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Welcome to Narnian Caparison, my site for the collected fanfiction of The Chronicles of Narnia and my random musings on Narnia, fanfiction, fantasy, and whatever else I think is appropriate.
Stories are presented in seven volumes, both as links and available in PDF and ePUB formats.
The Chronicles of Narnia is copyrighted by the estate of CS Lewis, Walt Disney Company, and Walden Media. Stories presented here are for entertainment purposes only and may not be sold or reprinted in any other format.
All stories in this series are rated T for Teen, otherwise known as MPAA PG-13 or TV-14, or less. Mild language, descriptions of violence, or references to sexuality may occur.
All stories in this series, unless otherwise noted, first appeared on www.fanfiction.net. Leaving reviews of critiques, feedback and/or appreciation is encouraged.
Stories may have been edited for spelling, punctuation, minor grammatical issues, or clarity.
Narnian Caparison 
Hello! I was just linked to this site, and oh my, what fascinating thoughts you have here! I look forward to reading all the posts. And I am very flattered that you included one of my stories, as well as thrilled to see that you have included some of my favorites here! And some new stories I haven’t read yet – I have a lot to look forward to.
I just have one concern: while linking to stories is fine, it’s considered rather bad etiquette in fandom to distribute other people’s stories without asking permission first (and very bad etiquette to edit said stories without being asked to do so), since people like to know where their stories are and some like to have control over the distribution. Maybe hold off on the PDF and ePUB docs until you get permission from the authors? And my story is available for download at the Archive of Our Own (http://archiveofourown.org/users/Snacky), if you want to use that link.
Once again, I am very flattered that you linked to my story, and I can’t wait to read more of the blog and the other stories linked!
All the best,
Snacky
I think this is a great idea – collecting the type of fanfiction you like best in one place to make it easier for others to find as well. You don’t mention anywhere on here about whether or not you have the original writers’ permission to post their work here (especially in pdf form), or to edit their work in any way, shape, or form. Maybe you have asked, and just not said anything, or if you haven’t, you might not be aware that posting someone else’s fanfiction, ESPECIALLY if you make any changes, without asking their permission first, is considered very bad form. I would hate to see a great idea like this marred in any way, so I would suggest that if you have asked the writers’ permission, you make it known here, and if you haven’t, you ask them as soon as possible, possibly even taking down any stories for which you haven’t gotten permission.
I for one won’t read anything if it even hints of having been used without the original writer’s consent, and I know many people who enjoy fanfiction feel the same way, so for the sake of this site, if nothing else, I would strongly recommend doing so!
Not to reply to just you both, but just in general.
I was more than surprised to come home from work today and see that my stats had suddenly exploded over 300%. After reading the comments posted in the last day, I see why – I’ve been discovered by the fandom.
I don’t mean to sound like that’s a bad thing. But it was never my goal to be “in” the fandom in any way. I’ve been involved in fandoms before, and even got the LJ and the twitter and been involved in contests and etc. I’ve decided that I’ve very much moved on from that. My goals for this blog are evident on the “About” page I think, and it is enough for me.
As for issues such permission: It is Bad Form to 1) copy someone else’s story and post it as your own, 2) copy bits of various stories and post them as your own, 3) re-post stories on another fan archive, even if you register under the same handle as the original author. These are all cases where “permission” is an issue and I have done none of these. Yes, I have thought this through, my previous fandom discussed fics-as-pdfs to the nth degree once upon a time. The only hesitation I have with the pdf/epub format (which are more “protected” than a Word document, which is why I chose them, even though it is all rather troublesome) is that it disallows the ability of the reader to leave comments, which prevents the author from responding to their readers, which is the most basic beauty of fanfiction. This is why, even though I geared the “collected works” to non-fanfic people (who have things like Kindle), I have tried to encourage leaving reviews, and also made it as easy as possible by providing direct links.
