Brilliant and thorough summary of the whole issue Tim.
It honestly seems to me that the 'war' going on between the advocates of "Pure" fanfics and "non-pure" fanfics is based around a simple concept:
I hate to think of myself as a "warrior", but I must admit that my own stand on the whole matter has become ever more radical the more radical the fanfictions I read became. This is something that worries me very much. I don't tend to be radical and I usually have very great respect for ideas and opinions different from my own. This respect has become ever less in case of LBT fanfictions.
The main reason the people in mindset A are fighting this so hard (mainly Malte, but I am a strong supporter of pure LBT fanfics, myself, at least to the point of taking a role in the strict LBT RPG and arguing the value of an pure LBT fanfic in this forum), is because there are so few people with mindset A.
I guess this is one point. Another is the nature of the stuff usually added to LBT names in the fanfictions. The stuff usually picked up for LBT fanfictions, is usually so extremely far from the land before time. Humans, Zombies, Cyborgs, Robots, time travels (suggestsions such as placing Littlefoot and the others at Pearl Harbor on December 7th 1941 and even (get this! :angry:) in Auschwitz!), lots and lots of Aliens from outer space (kinds that don't even look like dinosaurs as those rainbowfaces did), lots and lots of weapons and characters using them with lustfully, and tons and tons of dialogues which are very poor rip offs from movies like Titanic and Star Wars.
If indeed it was so much about the writers being so creative, why is it that so often the result is a mere patchwork of different movies with little to no own ideas at all? Wouldn't it be much more creative in this case to come up with an entirely own story? Creating an own world in which the author is the one to decide about rules following only the own laws?
That way there wouldn't be any limitations whatsoever, you would be the only ones to be credited for the content of your stories, and the difference to the LBT fanfictions I'm refering to would often be so marginal that there would be little more than a change of character names.
I'm being very unfair if I write as if every fanfiction write who doesn't stick to the rules had no fantasy or talent. Many of you definitely do.
I read most of Jason's Battle of the Sacred essences, a story which on the one hand contains almost everything I disapprove of in LBT stories, yet is on the other hand so well written, so excitingly told, with so interesting characters, and so strong emotion that even I cannot deny its charm. The story is well written and Jason deserves all the credit he can get for that.
And still such stories always leave the impression for me that two non-fitting parts of a jigsaw puzzle were taped roughly together. This impression is much stronger in case of the fanfictions which are not written with as much passion as Battle of the Sacret Essences. I regret I have to repeat that in many of the stories the authors can't seem to wait for their massacres to begin. Again I'm not saying that all writers of LBT fanfictions with non-LBT elements are that way, but many are.
A problem we have in today's world, is that LBT world has expanded so far that perhaps some people have a hard time drawing the lines between "LBT Element" and "Non-LBT element." After all, the series has had its share of odd incidents, such as freakish weather (LBT 8), dinosaurs that don't exist (LBT 11), dreams shared among all longnecks (LBT 10), the crazy sky during the eclipse (LBT 10), flowers which seem to heal instantly (LBT 4), and even aliens (LBT 7).
All too true (except (off topic) that in fact there are two Triassic species which very much resembled the Tinysaurs). I suppose it is difficult for everyone to draw a clear line between what would be possible in an LBT movie and what wouldn't. Yet a vague line is possible, and I don't think I'm too subjective when I claim that all the human-, zombie-, cyborg-, slaughter stuff would be way beyond even a very vague line marking the possibilities of what might happen in an LBT movie.
The problem is that the purists tend to believe that the non-purists are heartless killers with no respect for the original characters, and the non-purists believe that the purists have limited thinking, and see no reason to limit creativity. After all, isn't art supposed to be boundless and expressive?
While I'm not yet quite there, I must confess that my view about the writers of the fanfictions I'm talking about is shifting ever more in that direction, the more of these stories or story ideas I'm reading. I'm ever more under the impression that people will cheer just everything provided it quenches their thirst for blood and science fiction in a not overly violent, non-science fiction genre. I would love to be disproven by those authors, or much rather by the stories they write.
As for the question of art, I'm rather sceptical about taking a shade of somebody elses art and then add plenty of stuff to it that doesn't fit at all. This is being done in many fields of art. Depending on the different messages sent by the art (or in this case the stories) the result is sometimes something that deserves to be labeled a "perversion" of the original idea (a process which can be observed not only in arts).
I will agree that some non-pure LBT fanfics are very violent in nature, but that is the way the writer intended it to be. The world has its share of R-rated films. Fanfics deserve to have this same freedom. If one person doesn't like the violence, then that story probably isn't intended for that audience. Every piece of writing is written to a select audience; I have been taught this concept since about grade 5 or 6.
And this is where I gradually become scared of myself. I used to be able to just shrug off the fanfictions with non-LBT content and say "why would I care?". I'm afraid I'm loosing this stoicism more and more. It would be better if I could care so little about the non-LBT LBT stories. There is almost no possibility to evade them however. Look at the fanfictions that exist, look at the threads about new story ideas, look at the RPGs... the non-LBT stories, even in their extremest form, are to be found at every inofficial place that may be interesting for LBT fans, while on the other hand it becomes more difficult to find pure LBT stuff at those places.
