Fanlib's storyline gets hijacked

Every so often, as if acting out some formulaic movie plot, a bunch of big-city suits get lost in the wilderness of the internet, and bad things happen. The latest victims: Chris Williams, a former Yahoo exec, and his fancy partners, who include Les Moonves's brother, Jon, and a couple of divisions of Moonves' CBS network. Williams' Fanlib, a social network for fan fiction writers, isn't a bad idea, on the surface. One of the most popular activities on Usenet, an early online discussion medium, was the posting of modified storylines from popular shows such as Star Trek. Of course, the most popular genre of fan fiction is slash, in which the characters are typically made to mate in extraordinary homosexual or inter-species combinations. Which is why Fanlib, in a presentation unwisely posted to the web, promised marketers that forums would be "managed and moderated to the max"; which is also why the fan fiction community, which enjoys inter-species sex, has rejected this attempt to commercialize its passion; and which is why Fanlib is likely to end in disaster. Case in point: a mockery, by one of Fanlib's many critics, of the characters in its ad campaign, who are made to engage in "manly buttsex". That, when adventure-seeking execs get their come-uppance from the locals, is how the plot often ends.

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