As for edits, yes, there are a few. They mostly consist of light spelling corrections (I strongly suspect that there are bugs in fanfiction.net’s platform which introduce small errors in fics over time). There were also a few oddities with chapter numbers (since fanfiction.net insists so strongly on providing chapter numbers beginning with the number one), and when I added the chapter titles I thought it would be odd to import that peculiarity. Doing things like removing a word which is written twice in a row is technically a grammar issue, but I did fix something small like that. That’s really about it. I meant to keep italics and such, but as someone has already pointed out, some were apparently lost by Word in it’s many frustrating acts of randomness. You can compare what I have here with the originals and see for yourself.
As for where to read fics – if you are a fanfic reader you’re probably already used to reading fanfic while connected to the internet. I don’t expect you to stop that just because of me.
Thank you for your reply. We’ll have to agree to disagree on things. I think it’s Bad Form to not let authors know what you’re doing with their works, just as an act of courtesy, but since you’re not interested in being part of the fandom, I understand that you don’t care about their thoughts or feelings on the matter.
Again, thanks for the inclusion of one of my stories, and the link as well. Hopefully I’ll hear from some new readers thanks to this! Feedback is always nice to get. 🙂
What you call Bad Form is considered by most people as quite simply Plagiarism. And, if I may be allowed a syllogism here, while all Plagiarism is Bad Form, not all Bad Form is Plagiarism. You seem to be overlooking simple etiquette, which is that if you are going to present an author’s works in another form (such as a pdf), you ask them first. Even if you are attributing the work to them, it is still simply courteous. I know that at least one author whose work you have linked here, Andi Horton, has specifically asked on her fanfiction.net profile that nobody link to or archive her work without asking her first:
“On archival and distribution:
Please ask first. I mean it! If you copy my work to your computer for your own personal use, or post the odd link to rec, that’s fine and actually very flattering. However, if you are archiving my stories themselves on another site entirely, it would be in exceedingly poor taste not to ask permission first. It only takes a second or two to send a quick PM.”
That is taken directly from her profile; for you to ignore that is just plain rude, by whatever standards of good or bad form you hold. I know I would be very upset if anything I had written were used in such a way, especially if I had stated quite specifically my wishes regarding such matters. And to do any sort of editing, even if it just correcting spelling errors or repeated words, without first consulting the author, is shockingly improper. By any standards.
Snacky is far more gracious than I am.
I could give you a nice rambling explanation here about the importance of the fannish community to the creation of these works that you have neatly divorced from their original contexts, without either permission from or notification to the original authors–but I suspect from the evidence offered above that I would be wasting my electrons.
Instead I will merely say: Kindly do me the courtesy of leaving my stories out of your PDFs.
It seems that sometimes what I think is obvious is less than clear to others. But in these cases I try to explain my Full Position on the matter, and ask the reader to forgive that it may be long, boring, and complicated.
I think the issue with “permission” and “Bad Form” comes from a misunderstanding of how fanfiction was treated when it first moved online. This is the history lesson part. Once upon a time before the internet fanfiction was distributed via fanzines, which were printed and mailed, and handed out at cons and passed from fan to fan. Author’s whose fiction was published in these zines understood implicitly that the price for having their work published was that it would exist in published form. A tautological statement, perhaps, but it is important to note here. The fic would be printed, handed out, and some intrepid souls would even make photocopies (or, lacking a photocopier, even retype it) and pass them out to all of their friends. It could happen that when the author went to a con they could have a badly photocopied copy of their fic thrust into their hands by a half-crazed adolescent who smelled funny and yelled, “have you read this, it’s really great!”
Then the internet was invented, but it was clunky. People got the idea to post fanfiction there, but that involved knowing programming code in order to build a website from scratch and then put the fic there as a static page. Normally a fan would step in to build the page, and that webmaster would then act as the publisher, and would not only present the fanfic but also handle the author’s fanmail (since even after the internet was invented not everyone had email). It was here that the idea of permission on the internet was courted, since the webmaster was the one who had gone through all the laborious drudgery of coding, tagging, creating layouts, and paying for hosting. “Permission” primarily protected the webmaster, not the author.
