Warner Bros plan to make another Buffy movie without its creator is like fanfiction – but not as interesting.
There is a huge body of online fanfiction about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.
Warner Bros's decision to make a Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie without any involvement of its original creator, Joss Whedon, or any of his TV show's cast, is a win-win situation, however personally and professionally galling it is to have his best creation taken away from him.
If the movie crashes and burns, the decision to leave him out of it becomes the reason for its failure; if, on the other hand, it succeeds, he gets the kudos for creating a modern myth so powerful that his stories can be told without his involvement. Actually, we already know the latter to be the case – because fanfiction drawing on Whedon's Buffy and its spin-off series Angel is one of the larger and better-written bodies of such work on the internet.
Interestingly, Whedon has always been positive about fanfiction:
"I love it. I absolutely love it. I wish I had grown up in the era of fanfiction, because I was living those shows and those movies that I loved and I would put on the score to Superman and just relive the movie over and over."
He has even been positive about slash fiction, which depicts romantic or sexual relationships between fictional characters of the same sex. "In my world, heroes bugger each other senseless. Not all of them, but more than you'd think, and probably not who you're thinking."
I have to declare an interest here. While most people concerned with BTVS – as fans call Buffy for short – know me as the editor of a collection of critical analyses of the show, I have always led a double life. Some time ago, I was talking to a serious industry person about my writing and hers; she said diffidently that she has published some fiction, all of it on the net. "So you write fanfic?" I asked. "Which fandom?" She told me, and I realised I had read quite a bit of it. She suddenly looked at me with a wild surmise, "Oh my God" she said, "you're RozK."
People get into writing fanfic for a lot of reasons, and I can't speak for anyone but myself. When I started, I had published some quite well-thought-of genre short stories, but was seriously blocked as the result of a novel that crashed and burned. I was feeling nervous about writing seiously – perhaps pompously – about a show mostly watched by people much younger than I was, and wanted to demonstrate that I was just a fan like any other. I had enjoyed the fanfiction I had read as part of my research on the show, and wanted to give something back: the gift relationship as described by Richard Titmuss is a major feature of fandom. My fanfic days also taught me a lot about writing quickly and to order, just as obsessing with Whedon's shows taught me a lot about writing crisp dialogue.
I was particularly intrigued by the idea of slash fic – there are just not enough lesbian and gay relationships in popular culture to forego the chance of adding more informally. BTVS was, from an early stage, a slash-friendly show – Whedon said "all the relationships in the show are kind of romantic" and it was the sudden wave of Buffy/Faith fic that partly prompted the shading of the relationship into something quasi-erotic. In later seasons, Buffy's friend Willow came out as lesbian – other characters, notably the vampires Darla and Drusilla were shown as bisexual. Even Buffy herself has a lesbian affair in Whedon's BTVS comic book, Season Eight. Some creators mind what we do to their characters – Whedon mostly never did.
It would be hypocritical for me to object in principle to what Warner Bros may choose to do. After all, in my own work, I mashed up BTVS, Ugly Betty and Six Feet Under and put Buffy's cheerleader friend Cordelia through endless romantic angst with other characters Faith, Willow and the robot double of Buffy. One site I frequented back in my fanfic days made a point of trying to get at least one story for every conceivable romantic combination. Other friends, less interested in slash, wrote crossover fiction that involved in the Buffyverse everyone and anyone from the Saint to Father Ted to Noggin the Nog. Warner Bros are unlikely – I fear – to do anything to Buffy as comprehensively weird as that.
Guardian
No comments:
Post a Comment