🦍 Mitch's Other Newsletter
I did not like the Bad Bunny Super Bowl halftime show but I am not making a big deal about it because I am not a weirdo.
“Proposal by Brooks Stevens for the 1958 Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. At this stage of the design an onboard boiler was proposed, it would have generated a steam cloud to further the hot dog verisimilitude.” And more about the weinermobile.
“Wonder what happened to the dinosaurs? This is a baby Blue Heron.”
I thought that intellectual property laws created the idea of “fanfiction.”
But actually, it is not true: Intellectual property laws created the idea of original fiction. Fanfiction is the one that has always been there the whole time.
It seems possible that the idea of originality is stunting or damaging to storytelling. If there is a compelling idea or a cool character, we have to make it seem different, like we came up with it ourselves. But this means characters, worlds, and concepts are effectively siloed in their creator’s work, and people who seek to write a story have to pretend to assemble these things from scratch, concealing and de-emphasizing the ways that they are derivative.
Intriguing, but I don’t know whether I agree.