Some authors did not get a webmaster involved at all. They got email accounts and spread their fics by email. Sometimes, after attachments became common, these fics were sent in Word or PDF formats. These sorts of authors still exist, and asking them, “can I forward this to my friends?” is pointless. The answer is always, “yes, duh.”
But then fanfiction.net was launched. Authors could self-publish without getting a webmaster involved. And at some point, I don’t know how or why, some authors collapsed the idea that that also made them the “webmaster” of their own fic, and hence had Total And Absolute Control over their fics, FOREVER.
This, however, is not the case. Nothing has changed since the days when fics were published in zines and were relentlessly photocopied. Perhaps authors were misled by the fact that, when you upload a fic to ff.net you get the options of “EDIT” and “DEL”, but a misperception does not change a basic fact, that when a fic is published it is published. This is another stupid tautology, I know, but it is worth repeating. After a work is published to the public it is public. It is now “in the world” and no amount of wishes or threats will put the genie back into the bottle of the hard drive. A quick perusal of ff.net or the eFiction platform should make this obvious. The “EDIT” and “DEL” options go away after a few weeks, to be replaced by the more severe “Remove.” Nothing is done to disable the Ctrl-C function, and there is, up in the corner, are little options with the word “Share.” The eFiction platform has the yet more extensive “print” option. We have come full circle back to the photocopies at the con, because that is exactly what these offer.
I do think that a great many authors do not think about these things. They most definitely do not think about the “Print” option enough. I remember a fandom discussion, once upon a time, that went:
Fan1: Did you hear? Author21 pulled her fic.
Fan2: What? Why? I was in the middle of reading that!
Fan1: No idea.
Fan3: Oh, geez, I’m glad I printed it out last week.
Fan2: Lucky you.
Author21: You printed it out!?!?
Fan3: Yes.
Author21: WHY!?
Fan3: I wanted to read it on paper. I prefer reading on paper.
Author21: How on earth did you print it out?
Fan3: I hit the print button.
Author21: Well, I’ve pulled it, so get rid of it.
Fan3: Excuse me?
Author21: I’ve pulled the fic, so you need to get rid of your printout.
Fan3: I don’t have it anymore, I gave it to a friend.
Author21: What! Then go get. It. Back!
Fan3: So that I can throw it in the trash?
Author21: YES!
Fan3: You want me to throw your story in the trash?
Author21: YES!
Fan3: Why?
Author21: Because I AM THE AUTHOR AND I SAY SO!!!!
I have no idea what Fan3 eventually did, but I hope they didn’t throw the fic in the trash, though I suspect that the sight of the fic that they previously loved enough to print out and carry around with them and give to a friend grew so distasteful that they eventually did. But this whole thing raised the question, how would we feel if the author of the work we write fanfic for asked us to do the same thing? If the Lewis Estate tomorrow demanded that we burn all of our Narnia books, would we? Why do fanfic authors demand more rights than we are willing to give other authors? But that is a separate discussion.
There will come a day, and it is not far away, when ff.net will offer an epub reading option. I suspect that this will cause authors who think they have Absolute and Complete Control a great deal of flangst. But I think that it will be only a good thing. Absolute and Complete control was always an illusion, and ff.net never meant to give it to authors anyways.
And here I don’t mean to sound snarky, but after living through a fandom where there was rampant pull-to-publish, I really will insist on the fact that fanfiction is published the moment it is posted publicly on the internet, and the author has no say in how the fic is read beyond that. Yes, the author has the right to be acknowledged as the author, and to receive their own fanmail. But as a reader I also have rights, and I will insist that those rights be respected. And those rights include saving and sharing fics how I want.
I realize that that last statement is controversial, but it is only because a misconception has been so popular it has been ingrained. I think it is time that readers do insist on their rights and not be so passive. I will not be cowed by the threat of fic-pulling. I will not be cowed by threats of “I will only post the next chapter if people review and not flame!” I will not be cowed by threats of being “excluded” from the fandom because I told an author With Lots of Very Important Friends that I think the way they treat their readers is despicable. I am a Reader, and I have the right to enjoy reading, and I will protect that right and offer that right to others. Sure, I’m not handing out photocopies left and right at a con, but that’s one of the reasons why I love the internet.
