#anghraine rants
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I feel like the lighting of the beacons scene is kind of a microcosm of my issues with the LOTR films as a whole, in that:
Cinematically, it's absolutely gorgeous and stirring
The visuals are lifted even further by the score
It's a reference to a thing that is actually in the book, just highly re-contextualized (the beacons exist in the book and have already been lit, but serve a different function; it is the Red Arrow that is used to ask for Théoden's aid, with the specific remark that Denethor is asking for aid and not demanding it; the messenger who brought the arrow is caught and decapitated on his way back to Minas Tirith and so Denethor can't know if the message got out without using the palantír)
The lighting of the beacons in the films is tied into the story they're telling, in which basically all the NPCs other characters are much more self-doubting and self-sabotaging and it's up to Our Heroes to get them to do the right thing or the heroes just do it themselves (see Treebeard, see Théoden, see Faramir...)
Specifically, the necessity of lighting the beacons in the films is a direct byproduct of making film Denethor malicious and incredibly incompetent
The quiet, almost incidental tragedy of the messenger's death in war—not in a big battle, not in any glorious way at all, just this random guy being casually chased down and killed—is lost in favor of something dramatic and show-stopping and cool.
It is dramatic and show-stopping and cool! But sacrifices were definitely made in order to work it into the story at all and I think those sacrifices were very representative of the films' adaptational approach.
#rip to hirgon. and denethor's characterization#anghraine babbles#legendarium blogging#legendarium fanwank#pj critical#denethor#big giving faramir's dream to éowyn as part of a shippy scene with aragorn energy#anghraine rants#hirgon
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anghraine replied to your post: Out of morbid curiosity, as someone who can’t...
No idea. Luke as this epitome of purity and optimism has definitely taken off on Tumblr (which turns any remotely good-natured character into whitebread cinnamon rolls), but the Luke Is Really Like Padmé thing was pretty common when I got into lj SW fandom years ago. My rant about Luke and Leia as Padmé’s son/Anakin’s daughter opposites was originally posted there in 2011.
I sort of wonder if it’s not just some sort of arbitrary “each child must take after one of their parents, and they can’t both take after the same parent” rule that I’ve seen come up more than once in other fandoms. Because if you watch the movies, it’s very difficult to see where they’re supposed to be so alike. One of Luke’s most prominent, if not the most prominent, character trait--that short temper that he, for the most part, doesn’t even bother trying to control--is absent in Padme. She’s passionate, certainly, but one of the big things about Padme is that she’s a very controlled person; it’s part and parcel of having been a public figure for so long. And one of Padme’s most prominent character traits--her sense of duty--is absent in Luke.
The biggest way I can think of in which they’re alike is the way they both insist there’s still good in Anakin. But their assertions come from completely different places. Padme says they’re still good in Anakin because she’s seen the best of him as well as the worst; she knows there’s still good in him because she’s seen that good. Luke is going completely on faith; he’s never experienced any part of his father but as the agent of the Emperor. Padme’s assertion is based on experience; Luke’s, on faith. Those are two very different things. And these two people are really not very much alike at all.
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It's always weird when (some) people talk about the choice of the half-Elven as if they evolve like Pokémon upon choosing their ultimate fates.
Elros didn't become exclusively human. He chose to retain the gift of Men and to be counted among Men as far as that ultimate fate went, but he remained a half-Elf. He didn't gain a beard (even descendants as remote as Aragorn, Boromir, and Faramir can't because of Elros) or most Mannish qualities he didn't already possess and he lived half a millennium.
Elrond chose to be counted among Elves in terms of immortality, but he isn't exclusively an Elf. He's described as both Elf and Man, and as the eldest of Aragorn's people. Elrond's marriage to a full Elf produces peredhel children. Two of them are given names signifying Elf+(human)Man, names which Tolkien translated as "Elf-knight" (in Númenórean Sindarin) and "Elf-Númenórean." Elrond's sons are always distinguished from Elves in LOTR.
