Revolting peasants: It's not just Highlander 2

[andygates]

Fans get ever so attached to "their" series so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that someone came up with a term to describe their rejection of bits of story-arc that they don't like. Krypto-revisionism (yes, a pun on the Superman reboot) - and here's what Wikipedia mentions about a certain Film That Should Not Be Named:

"Another example of this would be the Highlander movie franchise. Many people chose to ignore the second movie because they believed it turned everything laid out in the first movie on its ear, just to make a quick buck. The makers of the third Highlander movie practiced their own form of Krypto-revisionism and continued the franchise in the vein of the first movie, choosing to disregard the whole plot of Highlander 2."

Now you see, krypto-revisionism sounds silly and petty and, well, fannish. But that bit about the Unnameable Sequel, well, that just makes sense.

Comments

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

Well, it's going to happen anywhere there's Too Much Canon. You don't get Highlander fans mentioning the animated series much, either. :)

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Sure - and as GMs we've been hidebound by Too Much Canon ourselves. What interest me is how the sense of ownership operates - in a very real sense a fanbase has the material as "our stories", insert your Campbellian Modern Myth Structure here - and that ties uneasily with intellectual property. Does the studio "own" Highlander or the fans?

And there's an animated series?

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

Animated series. There's allegedly also an upcoming anime.

Talking of intellectual property, there's a very interesting bit in Sheenagh Pugh's The Democratic Genre about the bloke who'd inherited the rights to Blakes 7 saying he didn't want slash fanfic on the web and would take legal action if he found any, and the fans saying 'Scuse me, did you have any creative input whatever into the series? Didn't think so' and ignoring it.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Well yes, inheriting the rights is a whole other thing to being one of the creators - that's where IP becomes some weird-ass member of the lawyersphere and ceases to interace with me whatsoever. Thank the gods.

I mean, trying to ban fanfic? Granted he'd probably been appalled by some really bad Avon/Villa slash, but even so, that's just silly. Fanfic = fans = continuing revenue stream!

I wonder, has fanfic ever become canon?

[thudthwacker.livejournal.com]

Ergh. That sequel (which exists in an ontological Klein bottle solely for the purpose of this post, so don't expect me to admit that I've even heard of it tomorrow) gave "There can be only one" a whole new context.