Not sure why you seem to think that everyone you’re talking to is a complete n00b to fandom, but I assume that’s because you just came out of Twilight fandom, which is full of teenies and middle-aged women who just discovered the internet. But rest assured you are not the only one who remembers the old days of fandom here.
“I really will insist on the fact that fanfiction is published the moment it is posted publicly on the internet, and the author has no say in how the fic is read beyond that.”
I don’t disagree with you on this at all.
“But as a reader I also have rights, and I will insist that those rights be respected.”
I have not seen one person telling you that you have no rights, nor that they won’t respect them. I am a reader, and I can read fic whatever way I want – I have printed it out, read it on my computer, read it via email, read it on my e-reader, etc. I have happily shared fic that have disappeared offline if I had a copy.
“I will not be cowed by the threat of fic-pulling.”
No one has threatened to pull their fics offline.
“I will not be cowed by threats of “I will only post the next chapter if people review and not flame!” ”
No one has threatened this.
“I will not be cowed by threats of being “excluded” from the fandom because I told an author With Lots of Very Important Friends that I think the way they treat their readers is despicable. ”
Nor has anyone threatened this.
“I am a Reader, and I have the right to enjoy reading, and I will protect that right and offer that right to others.”
No one has said you don’t, nor has anyone tried to take that right away from you. You are arguing against threats that no one has made. I understand that there was a lot of fic-pulling in Twilight fandom, and I am assuming that all these threats and problems came from there. But you are compiling and distributing Narnia fics that no one has pulled, and that no one has made any threats over.
I think you’re so overzealous in your attempts to prove your point and how you’re RIGHT, you’re missing the point of what everyone is saying. No one is saying you CAN’T do this thing. People are simply saying it’s nice to be asked first.
I have no problems with you linking to my (or anyone’s) stories. I, personally, don’t care that you want to include it in your download files – as I said above, I agree that the author has no control over what happens to their stories once they’re posted. I post my fic at the Archive of Our Own, which actually offers a ePub/download option (as you predicted that ff.net will someday do). I am more than happy if readers want to download my fic.
However, I do not speak for everyone on that matter. And all I am saying is that it’s good etiquette to ask authors first. I know you said earlier that you don’t care to be part of fandom, so obviously you don’t care that you’ve upset authors. But even if you don’t care, certainly you can understand that when people are upset over something you’ve done, they’re going to speak up about it.
What I DO have a problem with, is you editing people’s stories for, as you say, “spelling, punctuation, minor grammatical issues, or clarity” especially after reading your latest entry on this site with the glaring typos. Compiling for download is one thing – the editing is both presumptuous and unnecessary.
Again, I realize you don’t care about my opinion, or the opinions of the other Narnia fic writers trying to discuss this with you. You’ve made your position clear: you’re fighting a fight that you’ve brought with you from Twilight fandom, and you don’t care that no one here is fighting against you, simply asking you for some courtesy. I don’t know why you’ve decided that being polite to others infringes upon your rights as a reader, and no, your fandom history lesson doesn’t begin to explain your Bad Form at all.
I wasn’t going to step in here. I wanted to just be flattered and move on, despite my own misgivings about this. But frankly your response to this disturbs me greatly, and I find I can’t remain silent.
Firstly, let me say that your response could not have been worse if you had calculated a way to give the most offense. All that was needed here was a polite apology, along the lines of, “I’m sorry for not contacting you directly. May I continue to provide your work?” Knowing many of the authors involved as I do, I can say with some certainty that the majority of responses would have been a warm “yes, of course.” By reacting defensively and with hostility, you have alienated many people who would otherwise have been pleased to see their work in a collection. I include myself in that number.
Let me now try to address some of the several points you have raised which trouble me.
I can understand the impulse to correct minor errors. I know, personally, I’ve spotted about half a dozen typos in “Winterfall” which I haven’t had the time to go back and correct given ff.net’s recent switch to a far less friendly editing system. However, as someone who has had grammar “corrected” in instances where the original text was correct, sometimes altering meaning in the process, I am extremely leery of editing beyond the obvious typos.