Arwen doesn't morph into a human woman when she swears her vows with Aragorn; she still looks like f!Elrond and ageless years afterwards, and she would be very long-lived even if you only counted her married life. She is probably the most emphatically Elvish of any peredhel, but she's still a peredhel. Elwing and Eärendil are, too. Peredhil are peredhil are peredhil.
#elrond is not (exclusively) an elf 2k23#anghraine babbles#legendarium blogging#legendarium fanwank#elros tar minyatur#elrond#elladan#elrohir#arwen undómiel#peredhil#anghraine rants
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I saw a post that was like "P&P is about a man listening to the love interest and unlearning his toxicity" and it's similar enough to many others I've seen that I'm just ... aghhhh.
ffs Elizabeth is not the love interest; she is the protagonist of the damn book and P&P is primarily about her character and development and experiences. If you care more about Darcy's, okay; that doesn't mean it's what the book is about.
Yes, Darcy listens to Elizabeth's criticisms despite the circumstances and that's good. But that framing makes it sound extremely one-sided, yet Elizabeth's arc (which, again, is the main focus of the novel) is contingent on seriously considering what Darcy says and drastically overhauling her conceptions of pretty much everyone involved. The listening goes both ways!
Not going to lie, "toxic" and its variants are losing all meaning for me at this point.
#love interest elizabeth bennet might be my peak villain origin story tbh#darcy is one of the most prominent austen love interests but the book still isn't essentially about him#anghraine rants#anghraine babbles#austen blogging#austen fanwank#otp of otps
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Sometimes I think about looking for SW content and then the first thing I see is "Padmé isn't really Leia's mother because of Breha" which is just ?????? in terms of the Lucas films.
Like, Padmé did nothing that would lead Leia to reject her. Dying is not a renunciation of her motherhood. When Leia is asked by Luke (who invariably identifies their birth parents as his parents) about her "real mother," Leia doesn't correct him but simply responds with a description of Padmé that, contextually, could only come from impressions via the Force that she mistakes as vague memories. Luke does not share these impressions; there is a special tie between Leia and Padmé. There's nothing wrong or improbable about Leia having feelings about that.
Breha is also Leia's mother, but this does not require Leia to reject Padmé nor make it probable for her to do so. And the conversation about Padmé in ROTJ just does not suggest a rejection from Leia at all.
I suspect that Padmé is basically being packaged in with Anakin, whom Leia has very good reasons to reject. But Padmé is not Anakin. Leia does not have to relate to them in the same ways and it doesn't seem at all likely from ROTJ that she does.
#i don't think padmé and leia are super alike (nor that luke and padmé are)#but the idea that dying young in tragic circumstances erases padmé's motherhood is so weird#there is /nothing/ in the films to suggest this#and particularly not wrt leia#anghraine babbles#anghraine rants#sw fanwank#star wars#padmé amidala#leia organa
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Okay, breaking my principles hiatus again for another fanfic rant despite my profound frustration w/ Tumblr currently:
I have another post and conversation on DW about this, but while pretty much my entire dash has zero patience with the overtly contemptuous Hot Fanfic Takes, I do pretty often see takes on Fanfiction's Limitations As A Form that are phrased more gently and/or academically but which rely on the same assumptions and make the same mistakes.
IMO even the gentlest, and/or most earnest, and/or most eruditely theorized takes on fanfiction as a form still suffer from one basic problem: the formal argument does not work.
I have never once seen a take on fanfiction as a form that could provide a coherent formal definition of what fanfiction is and what it is not (formal as in "related to its form" not as in "proper" or "stuffy"). Every argument I have ever seen on the strengths/weaknesses of fanfiction as a form vs original fiction relies to some extent on this lack of clarity.
