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Originally Posted by narfforc
. Fanfic does me quite fine, it's harmless fun and of which I have participated, of course I wish someone could write some more, but that wish would be wasted, for if I had one it would be that Tolkien had written more.
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As said earlier, I wrote some fanfic myself & stuck it over on the Downs fanfic section. Fanfic is fine & fun & (to continue with the alliteration) free. I think this is fantasic, fabulous - free fiction for fans.
And so on.
What I don't get is why people want to pay for something they now get for free. It seems that what people want is to be told by the Estate what fanfic is good & what is bad. This seems to me to demonstrate a lack of the most basic critical judgement - of course, one admires the person who is so aware of their own lack of aesthetic sense that they are willing to pay to be told by those in authority what fiction is good & what is bad, & yet at the same time sad that it has to come to that. Their plaintive cries of 'Please tell me what is good Fanfic, O ye Lords of the Tolkien Estate, by putting JRRT's monogram on it & charging me £20 to buy it in hardback with nice colour plates by Ted Naismith! Else shall I not know whether the Middle-earth tales I come across on the Web are good or bad, for I am under a curse, as t'were laid on me by Morgoth himself, that I cannot tell whether a tale be worth the reading or not!' wring the heart of even the greatest cynic & the most unfeeling among us. Certes.
Of course, the irony is that when copyright expires & people are free to publish new tales of M-e all Tolkien's works will instantly appear FOC on the net, so that people will be able to get Tolkien's work for nowt, & yet have to pay for the sequels that will appear to glut even the most desperate fan of fic - all of which will be published perfectly legally, & 99.9999% of which will be drivel.