The allure of fan art? - A conversation
paulawp (marahzen)
Posts: 1,373
Having observed what seems to be an increasing number of "Editorial License" products, I'm prompted to ask: What is the allure of fan art, and what I perceive as the comparable fields of fan-fic and probably even the celebrity look-a-like genres? It's not a question meant to be confrontational, judgey or argumentative - just curious and thought it might be an interesting conversation to have.
For context, I write fiction and am here at Daz for the stated purpose of creating art related to my stories; over time, I've freely borrowed ideas from real life and culture (movies, series, books) but never felt any kind of pull to use existing, recognizeable franchises or characters (or real-life people). Most of my current WIP is the logical end point of that: My stories use elements of history, but recombine those elements into events taking place in alternate worlds - worlds just like ours, but not ours and never were. (It's not even alt history, since by definition, alt history has to have diverged from "real" history as some point.)
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I don't buy items with editorial license or non-commercial license, but I also like to do fanart. There is something fun about making characters from a known IP now and then.
That said, I don't buy editorial-use items in renders. I was once contacted about fanart I made with items used from freebie sites by the property owner. It made it difficult for even the intellectual property owner to use the items on their fansite because I couldn't account for the provenance of some of the models I had found in my runtime. After this, I vowed not to use freebie stuff or editorial use items.
This being said, I tend not to use mainstream characters like Kirk, Spock etc. I like to make my own characters set in that world.
it seems to be very popular among the population in general be it art, collecting, cosplay etc
I never felt the urge myself prefering original looking stuff but am definitely in the minority
but of course still buy DVDs and books and admit to owning some very cheap Game of Thrones plastic figurines
but they were very cheap
so I guess it's the same rendering 3D art for many
It's not necessarily something that I get involved in but I can definitely understand the appeal. If someone is really into a show/movie/game/franchise/whatever then adding your own creation into the world could certainly be appealing - even more so if you then share it within a community dedicated to that thing. Likewise with the celebrity/look-alikes perhaps their fans can add them to scenes/roles that they have never played in real life etc.
At least for fan art and fanfic, the appeal is largely the ability to recontextualize IP, to tell stories that haven't been told in the source material, and possibly never would be. Whether you want to imagine the same characters in a different setting (the show House is basically just "what if Sherlock Holmes were a physician?"), explore romance between two characters that were not romantically linked in the source material ("shipping" is a major theme of fan-fiction), introduce your own characters to an already-existing world...there are a lot of opportunities for creative play within existing IP. She-Ra and the Princesses of Power and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic are shows created and run by people who were fans of the source material who got the opportunity to reinvent the worlds and characters, giving them much more depth and meaning than the originals which were little more than ads for toys.
Pop culture is shared culture. It makes sense that people would imagine their own versions of that, that they would want to tell stories and make art about all that. It is something of a fraught endeavor, though.
Big comicon and fan expo conventions are hugely popular, with fans following the artists, creators and actors of popular media franchises, buying tons of merch, along with dressing up in cosplay of people's favorite characters. A smaller segment of that group will also do fanart, which is usually an expression of their love for the series, books or movies, and then posted to community specific boards and subcultures. People need past times, being a fan is probably safer than some of the other alternatives.
I'll chime in because I've created fan art on what I imagined a scene might look like in my head after reading a book as well as a creating a character render from a TV show.
For the books, it's mostly because I read something that the author wrote which brought images to my mind. After reading them, I want to create the images because art is my hobby and I love to express my thoughts in this way. It also gives me ideas for drawing since I'm trying to express the emotions that that author brought out in words to something I can see. Examples of fan art I did in Daz (1), (2), (3). They were inspired by the books and I added the background stories in the gallery. They aren't great (I'm trying to improve!), but they were expressions of what I envisioned in my head of the stories from books I read.
For the second example, I sort of created a celebrity look-a-like with this image. It was inspired by the TV show (Andor) and because there was a week between each episode, I had lots to time to think about the story that was unfolding. This was when Genesis 9 first came out, so I wanted to see what I could create using the dials. My inspiration came from the show and my enjoyment of watching it.
When I first read about the Editorial License, the first thing I thought of was... Wow, I hope they come out with a great Togruta model I can customize! I used to play swtor (an online star wars video game) and had a Togruta character that I would have loved to render, but as I read and researched more about what this license actually was, I kind of lost hope on that idea. =)
I've done both original fiction/art and fan-fiction/art. For me, which I do is all about what story's in my head and what wants to come out.
For fan-fic, when you really fall in love with a book/show, and it reaches the end of the author's planned storyline, gets cancelled, takes too long between installments, goes a way you really didn't like... there's a deep comfort in knowing it doesn't *have* to be over or take that left turn that broke your heart. When I was starting out, it was also a great tool to be able to build on an existing mythos and work on the writing, narrative, and pacing without ALSO having to come up with my own characters, settings, etc.