Hence the inevitable "what about Shakespeare/Ovid/Wide Sargasso Sea/modern takes on ancient religious narratives/retold fairy tales/adaptation/expanded universes/etc" responses. The assumptions and assertions about fanfiction as a form in these arguments pretty much always should apply to other things based on the defining formal qualities of fanfic in these arguments ("fanfiction is fundamentally X because it re-purposes pre-existing characters and stories rather than inventing new ones" "fanfiction is fundamentally Y because it's often serialized" etc).
Yet the framing of the argument virtually always makes it clear that the generalizations about fanfic are not being applied to Real Literature. Nor can this argument account for original fics produced within a fandom context such as AO3 that are basically indistinguishable from fanfic in every way apart from lacking a canon source.
At the end of the day, I do not think fanfic is "the way it is" because of any fundamental formal qualities—after all, it shares these qualities with vast swaths of other human literature and art over thousands of years that most people would never consider fanfic. My view is that an argument about fanfic based purely on form must also apply to "non-fanfic" works that share the formal qualities brought up in the argument (these arguments never actually apply their theories to anything other than fanfic, though).
Alternately, the formal argument could provide a definition of fanfic (a formal one, not one based on judgment of merit or morality) that excludes these other kinds of works and genres. In that case, the argument would actually apply only to fanfic (as defined). But I have never seen this happen, either.
So ultimately, I think the whole formal argument about fanfic is unsalvageably flawed in practice.
Realistically, fanfiction is not the way it is because of something fundamentally derived from writing characters/settings etc you didn't originate (or serialization as some new-fangled form, lmao). Fanfiction as a category is an intrinsically modern concept resulting largely from similarly modern concepts of intellectual property and auteurship (legally and culturally) that have been so extremely normalized in many English-language media spaces (at the least) that many people do not realize these concepts are context-dependent and not universal truths.
Fanfic does not look like it does (or exist as a discrete category at all) without specifically modern legal practices (and assumptions about law that may or may not be true, like with many authorial & corporate attempts to use the possibility of legal threats to dictate terms of engagement w/ media to fandom, the Marion Zimmer Bradley myth, etc).
Fanfic does not look like it does without the broader fandom cultures and trends around it. It does not look like it does without the massive popularity of various romance genres and some very popular SF/F. It does not look like it does without any number of other social and cultural forces that are also extremely modern in the grand scheme of things.
The formal argument is just so completely ahistorical and obliviously presentist in its assumptions about art and generally incoherent that, sure, it's nicer when people present it politely, but it's still wrong.
#this is probably my most pretentious fanfiction defense squad post but it's difficult to express in other terms#like. people talking about ao3 house style (not always by name but clearly referring to it) as a result of fanfic as a form#and not the social/cultural effect of ao3 as a fandom space#you don't get ao3 house style without ao3 itself and you don't get ao3 without strikethrough and livejournal etc#and you don't get those without authors and corporations trying to exercise control over fic based on law (often us law) & myths about law#and you don't get those without distinctly modern concepts of intellectual property and copyright#none of those things have fuck all to do with form!#anghraine rants#fanfiction#general fanwank#long post#thinking about this partly because the softer & gentler versions of fanfic discourse keep crossing my dash#and partly because i've written like 30 pages about a playwright i adore who was just not very good at 'original fiction' as we'd define it#both his major works are ... glorified rpf in our context but splendid tragedies in his#and the idea of categorizing /anything/ in that era by originality of conception rather than comedy/tragedy/etc would be buckwild#ivory tower blogging#anghraine's meta
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The cynical "whatever, we've been through the supposed death of Tumblr multiple times" posts are understandable but tbh deeply irritating. Those events hit Tumblr's communities hard and a lot of activity here drastically dwindled as a result.
Sure, good riddance to some of them, and some people very occasionally do come back, but it's just ... nonsense to act like these hits were inconsequential to the death spiral it's been very obviously in all year or like going into maintenance mode—if that's true—doesn't matter.