I understand that your import system strips italics, but perhaps that suggests you should look for a better system. Authors use italics for a variety of reasons, but it is always a conscious choice as to how they wish to present their work. I can also understand the desire to strip out author’s notes of the update apology variety, but where notes relate to the text itself, I find that becomes part of the author’s presentation. It would be akin to republishing (or re-presenting, if you like) a scholarly article without the footnotes.
Regarding your history lesson: In the first place, the arrogance displayed in that particular response has not endeared you to anyone. In the second place, if you are going to take it upon yourself to school others, it behooves you to be certain you have your facts straight. FF.net was hardly the beginning of large-scale internet fandom, nor did it create a sense of ownership of fic that had not hitherto been present among fandom. I would suggest you look into BBS (bulletin-board systems) and Usenet, and the history of fandom in those locales, before you adopt a position of authority on the development of distribution etiquette. Incidentally, I would not regard ff.net’s editing system as a commentary on expected behavior. The inability to edit fic easily once it has been posted for a while is a recent development and likely says more about their processing resources than the sociological norms of fandom.
Even in the days of ‘zines there was an expectation that authors would have a certain level of control over their work: a particular ‘zine might be photocopied for hand-to-hand distribution, but a story would not be published in an entirely different ‘zine without the author’s consent. The modern equivalents are downloading and emailing a file to a friend, and reposting a story on a new site. You have done the latter, and that is why people are bothered.
Republication permission was not solely a nod to the webmaster’s work in maintaining the site. It was, and continues to be, a gesture of respect to the author, and in many ways an acknowledgement that fandom as a whole operates in a gray legal area, as I’m sure you are aware given your discussions on the subject of authors against fanfiction. There are a number of reasons why authors might wish to limit the locations in which their work appears, or at the very least to be aware of where it currently appears, lest they be unpleasantly blindsided later.
It is, at heart, a matter of courtesy. The standard across most fandoms is to ask permission before reposting a story. As simple as that. Even in instances where an author has pulled their work from the web and requested that it not be shared, that remains the case. There may still be sharing of that work, particularly if the author was popular, but it is considered polite to keep that sharing private, either ‘hand-to-hand’ by way of email or behind closed doors in a locked community or behind a registration barrier on a forum.
As for that last paragraph — as Snacky said, no one has made any of those threats. I certainly agree that you have every right not to be ‘cowed’ by such things. I have very little use for authors who hold new chapters ‘hostage’ myself. But those aren’t at issue here. What is at issue is open communication, consideration for authors, and accepted practices of courtesy.
While I am flattered you enjoy my fiction, given your reaction to the requests of others I am no longer comfortable having my work hosted on your site. I ask that you please remove my stories from your collections.
Holy wall of text, Batman!
Let’s see if I can address some of the issues you have raised here.
1. Do you think none of us could possibly remember the days of fanzines? The history lesson is unnecessary. I was reading Robin of Sherwood fanzines in 1990. And Rthstewart’s been around even longer than I have. (Don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs: she already knows.)
But you mistake the lesson we draw from the days of hard-copy fanzines: writers submitted their stories to the fanzine editors, knowing they would be edited and compiled and distributed. The writers explicitly agreed to the arrangement. The editors and distributors of the fanzines had permission from the writers to edit and publish.
You are compiling and distributing a fanzine; but you do not have permission. Neither to edit (even for typos or grammar) nor to distribute.
(As an aside: if you think we are being uptight about distribution issues, you should see the old-school fanzine writers. Many of them are really incredibly anal about distribution issues–they don’t even want their old fanzines to be reprinted in identical editions without their prior approval, or stored in research libraries where people could see them.)