This is not to say it's just for rookies. I've enjoyed some serious world class fanfic that has far outstripped original fic - sometimes even the source material. And when you think about it, movies based on books and comics are cinema fanfic unless it's the author spearheading the whole thing.
I also often jump to enjoying other people's fanfic when I want to read something but just don't have the mental bandwith to learn an entire new world and meet a whole bunch of new people.
Fan art was how I taught myself to draw. Behold, REAMS of source material! Often there are YouTube tutorials these days. Again, though, not just for rookies. Sometimes it's just nice to draw (or render, I assume) a character you love as a way to say 'hello again!' or maybe make up that scene you envisioned in your fanfic (or someone else's).
TL;DR - Because it's like hanging out with old friends. :)
Also, for cosplay... when you think about it, the 'dress up box' a lot of people had as kids, and what we picked as Halloween costumes, was often cosplay. Those of us above a certain age just didn't have a dedicated term for it, and often far fewer resources to do it well or easy access to a community who could appreciate it. (Bless the internet, seriously.)
It's just that we were expected to grow out of it, and a certain subset of us just went, "Nah, fam, I'm just gonna do it COOLER now."
(Personally I love cosplay of all skill levels. Screw gatekeeping and perfectionism. If your heart is in it, and you're having fun, screw the haters.)
I'll note that for long running franchises, nearly all of it would be 'fan art' if it weren't sanctioned by the IP holder. Comics especially, the fans grew up and some became writers and artists for the comics they love.
I don't do fan art, unless you count images of my own characters as fitting in that category. I need my 3D art to be commercially viable, since I use it for book covers, website images, and promotional materials. So, I won't touch anything with an EL. I definitely don't make enough money to deal with the likes of Disney and Paramount.
I do, however, get the appeal of fan art. It's a way to engage with a franchise you love and share something with like-minded people. For me, it's fanfic. I read every day, and it's exclusively books and stories from my favorite anime worlds. I love it because--ESPECIALLY with anime--fanfic is a way to continue enjoying the world and characters I've connected with long after the original content creators have moved onto newer, shinier, more profitable things. The studio which made my favorite one-season anime recently shut down the possibility of any more content in that world, and while that was very sad, the fandom is large and enthusiastic enough that I'm able to continue to enjoy that world to my heart's content through fanfic. I've read some really good fan-generated content. Yeah, there's shipping which certainly breaks away from canon (I have my ships too...), but a lot of it is exploring ideas and opportunities which never could have existed in the original story. People are so creative and the possibilities are only limited by the breadth of one's imagination. I love going on a journey with a writer who took my favorite characters in a completely new direction. There's comfort and joy in that.
I see fan art and fanfic as two branches of the same appreciation of beloved source material. It's fans loving what they love and sharing it with the world. As a writer of my own fiction, I think that's the highest compliment a content creator could receive. As long as no one's trying to claim ownership of someone else's intellectual property or profiting from it, of course.
Not to start a conversation thread and then disappear ...
I am on the opposite side of a mirror and found myself curious about the phenomenon. The fact that so many Daz products come along that skirt close enough to IP entanglements that EL is an increasingly more frequent thing fascinates me. Clearly, there's enough of an enthusiastic audience to make poking the bear of IP law worthwhile for Daz.
Speaking further for myself and my POV - which I'm realizing will probably sound weird to everyone who's taken a moment to read through and respond thoughtfully to this thread ... My earliest writing was shapeless dreck, but by the time I was a tween/teen, I was writing stuff that had the basics - a plot, characterization, some stylistic choices and - by the time I finished a respectable item at 18 - a voice that is recognizable as mine. In those times, I had a vast collection of story stubs revolving around various parts of a particular character's life; it never saw the light of day as a finished work shared with others but it was a writer's sandbox, certainly at least into my 20s. When I look back on that stuff, I can clearly see when I got into PIs and police procedurals; and organized crime; and spy stories; and the inevitable "aliens are among us" phase, all at various points in my teens in the 1980s. (Yeah, there was the Miami Vice era, when I relocated part of the story to Miami.) Anyway, the point being, those ideas came from movies, TV series and other writers' books.
But what I never did was adopt fictional franchises and characters into my story line. For instance, during that moment of being interested in international intelligence gathering, I read everything Len Deighton and Robert Ludlum ever wrote, and then created my own organizations and structures, events and histories, processes and macguffins, and relationships and major players, then fit my characters into that. Fast-forward a few decades and my disinclination to include existing material got to the point in which even alt-history is too tied to existing material for my taste. For my current WIP, I created an entire world, including the world itself, history, languages, religions and cultures, just because I wanted to tell a story that clearly has ancestry in every WWII Resistance story ever told and requires early to mid 20th century tech to make the plot work, but I had no interest in writing another story about WWII and its - let's call them "well-explored and deeply trodden" - trappings.
