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So what *is* a remix?
I can hear![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
paleaswater saying that if I'd just go read a few remixes and compare them to their originals, I'd know. That's the Chinese way of doing things. The western way is to have someone define the thing for you, as being faster and more definite. I am a westerner. Ergo. What's a remix?
It appears you do not ask someone if you can remix their stories, so I assume in this kind of challenge people just give a general 'Use mine!' blanket permission? But if it's merely variations on the theme and umm configurations proposed by the original, and not plagiarism in any distinct way, what does fannish consensus think of doing a remix without permission?
That French 100 Demons fic keeps making noises at me. Particularly the author's comments about the very first story in vol 1: yeah, there's something going on there, decidedly. "Mais le fait qu'Aoarashi a trouvé Ritsu "mignonne" la première fois qu'il l'a vu, c'est canon, lalala." ('Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Canada any more': "But the fact that Aoarashi found Ritsu "kawaii" the first time he saw him, that's *canon*, lalala.") One needn't be a dirty-minded slasher to see vibes: one need only be an ordinary-minded Japanese fan. (It's odd that 100 Demons has more vibes than Ima's genuine BL. Or not odd: she tells the best stories when she's not telling stories.)
Were my French at all usable I'd go the time-honoured route and ask for permission to translate. It's not. But. Silver-haired demon x Human little boy is a classic manga trope: look no farther than Vartrag Saga for the shoujou version and Nakamura Rumi, I think, for the ecchi kind. I'd like to do v.1 story1 demon!Aoarashi x kid!Ritsu some day. (Pajama!Aoarashi x series!Ritsu is quite another matter, of course. I fancy evenmikeneko would draw the line at that one.)
ETA: Ok, so I've just looked at remixredux's definition of a remix, scrolling back and forth around their mothering big window-breaking picture of Ugly Real People (really, how does anyone write for a live action fandom, she sniffs? Oh right- pretend they're manga characters and write them like that.) Then I looked at a couple of remixes and I still don't understand. It's not expanding the story by looking at it from another angle, like they said; it's changing setting and dialogue and everything else, far as I can see, and keeping to the author's theme. Also the musical analogies made nothing clearer. Covers are the same words and tune with maybe the beat altered, or the edges removed. Remixes I don't know at all unless Paul Simon adding lyrics to Wonderful World counts. Agh.
I can hear
paleaswater saying that if I'd just go read a few remixes and compare them to their originals, I'd know. That's the Chinese way of doing things. The western way is to have someone define the thing for you, as being faster and more definite. I am a westerner. Ergo. What's a remix?It appears you do not ask someone if you can remix their stories, so I assume in this kind of challenge people just give a general 'Use mine!' blanket permission? But if it's merely variations on the theme and umm configurations proposed by the original, and not plagiarism in any distinct way, what does fannish consensus think of doing a remix without permission?
That French 100 Demons fic keeps making noises at me. Particularly the author's comments about the very first story in vol 1: yeah, there's something going on there, decidedly. "Mais le fait qu'Aoarashi a trouvé Ritsu "mignonne" la première fois qu'il l'a vu, c'est canon, lalala." ('Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Canada any more': "But the fact that Aoarashi found Ritsu "kawaii" the first time he saw him, that's *canon*, lalala.") One needn't be a dirty-minded slasher to see vibes: one need only be an ordinary-minded Japanese fan. (It's odd that 100 Demons has more vibes than Ima's genuine BL. Or not odd: she tells the best stories when she's not telling stories.)
Were my French at all usable I'd go the time-honoured route and ask for permission to translate. It's not. But. Silver-haired demon x Human little boy is a classic manga trope: look no farther than Vartrag Saga for the shoujou version and Nakamura Rumi, I think, for the ecchi kind. I'd like to do v.1 story1 demon!Aoarashi x kid!Ritsu some day. (Pajama!Aoarashi x series!Ritsu is quite another matter, of course. I fancy even
mikeneko would draw the line at that one.)ETA: Ok, so I've just looked at remixredux's definition of a remix, scrolling back and forth around their mothering big window-breaking picture of Ugly Real People (really, how does anyone write for a live action fandom, she sniffs? Oh right- pretend they're manga characters and write them like that.) Then I looked at a couple of remixes and I still don't understand. It's not expanding the story by looking at it from another angle, like they said; it's changing setting and dialogue and everything else, far as I can see, and keeping to the author's theme. Also the musical analogies made nothing clearer. Covers are the same words and tune with maybe the beat altered, or the edges removed. Remixes I don't know at all unless Paul Simon adding lyrics to Wonderful World counts. Agh.
