Feminism because why not make a thread for it?

[Darqcyde]

Don't forget Maud
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...if a single leaf holds the eye, it will be as if the remaining leaves were not there.
http://about.me/omardrake

[Heretical Rants]

there aren't very many maudfics that have caught my attention, yet

there is a fimfiction group for her, though



and yes, I am still drawing her every day
today makes three weeks of that
although week three is fairly weak
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butts

[Darqcyde]

Well, in more ways than not, fanfics and fanart are the same thing. Plus you said "I'm not just reading fanfics "
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...if a single leaf holds the eye, it will be as if the remaining leaves were not there.
http://about.me/omardrake

[stripeypants]

[Heretical Rants]

The Week From Hell
The Week That I Barely Even Tried
O Week of Little Faith
Weaky Weeky Ding-Dong
Week Shrub


(unrelated: Google searches including "shrub" in the search terms include George W Bush in the results by default, even more than can be accounted for by simply considering the book of that title )
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butts

[Moor]

[Darqcyde]

[Heretical Rants]

what, his own work isn't popular enough to have generated fanfics of its own, and isn't particularly original itself, but he's jealous of the moderate amount of attention fanfics can attract and deluding himself that since it isn't explicitly part of any fandom it is somehow more meaningful or has a significant chance at becoming substantially more profitable?
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butts

[ShadowCell]

[Darqcyde]

I was surprised to see that people weren't down voting his book on Amazon
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...if a single leaf holds the eye, it will be as if the remaining leaves were not there.
http://about.me/omardrake

[ShadowCell]

[Thy Brilliance]

[Darqcyde]

[WheelsOfConfusion]

You know, the link to that terribad fanfic article comes up as I'm reading me some Bart Ehrman, and it gets me wondering if some of the ancient Judeo-Christian apocrypha and pseudepigrapha wouldn't count as fanfic.
I mean, look at the Christian apocrypha. They were stories written about Jesus and/or the Apostles by early Christians to be disseminated among their disparate Christian communities. They basically tried to look like authentic records and accounts, like most of those that wound up in the New Testament. You've got fake Gospels and fake Acts and fake Revelations which basically fill the burning need for stories about their religious heroes, among a population that pre-dates any canonical collection of official texts like the 'New Testament.'

Take The Acts of Paul and Thecla, for example. It's basically a Greek Romance (as in the literary form) with a rather obviously artificial narrative following the adventures of a female convert to Christianity who wound up being more popular than Paul in some places, even centuries after the book was deemed a fake. Maybe some of the popularity is due to the character of Thecla herself; she rejects the classical Greek notions of proper femininity, disguises herself as a guy, kicks the ass of a nobleman who tries to rape her, performs miracles like any of the male Apostles. She survived in popular legends around the region, having her pop up out of the ground to do miraculous things before disappearing again.

One way to look at it: Thecla was either wholly invented as a character for Christian fanfic, or she was heavily fanfictionalized from a real person like Paul was in these fake Bible accounts. Either way, she became a wildly popular subject for early Christian legends and apocrypha, created by Christians for Christians.

At the time there was a debate among many in the young Church (well, there were three debates for every possible thing; but this was an important one) regarding whether or not women could lead churches and perform all the functions within the religion that men could. Thecla seems to have been used by some to support this female equality, and it's telling that one of the reasons the story was rejected is because Paul's own letters had being edited or forged (1 Timothy) to counteract this trend a few decades earlier. Stories like Thecla's represented a credible threat to the authority of the early anti-women parts of the Church and may have even been written in reaction to those factions which sought to keep women "quiet" by appealing to the faked and doctored writings of Paul. The story itself certainly makes Thecla out to be a hero for the women in the towns she visits, and doesn't exactly portray Paul in the best light.
There's an indisputable pro-abstinence message too, since Thecla got her super powers by remaining chaste and not doing her "duty" as a woman to bear children for the community. That's a direct rejection of the common values of the time, but it was popular within a few Christian sects. That was another doctrinal divide among the various factions. It's very possible that Thecla's story was written to back up the pro-abstinence, pro-equality sides and give them a hero to counteract the way some of Paul's boosters had appealed to "his" teachings about women being submissive and sex being permissible within marriage.

So it could be argued that much of the early Church doctrine was being fought over by Christian fanfics almost 2,000 years ago.

[stripeypants]

Fanfic is, as far as I know, mainly written by women. It is referred to as if it were women's alternative to porn - because men are supposed to e visual thinkers while women are supposed to be language based. That is where gender comes into it, even if that author didn't explicitly mention it.
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::lesser crisis mode::