I was about to go home when I discovered ff.net are banning songfics. This shouldn't be something I have a serious problem with - I don't write songfics, generally speaking I don't read songfics and really don't like songfics much either, though there are a couple of them I'm pretty fond of and will be sad to see vanish into the ether of the Internet. But it is. It shouldn't be, but it is. I have a problem with this 'request'.

The problem is with working out quite what the criteria for a 'songfic' actually is. And why not, since ff.net couldn't be much vaguer on the matter if they tried...

"For whatever reason, some writers feel it's okay to copy-n-paste musical lyrics they have not written into their fiction. If you did not write it, do not post it. This has always been our policy. Please remove these entries immediately to avoid account closure."

Well, that clears it all up. Makes me feel much better. Thank you, ff.net. Truly you shine a light in the fog of my poor cluttered fangirl brain. If I didn't write it, don't post it. Okay. Just what exactly is your problem here? Typing out songs? Songfics? Or are even brief song quotes counted in this? Is this a copyright issue? Surely not. The site is called fanfiction.net. Legally speaking the entire contents of the damn site are in breach of copyright law.

And surely nobody thinks two lines, three lines, or a short verse of a song at the start of a fic is a serious stylistic problem? I will admit that yes, there is problem posed by fics where the author types out the entire lyrics of a song simply to bump up the word count or because a character is listening to music. Now that's a problem both stylistically and contentwise. But the rest of it? Yes, I am only worried because I've done this myself but isn't this a bit of an overreaction?


(Needless to say, ff.net haven't bothered, you know, actually emailing their members about the change to their site policy. Christ almighty, if they're going to stop people's accounts for infringing a brand-new and not exactly overpublicized rule, couldn't they have at least let us know about this new rule via email instead of relying on people checking their 'site updates' spiel and discovering a brief paragraph in an update which seems at first glance seems irrelevant to anyone who is not a Mac user? Most of their users do not log into the site every freaking day. I certainly don't. I first found out about the songfic ban courtesy of a livejournal post from skyrat13. A notification email would have been nice, ff.net. I should not have to rely on your users' Livejournal posts to find out about changes in your site policy!)

Besides, it seems to me like that definition of the term 'songfic' couldn't be much fuzzier if it tried, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who's been mightily confused by what, exactly, ff.net are asking us to do here.

Could this be, for instance, an honest attempt to pull those godawful, irritating fics where a character - usually an author avatar - is 'listening to music' and the author feels the need to clip and paste an entire song (which they happen to like) into a fic, during which absolutely nothing happens apart from the OC 'listening to music'? If that's so, then more power to them. That's just bloody irritating, not to mention shockingly poor writing. If that's their aim - good. About bloody time. Could they ban purple-eyed Mary Sues too?

Or, more worrying, does this mean all songfics are now streng verboten, and nobody can post anything with song lyrics in or get their account closed? Well, that's kind of sad. I won't cry for the majority of songfics. Most of them are awful. But I've read a number of very good songfics. I think ff.net will be the poorer for insisting on pulling and I'll be sorry to see them go. One of the best fics I ever read inserted the lyrics to a song in the final chapter, and it was a very, very good move to do so - said song had been referred to several times over the course of the fic as something one of the characters both enjoyed listening to and found relevant to his own life and a number of events in the story, and inserting the actual lyrics in the final chapter wasn't an annoyance but both a logical decision and an interesting revelation. This kind of reaction to a few lame OC fests seems a bit of an overreaction - as if, to borrow a very tired old phrase, ff.net are insisting on throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Or, worse still, does this mean that you can't quote any line from a song at all without someone killing your account for it? In which case - well, come on, ff.net administrators, that's just stupid. Published novels have quotes from songs in them and nobody suggests that's wrong or should be stopped pro tem. 'The Blind Assassin' has a few lines from a song in it. 'Wise Children' has song lyrics in. 'Tender is the Night' has a few lines from a song in it, and opens with a quote from 'Ode to a Nightingale' (and these are just the novels I can think of off the top of my head which have done this - there are plenty more books like that out there). Some novels open their chapters with quotes from songs. Or novels, or poems, or plays, or books of non-fiction. Are we seriously going to impose limits on fanfic authors which no professional writer anywhere has been forced to subscribe to as long as they acknowledge their source?

Simply put: by these criteria F. Scott Fitzgerald couldn't keep a fanfiction.net account open because he quoted lyrics from 'No No Nanette!', whereas 'Weiss~Kitti~Calico' and her multiple terrible OCs are perfectly safe because she never mentions music at all. Okay.

So, what I want to know is - getting personal now - am I at risk of having my account pulled because I have used short (three lines maximum) attributed quotes from J-rock songs at the start of each of the fics in the 'Proximity' arc? Does this mean I should snip the song quotes? I don't want to snip the song quotes, I spent a long time searching for those goddamn things, I like the quotes - I'm especially fond of the 'Rosier' quote in part 3 - and the whole arc was inspired by the two lines Dir en grey's 'KR [cube]' I use at the opening of 'Proximity'. That is the only reason the quotes are there: because I wanted people to know what had inspired my story in the first place.

Am I now doing something wrong by having those quotes there? How could I be when this, unlike song fics or OC's listening to stereos, isn't a practice which is strictly restricted to authors of fanfiction? I'm not suggesting I'm anywhere near F. Scott Fitzgerald's level, or the 'KR [cube]' is the equivalent of 'Ode to a Nightingale'. Far from it. It's simply that I and ficcers like me are quite categorically not doing something that well-reputed published authors haven't done before, which is more than can be said for a 'traditional' songfic or a stereo-listening OC angst fest.

If you ask me it's not songfics in general, or quotes from songs, which are the issue. The real problem here is the way a growing number of users have started pulling the 'OC listens to music' stunt because they think it's cool and pissing everyone else off in the process.

Which, ff.net admin, is incidentally what you'll get if you continue to alienate adult users in favor of going all out for the junior high crowd. You'll get more and more users pulling this crap as serious fanficcers (oxymoron?) decide they've had enough of being patronized and go to post their work elsewhere. And it'll take more than a few new rules to get rid of badfics full of lazy writing, Mary Sues, transcribed song lyrics and other such crap. You need to stop dumbing down. Stop targeting your service at these godawful authors and they'll stop filling your archives with badfic. It's as simple as that.


Jeez. It's stunts like this that makes me wonder why I post to ff.net at all - they're getting more didactic by the day. For every good idea they have to make their authors' lives easier, they have three that make them much harder. If it wasn't for the fact that I'm addicted to feedback, this would have me throwing in the towel for good.

It's not banning songfics I'm annoyed about. It's the principle of the thing. It's wondering where this is going to end. And it's wishing there was somewhere else I could post my fics and still get feedback.