2. Your “history” is a bit off. Before the World Wide Web there was email but fanfiction wasn’t primarily distributed by email at first: it was distributed via Usenet (aka newsgroups or BBS). And it was done in straight text form (there was no PDF option then, because in the 1990s you needed to have the full version of Adobe Acrobat to make a PDF, and that cost hundreds of dollars). The stories were posted by the writers straight to the newsgroup, or sometimes through a mailing list that including the newsgroup.
Newsgroups and mailing lists often had associated archives, and authors knew it when they posted to the newsgroups–in fact, there was a protocol for letting the archivists know if the story was allowed to be posted to the archive. (“Gossamer: yes; all other archives, please ask” was a standard line on stories posted to alt.tv.x-files.creative for years.)
Again, the point I’m making here is that the authors knew about the archiving and gave implicit permission for the archiving by the posting. They knew in advance, and agreed to the archiving as part of their publishing process–or they disallowed it entirely, and it was their choice.
What you are doing is not like those early days of Usenet and mailing lists, because you do not have permission.
Certainly some people, upon receiving the stories, forwarded them on to friends. What they did not do was repost them publicly to the newsgroups or mailing lists, because they did not have permission to do so.
Pardon me if I am repeating myself. But let me make myself clear: Nobody sensible has ever argued that a reader has no right to forward a copy of a story to a friend, or print out a hard copy to save. But there is a difference between forwarding a copy of a story and reposting the story publicly.
3. But then fanfiction.net was launched. Authors could self-publish without getting a webmaster involved. And at some point, I don’t know how or why, some authors collapsed the idea that that also made them the “webmaster” of their own fic, and hence had Total And Absolute Control over their fics, FOREVER.
I… don’t even begin to understand this. I was posting to FFN in 2001, and even then I had the absolute right to edit or take down my stories from the site. Certainly anyone who had copied a story off the website and saved it on their hard drive would continue to have it on their hard drive, but my FFN account absolutely gives me authority over my stories. And FFN doesn’t allow anyone else to publish my stories, not even if the republisher attaches my name to them.
If I want to remove my stories from FFN and then republish an edited version, there is nothing stopping me from doing so. I do, in fact, own my stories there. And the fact that anyone can read them there or copy them to their hard drive or print them out and line their birdcages with them doesn’t negate that fact–they’re my stories and I can do whatever I like with the stories on FFN, including removing them from FFN.
I consider it an honor when someone prints out my stories. And I love the fact that the AO3 has an Epub/Mobi/PDF option so that anyone who likes my stories enough can download from that archive, to which I have voluntarily uploaded my stories, and put them on their Ebooks.
But the distinction there is that I set the content and the format of the stories I post to the AO3 (and, to a lesser extent, FFN): the download options are not there to allow the reader to change the stories and republish them elsewhere. They are for personal use.
This business with “edit” and “del” and whatever? Is basically irrelevant to the question of appropriate behavior in fandom.
4. Why do fanfic authors demand more rights than we are willing to give other authors?
Um, we don’t. In fact, we have much the same rights as other authors. Copyright law as it operates in the United States does not deny fanwriters all rights in their work. The work is derivative, and thus subordinate to the rights of the holder of the copyright (which means we can’t sell it for profit). But under that overarching right, fanwriters still have many protected rights in their work. And that includes the right to control publication, believe it or not.
Which brings me round to one of the reasons fanwriters like to control publication: future editing. What if, at some point in the future, I decide to rewrite the story of the Marsh-Wiggle Revolt and include more elaboration on the mysterious plot, and maybe give Susan more to do? Perhaps I discover a major logical flaw that I want to correct. The story currently resides on two archives (and two personal journals): making the changes and uploading the rewritten story would be a minor hassle, but it wouldn’t be too difficult. Because I have control over my FFN and AO3 & LJ/DW accounts, I could do that.
What I couldn’t do is edit the story on any other archive, unless I went cap-in-hand to the archivist and asked them to replace the story. Which would be a great burden in a situation where the story has been entirely reformatted and placed in a compiled PDF.
Or, let’s say some jackass associates my fannish identity with my real one and notifies my family or employers. I wouldn’t find it too hard to take down the stories on my personal website, FFN, or AO3–but I couldn’t take down any stories hosted here. Many fanwriters have run into this problem, and it’s particularly troublesome if the writer produces NC-17 fic, and/or wants to become a teacher or enter some other sensitive profession.