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You can ask to remix, you know. The French author, she know some English. And your French doesn't have to be perfect.
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See end of reply to mike below. It has to be perfect enough to satisfy the perfectionist here. And hopefully the author as well.
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People sign up to have their stories remixed and to remix another participant's story, so yes, it's a blanket permission.
I suspect nobody's really clear what a fic remix is supposed to be like either - those I've read have all done it in different ways every year. Someone might rewrite from a different point of view or expand on a scene or write a missing scene or just rewrite the whole thing in your own way, I don't know. The only thing that needs to be intact is the skeleton of plot and pairings, if any (though I suspect the pairings bit is more to avoid wank than anything else - you broke up my otp! you shipped a squicky pairing omg!).
Oooh, I'd like to see v.1 story1 demon!Aoarashi x kid!Ritsu, very much! ^_^ I'm with
Though that's more of a courtesy, all things considered. People write similar things and get inspiration from other stories all the time.
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Is true. It would depend how close the final story ended up to flo_nelja's, whether it was 'inspired by' or 'a remix of.'
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Oh right- pretend they're manga characters and write them like that.
Mm, yes and no? Now that
And you have a lot more in common with the latter than you do with the former.
Re: Remix. (Goddamn, I was one fanfic away from finally qualifying, then they changed the rules. Grr grr!) Anyway, that one's mainly using the original fanfic to do something "based on but new." I.e., very meta, your own take on someone else's fanfic. The majority seem to go for rather conservative rehashes from diff character's POV, but there are some very cool and creative oddities sprinkled throughout.
For that particular fanfic, I don't see why straight up translation wouldn't work fine. It's not long, with no esoteric vocab la dedans.
However! If it's that you want to do your own version with the same lines of thought . . . that depends on the person, doesn't it? I mean, people have lifted from mine w/o sacrificing on my altar, and I don't care. I like the community property feel of it all. But I've seen other people go nuclear over the same thing. I guess, when in doubt, you could say hey first or provide an obvious link to the original. That the manga's seriously obscure and original fanfic's in French do make a diff as well; there aren't that many dual-language fans, so there isn't anyone to start shrieking and overdramatizing.
'99 theses on the church door, theses on the church door'
98 theses on the church door"
ie warning: soapbox
Oh right- pretend they're manga characters and write them like that.
Me being sardonic. Ages back a BN slash fan was asking how could one POSSIBLY write characters that were BLACK AND WHITE and TWO DIMENSIONAL and the BN slash fan who did (with no regard to characterization or canon) said Pretend they're real people and write them like that. Which led to stories where the characters felt weird because umm no these guys are not real people, they're characters in a humourous Japanese manga. It still is weird. I can tell which Saiyuki writers come from media fandom because their stories are- off. They're A/Us where the charas have been turned into real-life western guys. (Or MF's hybrid notion of what a real-life guy is like.)
It's possible, as media fen like to claim, that media fandom stories are better written technically because the fandom is older blahblahblah. I can only say that MF stories creep me the hell out and always have. I don't want to read about real men, much less about MF's 'real' men, with both their (variously- unlikely, pedestrian, or stunted) feelings and their (too well researched) cocks hanging out all over the page. These guys feel the same to me as hentai's big-boobed sighing females: somebody else's quite alien notion of a hot character.
So yeah: you have a lot more in common with the latter than you do with the former is fighting words. Just so you know.
Hot!Aoarashi-in-Papa in the snow journey story isn't wearing his glasses, I think is the difference. However falling-apart-guy in-Papa the pot story is also pretty cool. 'Yes,' Ritsu mutters to himself in penji, 'what's inside *does* matter.'