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I know that "my male fave is also the fandom's male fave to such a disproportionate degree that almost everyone who has a different fave uses mine as the point of comparison to explain why theirs is Better, Actually" is a smallest violin kind of problem.
But I've liked many popular characters and juggernaut ships and ... damn, there is something about Austen's Darcy that attracts this like nothing else.
#also extremely reductive or simply wrong takes on him to prop up the alternate fave#and a whole ton of heteronormativity bc of the assumption that his popularity is all about straight women wanting him#'wouldn't you rather have a man like xyz who ...'#no :) because i would rather not have any man at all :))) bye#anghraine babbles#austen blogging#austen fanwank#lady anne blogging#fitzwilliam darcy#anghraine rants
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I saw a popular author post about how, while of course Elizabeth has some obligatory flaws, Darcy's are exponentially more severe, and it was like stepping into a view so far removed from mine that it was almost disorienting.
The thing is, I periodically see people wondering why Elizabeth/Darcy is such a behemoth in Austen fandom when either/both of them have substantial flaws that the narrative doesn't shy away from. Their flaws aren't identical, but they do obviously mirror each other and are thematically intertwined, with reflecting character arcs and specific beats. As I see it, the novel maintains a tense and careful balance between them—not in terms of centrality (Elizabeth's mistakes and growth are more central to the narrative than Darcy's IMO) but in terms of the weight given their flaws and virtues.
And for me that's essential to their appeal!
I love plenty of other Austen characters and relationships, but for me, personally, none of the other canon pairings are balanced in such a fun and satisfying way. The closest (and the other most conventionally romantic pairing in Austen IMO) is probably Anne/Wentworth, where at least the choices of both of them are heavy contributors to their current problems. But a) the novel is ambivalent as to whether Anne actually erred morally in the first place and b) that is long in the past by the time of the novel; the Anne of the main story of Persuasion is a fairly idealized figure by contrast to Wentworth.
I sometimes see arguments that, say, Anne or Mr Knightley or Elinor Dashwood or whomever are actually as flawed and prone to error as their romantic counterparts, but I just ... don't buy it, honestly. As far as canon Austen goes, I only really see that balance in the course of the main story with Elizabeth/Darcy. P&P loves them and holds them up as admirable (and they are!), but it also loves undercutting them in clearly paralleling ways and does it over and over throughout the novel.
So the idea of an Elizabeth and Darcy where one of them has obligatory storytelling flaws that can't seriously be compared to the other's is just ... blah. It cuts out the fundamental interconnection and resonance between them that I think is built into the structure of the novel down to its bones and is what makes their relationship special. A lot of stories pay lip-service to that kind of dynamic, sure, but despite the many (many) imitators, I don't often see it done successfully. But P&P is the real deal.
So yeah, when people are like "why do people like Elizabeth with Darcy so much when she could have a different man who doesn't make serious mistakes" I'm just thinking ... why on earth would I want Elizabeth "there was truth in his looks" Bennet with someone who would never make mistakes on that level? Or when people are like, Darcy's just misunderstood, wouldn't he be better off with Jane [or another relatively idealized female character] it's like ... hell no, I love him, but I do not want to inflict him on that poor woman.
It's not that there's something wrong with multishipping them (I've written alternate pairings for both!) or shipping them with other people, but just in terms of the novel as it exists, I do think the balance and echoes between them are part of what makes the novel work and one of the sources of their long-standing popularity. And I feel that trying to pin the "real" blame on one or the other up-ends that balance and diminishes a lot of what I, at least, find appealing about the dynamic between them.
#anghraine babbles#anghraine rants#austen blogging#austen fanwank#otp of otps#elizabeth bennet#fitzwilliam darcy#long post
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I got a comment that was like ... people are only mad about film Faramir because he doesn't act exactly the way they personally imagined him, and tbh I'm torn between being annoyed at how deeply disingenuous that argument is and slightly impressed at the sheer audacity of pinning the Faramir Controversy on difference from random people's headcanons rather than the book itself.