Having stories out of our control can be a real problem–writers who get uptight about it aren’t just being petty, they are dealing with both artistic concerns and real-world issues. Jobs have been lost and child-custody threatened as a result of fannish activity.
5. There are many juvenile or badly-behaved fanwriters out there who do things like demanding reviews before updating their stories, or pull their stories down and march off in a snit because they don’t get enough love. That’s too bad: that they pull these antics does not justify bad behavior in response.
I will not be cowed by threats of “I will only post the next chapter if people review and not flame!” I will not be cowed by threats of being “excluded” from the fandom because I told an author With Lots of Very Important Friends that I think the way they treat their readers is despicable.
I… what? Who are you talking to? Because none of the people engaged in this conversation with you have ever behaved that way.
You are using some bad experiences in (I presume) another fandom to determine your behavior here. And that’s too bad, because Narnia fandom is pretty friendly and mellow. But I guess you won’t know, since you’ve managed to alienate nearly everyone involved in this conversation.
6. Nothing anyone has asked you for is very onerous. What has been requested? That you ask permission of these writers before editing, archiving, or publishing their work. That’s ALL.
How hard is that, really? Why not be polite?
Again, you seem to be diverting the point (or at least missing it). What you are doing, is it legal, is it possible, do you have rights? Sure. Is it courteous and respectful to the writers and to the idea of fanfiction in general?
No.
Do the writers have the “right” to “demand” you only do what they want with their works? Perhaps not. Are they graciously asking that you honor a simple request? Yes.
So the question is, are you so determined to have things your own way that you can’t be bothered by thinking about the writers who painstakingly created these works you claim to enjoy and appreciate so much, or are you willing to bend your position a small amount as a way of showing them respect and courtesy, the same courtesy any human being ought to be shown?
I don’t believe anyone here is “threatening” you or asking you to be “cowed” or “passive.” Nor are they insisting on, as you put it, Absolute and Complete Control. They are making simple requests that you show them some respect in how you handle their creations. And I, personally, don’t think that is too much to ask. I am very sorry that you do.
I have been active in media fandom since the early eighties. This includes buying, selling, illustrating, editing, co-publishing, writing, and occasionally very, very late nights of collating and binding fanzines.
Editors who published contributors’ material and made changes without their writers’ or artists’ consent did not keep their contributors for long. Editing means working with the writers. Changing perceived flaws in a story without permission is not a right.
You seem to think that fiction zines were “handed out” for free. That was very rarely the case, because fanzines cost money to print and distribute. Sometimes quite a lot of money. Selling or handing around xeroxed copies of fanzines and stories without permission was and is called “bootlegging.” It is a form of theft that denies publishers and writers vital contact with their audiences.
If you wish to continue as you are, please do not try to use old-school publishing practices as justification for your actions. It is clear that you have no idea what you are talking about, and you are making yourself look foolish.
I must say I agree with the comments of Louise, Cofax, Snacky, Songsmith, and Rthstewart in reply to your actions and explanations thereof, and also am not inclined to agree with your arguments due to the possible conflicts with the professional lives of some authors who have not commented here.
However, I am curious- what are your editing credentials? Yes, we have all spotted typos and other minor errors in each others’ work and the urge to proofread might stir, but that is many steps away from the extensive copyediting and revision you appear to be engaging in. I have no desire to reveal my RL identity to you, but I am a professional editor with a very broad base of experience, from fiction to legal to scientific editing, and I would never presume to begin editing someone’s work without their express permission and an acknowledgment from them that my editing background suited their needs. (Also, a contract stating that they are paying me $20+/hr for my services also helps.) I can only conclude from your behavior that editing and publishing are worlds you are very unfamiliar with, and while your inexperience may not get you into legal or other trouble here, you may find it elsewhere. Just a tip from someone who has had her share of publishing headaches and wouldn’t wish them on anyone else.