I have a thread over in the Art Studio forum in which I blather at great length about one of my favorite topics: how learning to use Daz (with other tools) has made it possible for me - a horrifically incapable artist - to get characters that only exist in my imagination out of my head and into an image. From the first day I used Daz, that was what I was teaching myself to do. Now that I've been hanging around here in Daz-land for exactly three years this month, I see how popular the fan art genre is and I was simply wondering what the allure was.
The question is one I have never thought about.... it is interesting to think of it as I.P. For me, I think about the very long tradition of artists painting copies of interesting works of art (I had a remarkable experience of seeing the real one up close https://salvatormundirevisited.com/Copies) or how artists such as Shakespeare, Da Vinci, etc created this rather particular category "adaptations" of existing I.P.
The desire to make art in general comes from "Inspiration".
In these modern times it is no real surprise that the tv shows, the movies, the video games, etc. all can inspire us. They are a very creative and imaginative part of the world we live in.
I know I get alot of inspiration from all these things, and that keeps me going as an artist.
Fanfiction is by and for people who are deeply into a frenchise and just can't get enough of it. They write a wide range of stories and enrich that world for their own enjoyment. Fan art is an extension of it.
I bought some of the Start Trek stuff because one of these days I'd like do some Lower Decks fan art in 3D, just for my own enjoyment. I mostly use DAZ for custom work and don't use editorial content for that, but sometimes I like to make something just for me. Maybe I show it to some friends.
@lou_harper described it perfectly
My experience.
There's only one reason I got into 3D. Vergil from Devil May Cry.
Orginally, I created an oc (she looks a bit like my avatar here), gave her a story, and partnered her with Vergil for my own enjoyment (or delusions - Depending on my mood).
When I downloaded Daz Studio back in 2013, I created a character morph of her, and made my own (rubbish) head morph of Vergil.
I don't write fan-fiction anymore because my heart isn't in it, and (believe-it-or not) words don't come easy to me (plus, grammar). So I rely on Daz Studio.
While I love doing DMC-related renders (which are the majority of my work), I also love doing renders of other gaming characters that I like. Plus, I'm more likely to share renders of characters outside of the DMC universe, because I rarely do anything which doesn't feature my OC (I don't like sharing her... I'm selfish like that... :3 ).
After playing Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines how else can I get more Jeanette?
As others have already stated, my fan art is an expression of love, passion, and a celebration of the subject.
My eldest daughter is always writing fanfic, and I have often wondered what the motivation is. She's amazingly articulate on paper, fairly uncommunicative verbally, which is why I'm still partly in the dark despite trying to explore it with her.
I can now see that adopting a complete canon of work by writing fanfic means that a whole lot of back story can be ready made and need only be sketched in so the story can concentrate on what the author wants to explore. Otherwise the author would have to spending a significant amount of effort and time creating a consistent world in which the story would work.
I think fanart must be a little different in some ways. Instead being able to quickly adopt the environment, trying to illustrate an event in a fanart image must actually be more difficult than with 'free' art. The reason I say this is that clothing styles must be adopted, character shapes/ looks are constrained by the canon without the ability to use easily available material due to that IP issue that keeps rearing its head.
Interesting topic, and fascinating exploration of the ideas so far.
Regards,
Richard.
In my understanding editorial license products and AI generated pictures go together quite well - you are not supposed to make money from any of them.
But if wannabe artists buy editorial licensed products and pay for AI generating pictures for them, the company which sells the editorial licensed products and the AI can earn some money.
I daydream a lot and my fantasies borrow from are plagiarised from many genres
which is why I never would be able to create a book based on them.
That said it does make mixing and kitbashing stuff inspired by many movies, games, books etc easier
I could never settle on one fandom
everytime I read a book, watch a film I just toss another ingredient into my world
I guess others are just more disciplined, linear thinking than me
Hmmm? AI generated art is not protected by copyright, if used straight, but that doesn't mean you cannot make money from it - especially if you add enough of your own modifications/post work that it is protectable (how much that is is, as far as I know, an open question)
I'll also add on that tabletop roleplaying games are effectively exercises in fan-fiction. D&D, Shadowrun, Warhammer et al have very dense lore attached to them, but when you play, you can use as much or as little of that lore as you want to as you create your own story within the game's universe. The podcast TV&D revolves around playing D&D as TV characters, which is fan-fiction inside of fan-fiction.
It is pretty hard to be completely original these days. My son is working on a group assignment for one of his college classes, and I was listening (eavesdropping) when they were talking about the other day. Their Story is a post apopoliptic scenario where the S has HTF and the world has regressed into a stage of medeival feudalism.
