On Fri, 14 May 1999, Presley H. Cannady wrote:

At 05:11 PM 5/14/99 GMT, Gary Kleppe wrote:

I'm gonna agree with Krista and Reid here. This tired old argument is
your basic logical fallacy of "all or nothing." I think just about all
of us would agree that any reasonable reader should be willing to accept
some variation in the characters. But it doesn't follow that a reader
should accept anything a writer does with the character.

That sounds offly capricious.  How do you define when a fanfic writer
has "deviated" from the source too much?  It's an arbitrary call, and
any feeling on the matter is subjective and therefor shallow.

If it is not possible for people to make this sort of judgement, then the
comments and commentary aspect of this list is useless.  If the opinion of
everyone on this list on such issues as characterization is innately
'shallow' and arbitrary, then we are simply 1000+ people whistling in the
dark at each other and there is no point in conducting any discussion of
anything.  

There is a body of canonical material.  (Or several bodies, if one 
takes the manga and anime as seperate sources)  Opinions as to the
conclusions to be drawn from it will vary.  This doesn't mean that one
cannot discuss whether or not a character is in character or not.  It does
mean that we lack something as objective as describing light by its
wavelength.  It means that ultimately we can't resolve the argument in a
way that will 100% convince everyone without room for doubt.  But it does
give us something common to at least argue from.  

To draw an analogy, if a fan artist does a picture of Ranma, it's
probably not going to be indistinguishable from one of Takahashi's, and
that's fine; but if someone hands me a picture of Dagwood Bumstead and
tries to tell me it's Ranma, well, sorry, but I have a bit of a problem
with that. Because *some* variation is acceptable (to a particular
reader) doesn't mean that ANY variation is.

Any variation is acceptable, because you cannot quantifiably prove that
audiences will NOT accept Dagwood renamed as Ranma.  What about parody,

And you can't quantifiably prove they would.  Would you really accept a
picture of Dagwood when you paid for one of Ranma?  If you went to buy a
potato, would you accept an orange as a potato?  They're both vegetables,
after all.  Human cognitive acceptance only stretches so far when dealing
with sane people.  There comes a point, however hard it is to define,
where one crosses the boundary from one representation to another.

the obvious example of where such incredible variations have been
successfully received by their audiences?  No, what you're talking about

Not all fanfics are parody, and parody is typically labelled as such.  

is an outmoded, baseless and entirely subjective code of honor that
has absolutely no legal, historical or moral basis beyond one's own
personal feelings.

No, it's rooted in the fact that human beings can tell the difference
between different things, and that they typically expect that if something
is labelled X, it will BE X.  They may argue about what X is, so that
multiple companies can all produce cornflakes, and yet be producing
different products, but if you try to sell bat guano as cornflakes, you
will get in trouble.



John Walter Biles :  MA-History, Ph.D Wannabe at U. Kansas         
ranma@falcon.cc.ukans.edu       
rhea@tass.org              http://www.tass.org/~rhea/falcon.html
rhea@maison-otaku.net      http://www.maison-otaku.net/~rhea/

"If you're looking for a new coaster, the album _13_ is perfect for you."
--Daily Kansan Music Review