...then I got to thinking about how the whole time-consuming and wildly out of character handling of the temptation of the Ring is one thing, and justifiably gets a lot of attention, but Faramir allowing his soldiers to beat Gollum for information is quite comparable in my mind. They're his men! Gollum is an unarmed prisoner! I guess it's meant to show the exigencies of war or something and I'm just like ... hahaha no.
In a way it reminds me of film Aragorn just straight up killing the Mouth of Sauron in a way that seems meant to show their desperation in a badass cathartic way, and meanwhile, I'm thinking ... oh, our heroes murder ambassadors now. I feel like it's the same underlying kind of rationale, and quite far from not matching people's headcanons.
#faramir ordering his men to handle gollum gently and aragorn not actually killing sauron's (human) envoy are not people's headcanons#they're things that objectively happened (or didn't happen) in the source material being adapted#like the argument about how significant the divergences are is one you can have (obviously i find them very significant)#the argument about whether the comparisons should be made at all is one you can have (obviously i think comparisons are fine)#but 'people are just mad about not seeing their headcanons on screen'? nah. points for effort though.#anghraine rants#legendarium fanwank#legendarium blogging#pj critical#jewel of the seashore#húrinionath#vagueblogging intensifies
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I do have some sympathy for criticisms of how Éowyn's arc is resolved in LOTR (the book), even though I like Éowyn/Faramir a lot. I agree with some of those criticisms, even!
But I'm a Faramir stan first and foremost, and I am a bit puzzled at the idea that her arc is essentially sacrificed to prop up Faramir's. For me, it's Faramir's arc that is sacrificed to give Éowyn resolution.
For most of his on-page time, Faramir's characterization is deeply caught up with Boromir's and Denethor's and the dynamics between them (on an in-story and meta level). These and the high tragedy of his family are essential to the presentation of Faramir every single time he appears until the horror of Denethor's death.
And then it just ... vanishes. We don't know anything about what he feels about his family after Denethor's death. We don't know how he reacted to what Denethor tried to do. He never mentions or is shown thinking about it, or about Boromir (who he loved dearly but previously had complex feelings about), or what his family's place in the new Gondor should be. Did he find out he'd retain the Stewardship during the coronation? Was it already settled, with the later interchange with Aragorn a matter of ceremony? We don't know!
One of Faramir's greatest character moments is his speech about his love for Minas Tirith and hopes/fears for it in the future, but by the time Faramir meets Éowyn, he knows he'll have to leave Minas Tirith (his lifelong home) in the best possible scenario. Yet we know very little about what he feels about leaving Minas Tirith apart from what he can offer Éowyn in Ithilien.
It's not just that he's underwritten after Denethor dies, though. He's still quite lovingly written—as Éowyn's love interest. The narrative emphasizes Éowyn's development and healing during their romance and the resolution lies in Éowyn realizing her love for him and seeing a future other than war or what she went through in Rohan. Faramir becomes this kind of dreamboat love interest for Éowyn and is characterized almost entirely in service to resolving her arc.
And I do think it's beautifully written in ways that ... mostly have a lot of synergy with the overarching themes of the book etc etc, and we can fill in the missing spaces here, and so on. But it does seem to me that Faramir very abruptly goes from a character who independently exists in his own right, whom the narrative cares about in his own right, to a character who primarily exists to advance other characters (mainly Éowyn, a little bit Aragorn). He is much more a character in Éowyn's story than she is one in Faramir's.