I made the mistake of interacting (which they are not comfortable with), and asking if they had heard of the SM Sterling "The Change" series where this same scenario played out across something like 15 or so books. Eight blank stares looking back at me.
It was original to them...
I'm a big fan of Star Wars fan fic these days, since it shows infinitely more imagination and creativity than the drivel being excreted from the official channels.
Adding to that... DragonLance has a metric ton of books and is also an RPG line. I remember reading that the first several novels were based on the RPG playtest, and some of the things that became cannon weren't originally in there; it was the players taking that unexpected left turn. And a lot of the published books are anthologies... so, fanfic that got sanctioned.
White Wolf is the same for the urban fantasy set.
It is my understanding, the creator of Wonder Woman had a thing for men being tied up by women. If this is true, it's a good example of how fan fiction would be good because there are some things the original writers would never do. Because he only wants men tied up by women, that's all Wonder Woman will ever do. Maybe I'd like to see her put her rope around another woman. Or maybe I'd like to see her be the one tied up and forced to tell the truth. I'd have to create my own story for that to properly happen.
I wrote a lot of what one would now call fanfic when I was a teen and YA, in 2-3 pages-long installments sent via post (yes, actual letters - I am that old) with my bestie - later through e-mail. I've only realized this recently. We would spin our own stories on people from books we'd read, but also legendary characters and such. We loved to act some of them out, too whenever we got together (one of the main features would always be climbing on her parents' chicken shed roof and then jumping off with great hurrah, for whichever flimsy reason presented itself). I remember us creating a lot of Robin Hood themed adventures, for instance, but we were also much intrigued by stuff like The Secret History (man, what a BOOK, to this day). It seemed a great way to kickstart your own imagination, and taught me a lot about writing and what makes a good scene.
Ages later, some of my own publications were very nicely received by a YA reader, and she drew a number of amazing pictures of the main characters. She was so sweet to actually ask me before if I as alright with that. I absolutely loved it, and the drawings were great. I never asked her why though, didn't even think of it. It seemed kind of natural (very flattering of course), maybe because of my own fanfic experiences from earlier.
I don't feel much like going in this direction anymore now, haven't since a long time. I can't quite say why. The pull is just gone, I'm not as fascinated by literary characters anymore as I used to be. And many of the characters in today's popular stories seem very samy to me. I still think it's something like an honor for a story to be received so intensely, but it can go wrong of course.
I don't have any particular insight into William Moulton Marston's bedroom preferences, but I know a little about the early Wonder Woman comics he wrote. None of this is to take away from your point - I'm sharing because I find the history of WW interesting, so perhaps others will too.
WW was frequently bound in the comics, with many of the early comics featuring WW bound on the cover. I Googled early wonder woman covers and got half a page of images with the explicit filter obscuring them. I'd share some examples, but if that's considered explicit these days then perhaps not. Anyway, WW's weakness is specifically having her bracelets bound - by a man - and needing to break herself free, which is a not-at-all-subtle metaphor of internal feminine strength being more than capable of breaking external patriarchal bonds. I don't know how common that is in today's comics - what was a definite sign of empowerment back then would be problematic today, so maybe it's not so common to see. Sounds like you know more about the modern comics than me.
WW wasn't shy of tying up women, either. She was sort of... Ummmm.... Prolific!
And of course she has been tied up by a few women herself. Wonder Woman #200 is an easy to recall example of this.
Marston was in a polyamorous marriage, with his wife, Elizabeth Holloway, and their shared partner, Olive Byrne. Marston died relatively young in his late 50's, and Holloway and Byrne stayed together until death separated them decades later. Still no particular insight into his - or their - bedroom habits, but I think it's fair to say they all had their influence on WW and, as creators with an (alleged) interest are wont to do, explored said interest rather thoroughly indeed!
Have you seen this article in the Smithsonian?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/origin-story-wonder-woman-180952710/
Highly recommend, if you haven't. Well researched, with lots of historical context.
Thanks for sharing - great read on the historical lead-up to WW! Really does appear that WW's bondage theme is primarily influenced by feminist iconology rather than anything happening in bedrooms. I'm sure there was also some cynical marketing along kinkier lines too, but it's rather telling that any focus on the bondage theme will almost always end with speculation around Martson's sexual psychology rather than on an examination of its symbolic importance.
Well, in our culture (sadly) things always tend to wind up Rule 34'ed at some point or another. I admit I hadn't really gotten into WW before the first Gal Gadot movie, but I'm always up for a good Smithsonian article (my parents have a subscription and pass them on to me when they're done, so I'm spoiled) and that one was really fascinating since I was starting with a (mostly) blank slate. It made me love her even more, really.