poppyseed

 Every time I talk about my admittedly drastic take on transforming transformative works, I worry a bit that I'm furthering the idea many authors have that podficcers(/translators/artists/remixers/etc) are actively malicious thieves. Podfic usually, but not always, replicates the words of a text. I think it's easy to make the leap that podficcers thus are in a position to easily plagiarize and/or ruin the life of the author whose work they are adapting. & I think there is a justifiable fear of misrepresentation of your work, especially when so much of fandom is on twitter where you can get doxxed in like two seconds if the wrong person thinks you pissed them off.

Part of the reason I feel quite defensive of podficcers is because of fandom history. In a lot of other fandoms (not so much kpop, where most authors seem to not know podfic even exists), there is or has been a kind of rivalry, and in my experience it's a rivalry that tends to be extremely disparaging of podficcers. I wasn't there for most of the bigger fights but I've seen the waves in the podficcer community, and one of those major waves is the now-established fannish etiquette of asking for permission to record works rather than waiting for an author to express displeasure after it already exists.

My take, generally is as follows: in transformative fandom we are all in the soup of collective ideas. Tropes are a great example of that, especially fandom-specific tropes. If I want to transform someone's work into a podfic or remix it into a fic or make art or whatever (I only really do one of those things with any regularity lol but stick with me), it's usually out of a place of enthusiasm and wanting to continue that fannish conversation. Also my god if I was trying to steal from someone to get clout or profit it would not be by making podfic hahaha I don't know how to express how little engagement most podfics get (+ it's almost all from other podficcers). So all that said, I have virtually no limits on transformations of my own works. You don't have to tell me you're doing it, you don't have to get permission, you're not barred from any particular work. I ask that people archive-lock works that are transformative of my own archive-locked works, but that's mostly because I post a lot of rpf. 

I do tend to carry that "blow open the boundaries!" vibe with me as a podficcer too. I'm many times more likely to podfic or otherwise transform a work from someone who's not asking me to email them first, for example. I like the sense of enthusiasm and freedom that comes with a broad statement that gives blanket permission. It's exciting! I also hate being told no lol it feels really antithetical to my fandom ethos (see above), which is my own thing to process and deal with. I just don't like putting myself in a position where it might happen.

Maybe because of the previous drama and my general protectiveness of podfic as a positive contributor to fandom—not only for accessibility reasons, but as its own kind of art!—I come across quite intense in these kinds of conversations when I actually share my opinions. I do want to clarify that I understand hesitation about transformative works, especially for personal projects. Like. If I write a fic and start the sequel I would be a little weirded out if someone else remixed it by just continuing to write the sequel before I could post my version. I probably wouldn't stop them lol but I would be confused! Similarly, there is a series I've been posting that is suuuuper based on somewhat fraught personal experiences. I would want any transformative work of that series to be handled gently/seriously/genuinely. If I barred people from transforming it at all, though, the really beautiful spinoff that my friend wrote wouldn't exist! So for me the risk is easily worth the reward. Other people will employ a different calculus for these decisions and come up with a different answer.

Also, I don't think there's a good answer to the question of wanting to delete works in the future as an author. If I'm genuinely wanting to scrub a work from the internet, a podfic existing for that work is going to make it very hard to do that! If I orphan it, the attribution is still to me in the audio. It's complicated because asking someone to delete a transformative work that they spent a number of hours on and is their own take in their own right feels bad. But I also know that treating it like the author and podficcer have to automatically be at odds here doesn't have to be the case. (I've seen podficcers go back and edit audio to remove author names, for example. Which is a pain and also very kind, I think!)

Which brings us back to the idea that podficcers are generally not evil, lol. Or at least no more evil than authors, or fanartists, or translators are as a whole.

I'm not sure what point I'm trying to make here exactly! I do know that I tried to explain this in shortform earlier and accidentally made a fool of myself about copyright law, so we went longform so I ideally wouldn't do that again hahaha. Really I suppose this is just an explanation/deeper dive into why my blanket permission statement is so permissive. I know to some people it seems strange!

I approach fandom as a fic author from the perspective that I write fic because I love something a lot and this is how I participate in the conversation around that thing. I don't feel a particular ownership over my works or ideas because I think those works and ideas came from the constantly moving chaos that is fandom as a whole. It's why I love chatfic and remixes. It's why I love making things with and alongside people. Come here, sit next to me, let's make something new together.

And maybe it's protective, too, in an emotional way. I give things away too fast to steal. Take it, I am always saying, take it and build something else. I'll be in the back cheering you on.