Does Stephenie Meyer have to cut a bitch?

THIS IS NOT OKAY. (And the photoshoping is bad, too.)Twilight fans, I’m sorry, but it’s becoming clearer and clearer that there is a deep vein of crazy running through your fandom. Hot on the heels of LadySybilla and her unending spiral of batshit, you now have a second person trying to sell their Twilight fan fiction – and this one is on Amazon.

Seriously guys, when your creator has a history of pitching fits in the style of a 16-year-old BNF who’s not getting enough reviews? It’s probably not wise to gleefully infringe on her copyright. One can be written off as just a random nutter, but two? That’s stupid crazy. Meyer has money, she has lawyers, and I don’t doubt that they will cut you – and maybe everyone else who’s doing their Twilight fan fiction without asking money for it as well.

The catchup: Links from Twitter

atat-anatomyHere are some of the things I’ve micro-blogged over @clubjade in the last week or so.

Clothing: Behold the Anatomy of the AT-AT t-shirt!

Guardians of peace and justice? Eight Scottish officers with the Strathclyde Police and two of their civilian co-workers have listed their religion as “Jedi.”

Crazy Twilight fan theater. Lady Sybilla’s industrial-sized victim complex trucks on! She’s now claiming that “Characters don’t belong to authors. Authors don’t create characters. They merely channel them.”

Lulz. io9’s Charlie Jane Anders pegs Obi-Wan Kenobi as one of the Great Unsung Slash Fiction Heroes. I know it’s pretty ironic that the most code-abiding Jedi in the saga is the fandom bicycle of Star Wars fanfic, but these things just tend to happen when Ewan MacGregor is involved.

Video fun! We Didn’t Start the Flame War! (NSFW, mostly for language.)

Video: Supernatural mocks fans, themselves

So it seems that on last week’s Supernatural episode ‘The Monster at the End of This Book,’ the main characters, Dean and that guy played Dean on Gilmore Girls Sam, discover fandom. And slash. Incest slash, of course, since the main focus of both the show and the psuedo-fandom within the show are the two brothers. Naturally, some in the fandom are less than amused

I gotta say, I tend to eat this kind of thing up with a spoon. (See Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, Avatar’s ‘The Ember Island Players,’ and I’m sure some of you know the names of the X-Files episodes I’m thinking of…) But what’s your take? Is it okay for the canon to take a mocking stance on not only itself but the fans?

Inappropriate fannish behavior du jour

A Supernatural fan asks security to remove Jensen Ackles’ girlfriend from the convention. Or at least claims to have done so on her Livejournal. Key quote:

I was actually pissed to see her sitting behind him killing my fan squee, she was a total buzz kill, I mean seriously to sit there while he is with fans was tacky IMO.

And another, from the comments:

hahaha i heard she was a bit of a cock block for fans

Bravo, ladies. Bravo. (via)

Twilight infringer backs off, sort of

With fandom buzzing and several professionals weighing in, Lady Sybilla and her ‘publisher,’ AV Paranormal, are backing off on selling her Twilight fanfic, Russet Noon. But she’s not going to take it laying down!

Swarming with self-righteous judgments and slander galore, some of these postings have gone as far as to threaten Lady Sybilla and her team with everything from boycotting the novel, reporting it to web administrators, and even stalking the addresses listed under Whois registrar entries.

Slander is a term used for defamatory speech. The term she’s actually looking for is libel. But wait, there’s more:

Blown out of proportion falls short of describing the overzealous crusade that has given these teens “a common enemy,” as one of them has called it. Some of these volunteer soldiers are so militant about their cause, that eBay buyers appear to have been contacted one by one in an attempt to persuade them to request refunds on their Russet Noon preorders.

Now we all know that sometimes fandom will get a bit… overzealous in reaction to people trying to publish fan fiction of copyrighted works. Some of it might even qualify as libel, though most of what I’ve seen is simple boggling at her ignorance. But that is the absolute most minor reason not to do it. In short? Lady, if you don’t want people saying mean things about you when you do something stupid on the internet, maybe you should stop fanning the flames.

A recent theory, however, could mean her behavior isn’t born out of arrogance and ignorance, but instead something even less savory. Could Lady Sybilla have manufactured this situation simply to get more views on her site and cash via Amazon affiliate links? If so, she wouldn’t be first in fandom to attempt to (fandom_)wank her way to profit, but perhaps the most successful to date…

Once again, a huge tip of the hat to Caito and the folks at Fandom Wank.

You still can’t sell your fanfic: Twilight edition

I hate to make two Twilight posts in a week, but now it seems the fandom has their own Lori Jareo wannabe in the form of LadySybill, who’s written Russet Noon, a post-Breaking Dawn story about Bella’s other love interest, Jacob Black. Nothing surprising about that as a fanfic: But she’s calling it a “tribute novel” and was directing readers to… eBay? And it seems she thinks she can get away with it because… Stephenie Meyer didn’t draw pictures of her characters:

The characters in SM’s novels were not copyrighted because she never drew them or hired an artist to draw them. Today she shares her character copyrights with Summit. And, no, Russet Noon does not have direct permission from SM to publish this sequel, which is why the article says that it is a “Tribute” or “Unauthorized” Sequel.

And here’s what her ‘publisher’ has to say:

When fictional characters become such an intricate part of the popular psyche, as is the case with the Twilight Saga, legal boundaries become blurred, and copyright laws become increasingly difficult to define.

Yeah, that would totally hold up in court. Get the rest of the story and boggle at length at Sparklefield and Fandom Wank.

UPDATE: Has LadySybill seen the light?

Angry fans better than no fans at all?

Steve Sansweet gets quoted in a story on the Harry Potter fans miffed at the Half-Blood Prince delay.

Some think the outsized reaction could actually be a boon for the studio. Steve Sansweet, who runs fan relations for George Lucas’s Lucasfilm Ltd., says “Warner Bros. should be delighted. Sure, they have a problem on their hands, but they are also seeing the passion of their fans. The real problem comes when you have fans that don’t give a damn.”

Granted, the quoted Potterheads are certainly on the raging, ranty, please-calm-down end of the spectrum, but Steve has a point. Just, uh, refrain from sticking your hands between the bars.