#anghraine babbles#anghraine rants#legendarium blogging#legendarium fanwank#jewel of the seashore#húrinionath#éowyn
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The assumption that autistic adults who can express ourselves on the Internet must be fully verbal “high-functional” adults with no symptoms beyond mild and easily remedied social deficits is just—
I mean, of course it’s personally frustrating, as an autistic adult who can express myself on the Internet but has a lot of cognitive issues (with regard to things like spatial reasoning, math, multi-tasking, figurative language etc) apart from literal comprehension of words. And I do think that it’s glaring that there’s this obsessive fixation of people, often allistic people, with the symptoms of autism that are the most apparent and disruptive to others while largely ignoring symptoms that can make life much more difficult for an autistic person but don’t inconvenience other people much.
Like, the fact that I can’t drive—I do know how; I literally can’t without endangering pretty much everyone involved—does not affect random strangers who find me a bit awkward and stiff but otherwise easy enough to get along with. It drastically affects me, though. My struggles with all math beyond basic addition and subtraction don’t inconvenience anyone else as an adult, but for me, just shopping for groceries is very difficult. Nearly all sensory stimuli are actively upsetting (touch, bright or erratic light, many flavors, so on), but if I can hold it together until melting down in my apartment, nobody else has to care. And so on.
And—okay, my capacity to ramble about P&P or Star Wars or whatever for ten years on the Internet tells you nothing about that. You don’t know. Part of my autism testing involved imagining how an object would look if turned in various directions or recognizing visual patterns/spatial relationships—I’m really bad at things like that. Of course, strangers can’t be expected to know about that or how it affects my life (it does, severely). But strangers can realize that they don’t know all the factors that go into some random autistic person’s diagnosis (or often, don't know the diagnostic criteria of autism at all) before they assume they know everything there is to know about our lives.
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I may put together a longer post about this later, but something I feel very strongly:
Fantasy as a genre does not need to morally justify its existence.
I see "fantasy can do and say really important, profound things, but most of the time it's just escapist trash" going around pretty regularly. But it is no more incumbent on fantasy to say Important Profound Things than on any other genre. It's no worse for it to be escapist than for anything else to be—that's part of what fiction is!
It's not to say that fantasy or any other genre, or particular trends in any genre, are above criticism, but that fantasy-specific condemnations tend to trade in wild double standards.
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I got a comment a few days ago (which I'm too lazy to dig up, sorry, esp since its argument is made so frequently) about how Faramir's rejection of the Ring vs Boromir's fall is basically insignificant because he(Faramir) was around it for a brief time while Boromir had to resist it for a protracted period. I've seen that point made a lot, but I'm not convinced tbh.
For one, even if you only consider in-story details, it typically ignores the increasing strength of the Ring over time as it approaches Mount Doom. Faramir didn't have to face a protracted temptation, but he did have to face a more powerful one than Boromir ever did. How the length of time vs intensity compares is pretty debatable, but it's a factor.
But the dismissal of the contrast also just seems a plain resistant reading that ignores (or denies) the treatment of the two incidents by the overall narrative. You can do that (and probably should at certain points), but I think it's important to be upfront about it. The narrative of LOTR pretty blatantly treats Boromir's and Faramir's differing responses as indicative of their underlying characters and not simply a difference in length of exposure etc.
I don't think this is an indictment of Boromir's overall character; he's definitely a heroic person in general (much as Isildur was—the Ring's warping of heroic characters is a major aspect of its function and tragedy). But to argue that Boromir's fall has nothing to do with real flaws the Ring was able to exploit or that Faramir's rejection says nothing significant seems such a rejection of the narrative treatment that I'm just—nah.
And I am a Faramir stan, so my opinion might be suspect, but I do like Boromir a lot. And his fall to the Ring and reclamation of himself after make him much more interesting to me, personally and thematically, than he would otherwise be. Denying its significance to the function of his character and what the book is saying about attitudes to war etc is just ... blah.
Also, this is more headcanon, but I think it's important that in terms of the writing process, Tolkien came up with Faramir after Boromir's fall. Boromir's account at the Council revealing that the vision/riddle came first to Faramir and more often, with the clear suggestion that Faramir was the primary intended recipient and Boromir an acceptable replacement in the long run, was very deliberate. If there's no meaningful difference in the Ring's effect on them, then the reason for the preference for Faramir and active incorporation of him into the dream account becomes a bit baffling.
