Art, Myth and Fan-Fiction — Why Does It Exist?

This is fundamentally the difference between Art, Myth and Fan-fiction — Why Does It Exist?

Myths more or less write themselves (like the Legendary Luke Skywalker, who undergoes a Transfiguration in The Last Jedi by dying, and thus goes from being a merely Legendary Figure (as well as being a real man), to being a Mythic and Mythological Hero — Because the qualifying requirement for Hero status, ever since the earliest epics and sagas of the Ancient World is that you have to DEAD.

You have to be dead, and have a tomb that pilgrims can venerate when they journey to visit your gravesite — which is why William Shatner’s egoistic desire to resurrect Kirk’s corpse from it’s lonely unmarked resting place on Veridian III was such utter misguided folly.

That’s also why Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker vanish when they die, their heroic deaths achieving an act of Herculean, Quasi-Arthurian Apotheosis, eternally unifying their mortal existence with the heroic legend.

It’s also why Vikings, Hindus and countless other tribal cultures believe the highest honour that can be afforded to a fallen warrior king is to raise him up toward heaven, in both body and in spirit, atop a mighty funeral pyre — just as Hercules did, when ascending to Olympus.

But with anything below Myth, in the realm of ordinary storytelling, you have to justify each narrative development, every creative decision in terms of why it is happening to your characters —

• Why Is This Happening to Them?

• What Purpose Does This Incident in the Lives of Your Characters Serve in Advancing their Journey Along Their Respective Paths?

• Why Do I (as The Storyteller) Feel The Need to Tell it?

And the answer should NEVER be “Because I want to Tell it.” — which is ultimately the fundamental motivation behind ALL FanFic / Shipping / SlashFiction.

If it exists, solely or primarily owing to the fan-author’s personal, selfish reasons, not only are you doing a disservice and are perpetrating an abuse of the characters and the world you claim to love so much, you are doing so to the injurious cost of the needs of The Story itself — the Marxist social historian 

Kevin Smith Tells The Story of a moment in time, back in the late-90s, during The SuperHero Dark Ages, before The MCU, when he was given a meeting  at Warner Bros., where he was offered the opportunity to develop a screenplay for one of the following two, front-line major marquee showcase A-List projects then-in-development — Either :

Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian

OR

Superman 5, aka Superman Lives.

Kev’s reply to the first project was spot-on in his contemptuous scornful dismissal : 

“Didn’t We Say Everything That Needed to Be Said with The First Beetlejuice...? I mean, must we go tropical....?”

And of course, he is entirely right - the ‘creative’ ethos and rationale driving the decision to make the thing is exactly the same one at play with every other awful, soul-less half-assed rehash of a zany, madcap breakout hit fish-out of Water comedy flick of that era — Crocodile Dundee / The Mask / Home Alone / Ace Ventura : Pet Detective Made $200+ Million, so let’s make another one, but this time, with a completely different setting or situational circumstance to drive generate incidents, move the plot forward and make it SEEM new and different and fresh (even though it isn’t), usually by just reversing everything that the characters went through in the first movie (and thus undoing all of their character development by negating their character arc from the first one.

Which is why, with perhaps the sole exception of the second Addams Family movie, those quicky studio comedies were almost uniformly and without exception, TERRIBLE.... even Ghostbusters 2 is deeply mediocre.