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I have a theory
(It isn't bunnies.)
I've been reading some of the posts about money and fandom that are making the rounds, and in the comments to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fairestcat's post, people touch on the source of much of the weirdness in fandom re fanworks and money: old-school SFF fandom.
It's always been bizarre to me that fanartists could make money off their fanart, when fanfic writers were expected not to. (I should add here: I love the fannish gift economy, and thought it should encompass all fanworks, not just fic.) I spent a lot of time thinking about this, and eventually came up with what I think might be the answer. Or an answer, anyway.
So here's what I think happened: back in the day (mid-20th century), if you were an SFF fan going to conventions, there were three "paths" to participating. (Someone's going to come and argue that. I'm generalizing wildly here for simplicity. I know there were many ways to participate.) If you wrote fiction, you could submit it to magazines or book publishers, and go pro, and create content for people to talk about. If you drew art, you could submit it to magazines or book publishers, and also sell it directly to buyers at art shows at conventions, which were basically fandom's galleries.
If you didn't want to be a "pro" creating more content, but wanted to talk about fandom in general or the content that already existed, you contributed ("tribbed") to zines (APAzines, letterzines). Tribbers got copies, and other people could buy copies (of the letterzines) for the price of copying and mailing, basically. (Again, generalizing wildly, just to provide a sense of a common approach. Don't @ me *g*.)
Star Trek fandom branched off from SF fandom, and took a lot of SF fandom's terminology and culture with it, including zines. They were created along the old familiar lines: people who wanted to tribbed to zines, and got "paid" with a copy of the zine, and people who hadn't tribbed could buy it for cost and shipping. But in ST fandom and its descendants, zines were as likely to be full of fanfic and fan poetry as meta or analysis.
Artists could get their work out by tribbing to zines, or making zine covers, but art reproduction was harder than mimeographing or photocopying text, so artists also tended to show their work at conventions, which also got set up along the old familiar lines: an art show that allowed for sale or auction of the art.
And then that got embedded in the culture. Fanfic was part of the conversation, like meta, and you didn't pay for it beyond the cost of physically receiving a copy. Fanart that was in zines was also part of the conversation, and ditto.
Fanfic writers who wanted to be paid filed off the serial numbers and went pro if they could, just like in SF fandom. Fan artists didn't have as clear a path to a pro life, but could sell their art at cons. Even as fandom moved online, it was hard to show art, so art stayed outside the general conversation.
These days, art is a huge part of the conversation, and for the most part is free the way fanfic and meta are; you can browse around DA or tumblr (or you could, anyway, sigh) and see all sorts of visual takes on things. But because it was outside the conversation for so long, and treated as a sort of pro content, it's still much more acceptable in fannish culture to take art commissions, or sell art.
It's a bizarre difference in approach when you only see the existing conversation among all the creative forms of output. But I really think it goes back to those early days of creating something slightly different out of SF fandom's culture, and the translation just not being perfect.
I've been reading some of the posts about money and fandom that are making the rounds, and in the comments to
fairestcat's post, people touch on the source of much of the weirdness in fandom re fanworks and money: old-school SFF fandom.It's always been bizarre to me that fanartists could make money off their fanart, when fanfic writers were expected not to. (I should add here: I love the fannish gift economy, and thought it should encompass all fanworks, not just fic.) I spent a lot of time thinking about this, and eventually came up with what I think might be the answer. Or an answer, anyway.
So here's what I think happened: back in the day (mid-20th century), if you were an SFF fan going to conventions, there were three "paths" to participating. (Someone's going to come and argue that. I'm generalizing wildly here for simplicity. I know there were many ways to participate.) If you wrote fiction, you could submit it to magazines or book publishers, and go pro, and create content for people to talk about. If you drew art, you could submit it to magazines or book publishers, and also sell it directly to buyers at art shows at conventions, which were basically fandom's galleries.
If you didn't want to be a "pro" creating more content, but wanted to talk about fandom in general or the content that already existed, you contributed ("tribbed") to zines (APAzines, letterzines). Tribbers got copies, and other people could buy copies (of the letterzines) for the price of copying and mailing, basically. (Again, generalizing wildly, just to provide a sense of a common approach. Don't @ me *g*.)
Star Trek fandom branched off from SF fandom, and took a lot of SF fandom's terminology and culture with it, including zines. They were created along the old familiar lines: people who wanted to tribbed to zines, and got "paid" with a copy of the zine, and people who hadn't tribbed could buy it for cost and shipping. But in ST fandom and its descendants, zines were as likely to be full of fanfic and fan poetry as meta or analysis.
Artists could get their work out by tribbing to zines, or making zine covers, but art reproduction was harder than mimeographing or photocopying text, so artists also tended to show their work at conventions, which also got set up along the old familiar lines: an art show that allowed for sale or auction of the art.
And then that got embedded in the culture. Fanfic was part of the conversation, like meta, and you didn't pay for it beyond the cost of physically receiving a copy. Fanart that was in zines was also part of the conversation, and ditto.
Fanfic writers who wanted to be paid filed off the serial numbers and went pro if they could, just like in SF fandom. Fan artists didn't have as clear a path to a pro life, but could sell their art at cons. Even as fandom moved online, it was hard to show art, so art stayed outside the general conversation.
These days, art is a huge part of the conversation, and for the most part is free the way fanfic and meta are; you can browse around DA or tumblr (or you could, anyway, sigh) and see all sorts of visual takes on things. But because it was outside the conversation for so long, and treated as a sort of pro content, it's still much more acceptable in fannish culture to take art commissions, or sell art.
It's a bizarre difference in approach when you only see the existing conversation among all the creative forms of output. But I really think it goes back to those early days of creating something slightly different out of SF fandom's culture, and the translation just not being perfect.
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There was also a belief - and I'm not judging it for accuracy, I'm just repeating it because I heard it a lot from people at cons - that drawing one copy of someone else's character was entirely legal as long as you didn't reproduce it, whether it was commissioned or sold or whatever. As opposed to fanfic, which was generally considered (by creators, at the time) to constitute an unauthorized derivative work which was therefore illegal or at the very least occupying a legal/moral gray area as long as you kept it out of sight and didn't go putting it out there into competition with the original work.
People in the fanartist/comic-con fandom community were very active online, they just were very separate from fanfic fandom, including people who wrote fanfic for comics. It was really interesting for me being in fanfic-fandom at the same time, because I was also in anime fandom during this time, writing fic and posting it on ff.net and talking about it on an anime mailing list that I ran, and it was sort of this ... whole other world, I guess, very separate from the comics message boards and the small-press cons I was going to for the art and comics fandom side. I was always careful to keep the two from crossing.
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