Re: translation- It's not esoteric vocab is the problem, it's that I don't know enough French to translate the nuances correctly. Nothing more galling to a writer, I'd think, than having a half-fluent speaker miss your points all over the map. And y'know, the author might object to a pastiche that was too close to her own story. (But ahh- (leer): 'I like pretty little girls in red kimonos' is such a lovely image and such a lovely line.)
Re: '99 theses on the church door, theses on the church door'
I have a soapbox too!
See, this is something that frustrates me immensely on both sides. It's hard to express, but it goes something like this:
Of course animanga characters are real! Within their universes, they are real. Or if we go at it from the other side, mediafandom characters aren't real people either! They're all fictional characters in their own fictional universes where the rules are different. Just because they look like real people doesn't mean - sure, rant about the whacky science and all the things that don't match up with real life if one wishes, but that's how it works for the characters!
What's more, real people aren't that much alike either (oh we unique snowflakes). A media story that has people in Star Wars and Batman and CSI being the same generic "real people" would be as painfully characterised as the real-life western guy Gojyo by my lights.
huff huff. /rant over
I think you do have a lot in common with some media fans - concern with style, tone, canon and such. You're more accepting of the random weirdness that crops up in yaoi, but you don't write about them either...
Truthfully, all segments of all fandoms I have blundered through have similar underlying qualities - the bulk of ye average young animanga fans are similar to the bulk of ye average young media fans, otp slashers are like unto otp yaoi fans, etc etc. Cultural/language/fandom differences aside, the fanfic they produce has similar themes and styles and so on. It's just there are fewer of the very skilled and interesting fanwriters in animanga.
Re: '99 theses on the church door, theses on the church door'
Sadly, that's what I find in media fandom slash (or even gen on occasion.) The omnipresence of the generic slash male. Different names, same attitudes, emotions, ways of viewing sex: and worst of all, same vocabulary. Why it bugs me more than in yaoi is simply this: yaoi is arbitrary by definition. It's the imposing of sexual roles on two characters often for no better reason than that the charas look sweet or hot or interesting enacting those roles. It's OOC or A/U or playing paper dolls with the charas, and in its country of origin everyone knows that.
By extension, many anime roles also come cookie-cutter. Our genki hero, our hawt and BL-coded sidekick, our angsty guy with a past. Fitting an outside and authorially defined role onto an animanga character is much less a violation of that character's (God-given, to be respected, etc etc) 'individuality' than in western series, where it's usually an authorial concern that *this* character be unique and different from all other characters in definite ways, and not be interchangeable with all other characters.
Slashers go on and on about subtext and the fact that their pairings are, to the slashers' eyes at least, rooted in the canon individuality of thew characters. If so, the slash should also be expressed very much within the style of the charas and the canon. To then make these two supposedly unique characters act like any two other guys (a common charge the Any Two Guys style of writing) is a specific denial of western fandom's values, in a way that the whimsy of yaoi is not.
(I'll admit that maybe one reason media characters, if American, all sound alike in fic is that they all sound alike in canon. TV writers are rarely known for their felicity of style. They too seem to believe that all men sound alike. But even when they don't, it's the rare fanwriter IME who can make, say, Picard and Data sound like themselves, let alone poor Q. And they still write Picard and Data and Q stories.)
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Never mind! One day...perhaps. ^_^
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You can do anything you like with my fanfic, translating it, translating-adapting it, remixing it, or taking just the main idea, as long as I'm credited somewhere (Oh, and if you were to send me a link it would be cool too :-) )
I would even like it. I'd be honored. :-) (Besides, how can you write fanfic and be picky about such things as intellectual property ? ^^ )
And sorry, my English is far from perfect...
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Thank you very much for permission to do
horrible thingsa reworking of your lovely fic. Certainly I'll credit and notify, when and if.(Besides, how can you write fanfic and be picky about such things as intellectual property ? ^^ )
I don't know, but alas, it's not uncommon, on these shores at least. *My* fic, *my* ideas, *my* original characters!! Touch them and you die!!
And sorry, my English is far from perfect...
(blinks) It isn't? ^_^
As
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"Lessee-- the past participle in passé composé agrees with the uhh subject? object? indirect object? Anyone??
depends on whether it's constructed with "avoir" or "être". And also from the order of words. Yeah, French can be an horrible language. ^^