But the thing is, not just considering Faramir's rejection of the Ring but his overall character, I do think he would have been more suited to the stealth and grinding strain of the Ring than Boromir.
(Yeah, there are some plot complications w/ the alternate scenario, but I think those are pretty easy to overcome and far from an "all would be DOOMED, the dream-sender must have really intended for Boromir to be the one in the Fellowship" scenario.)
Basically, they are very different people, and in the canon scenario, the Ring reveals these differences in ways that are actually important to their characterizations and the concerns of the novel.
#anghraine babbles#anghraine rants#legendarium blogging#legendarium fanwank#faramir#jewel of the seashore#boromir critical#to be safe!#long post#húrinionath
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I think autistic self-advocacy is really important and that it's important to connect our experiences, help each other as much as we can, etc.
But it's also important to remember that this is a spectrum and our experiences and traits are not necessarily the same. There are a ton of "helpful" posts directed at fellow neurodivergent people that include some variant of "and don't say you can't because you're autistic or whatever, I know better because I'm autistic and I can do [thing]."
Being autistic does not mean that you have a perfect knowledge of what any and all autistic people can and cannot do. You can have common experiences and qualities with other autistic people without knowing everything there is to know about their capacities and their lives. It's one thing to share things that have helped you; it's quite another to dictate the terms of strangers' lives to them just because you're both on the spectrum.
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I hate, hate, hate the posts about how it's so important to read real books and not just fanfic.
I personally do read non-fanfic books, and I think it's a good idea to read things that are not fanfic, much as it's a good idea to read things other than genre romance or litfic or horror. Reading a variety of things is a good idea, in general, depending on what that variety consists of. But lots of people only read in one or two genres they like (true crime, procedurals, sports biographies, whatever), and there's far less lecturing about that for some mysterious reason.
And once you dig around, there's a lot of ?????? in the arguments for why the only-fanfic diet is uniquely objectionable and desperately needs to involve Real Books (of any kind, I guess).
Q: If someone binds a fanfic into a book, is it a "real book" for these purposes?
The usual answer: no, it's about the content, not the format. You need to encounter original characters and settings and plots.
Q: Okay, so a traditionally published book that uses pre-existing characters (e.g. a re-imagining of the Iliad or a Shakespeare play or so forth) is not truly a book for these purposes?
The usual answer: no, those are real books. They're fine.
Q: What about the over 200,000 fics in the "Original Work" category on AO3? Does reading a book-length one of those count as reading a real book?
The usual answer: no, those aren't real books. It's not actually about originality per se, it's about quality control from the professional publishing process.
(Wow, I knew people were harsh on self-published books, but I didn't know they weren't even books! You learn something new every day. I guess the legitimacy of real books is completely determined by a handful of increasingly consolidated publishers who often expect authors to also be influencers. Cool, this could go wrong in no way.)
Q: Oh, and if a work was originally a fanfic and then gets the serial numbers filed off (or doesn't even go that far, if the canon is out of copyright), but is largely the same text, and gets traditionally published—is that a book?
The usual answer: yes (sometimes with caveats).
(Okay, so the same text with a few minor changes between versions can be fanfic [inferior, getting you stuck in a rut] and a real book [intrinsically superior, important change of pace]. Schrodinger's book, I guess!)
Q: Ooh, let's get into texts that predate modern publishing practices! Are those books?
Usual answer: yes.
Q: Even if they were published by the author or his(almost always his) personal friends?
Usual answer: yes.
Q: Even if they don't have any original characters or settings?
Usual answer: yes.
Q: Even if they're deeply flawed?
Usual answer: yes.
It's like ... is there any consistent concept of what a book even is here, or is it all just grandstanding about the evils of fanfic?
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