AN ARMY OF MARY SUES: “If, as Glenn Reynolds put it, the Internet has unleashed an ‘Army of Davids,’ it is also unleashing an army of Mary Sues,” Robert Tracinski writes at Real Clear Future:

For those who don’t know, “Mary Sue” is a term that originally referred to a particularly bad kind of fan fiction. It originated with a 1974 parody of Star Trek fan fiction in which the heroine, Lieutenant Mary Sue, is a rather obvious stand-in for the author, who is seeking to live vicariously through her overly idealized alter ego. Since then, the term has come to be a stand-in for fan fiction as such.

It also indicates some of the mixed feelings fans of a franchise have toward its amateur fan fiction, and it gives you an idea why movie studios and publishers who own copyrights worth billions of dollars might not want to give fan fiction full rein.

Which leads us to the next step: surprise, surprise, a promise made by a Hollywood producer turns out not to be true. The Axanar lawsuit has not been dropped, and in late June Paramount ignored a set of guidelines proposed by makers of fan films and published its own set of guidelines that will put the medium in a pretty small box. To avoid a lawsuit from Paramount, a fan production must be no more than 15 minutes long; have a budget no bigger than $50,000; have no paid professional actors or crew and no one who has ever worked on an official Star Trek production; no merchandising, not even the little perks usually given out for crowdfunding efforts (and what is a crowdfunded project without a T-shirt?); and all costumes from the franchise must be official Paramount merchandise. This can only be viewed as an attempt to ensure that no fan films with decent production quality or and kind of ambitious scope can be produced.

Earlier: THE FAN TRAP: Axanar, The $1 Million Star Trek Fan Film CBS Wants to Stop (from Reason TV):