Canon, Fanon and Why I love Both
Various people have been posting about and discussing canon and fanon over the past month or two, and each time the discussion has come around I've missed it! Argggh. I've been drowning in my RL recently. But I've finally managed to compile some of my thoughts on the issue here.
Fanfiction as a Game (This will get us to fanon and canon, I promise…)
One interesting way of looking at fanfiction, I think, is as a game. (Or perhaps a set of related games played with the same materials, just as one can play bridge, gin rummy, or war with the same deck of 52 cards.)
The game of fanfiction can be played alone, like solitaire, with just an author and their canon of choice, where all stories are written in secret and never shared. Or it can be played more typically, where an author uses a beta reader or two, revises, posts to a community of readers and receives feedback. It can even be played as a large group and with additional formal rules, like the Severus Snape Fuh-Q-Fest, or the challenges on hp100 or pornish_pixies. And of course, it can be played in all kinds of ways in between.
What is the object of the game of fanfiction? One possible answer is "to write stories using characters, a setting, or both, which have been borrowed from a pre-existing source." I think that comes pretty close.
What are the rules of the game of fanfiction? To qualify as fanfiction, a story must borrow at least some of its characters or details from one or more canons. It does not have to borrow them well or accurately, it just has to borrow them recognizably enough that you can tell where they came from. So that fic where "Hermoine" the supermodel has wings and purple hair and attends "Hogwrats" is still an example of Harry Potter fanfiction, as long as most readers can make out what fandom it belongs to. Even if they can decipher nothing else about the story. *g*
As to borrowing from canon accurately and well, or writing the stories themselves accurately and well… those distinctions, IMO, are part of *how* the game is played. Even the sorriest, most badly spelt Mary Sue on ff.net is still fanfiction, and its nine year old author is still playing the same basic game the rest of us are. There are, however, many many groups of players, and many subgames, and many different sets of rules.
Canon is essential for all of it, or else you are not writing fanfiction. But the degree of departure allowed from canon varies enormously, depending on who is writing and what they want to achieve. So you have authors following rulesets all the way from "Not one thing stated in the text may be altered under pain of death" to "Hey, I wanna write two hotties having sex, I didn’t read the HP books but I read some Harry and Draco stories on LJ, good enough, let's go!"
All of it is still fanfiction. *grin* But it is no wonder much quibbling occurs about what the rules are and who's playing the game "correctly".
Fanon Defined
The definition of fanon I'm going to use is my own, pulled it from the way I've seen the word most commonly used over my 10 years in fandom. Here's my shot at it:
"Ideas related to a canon universe, such as details of character background or behavior, which are not part of the canon universe, but which multiple authors incorporate into their fanfiction."
Fanon most often comes from widely read fics, but it doesn't have to. It can come from discussions on mailing lists or LJ, etc. I've seen quite a bit of fanon get started that way. (Being in very small fandoms helps with this; you get a chance to see where lots of fanon concepts have their exact origins, since you can monitor most of the discussion and fic in the entire fandom.) Sometimes fanon originates as both, where someone will ask "why did so-and-so do that, anyway?" Someone else responds by writing a fic that explains why, and then others who like the explanation proceed to use it in their own stories.
Fanon can also come from challenges and other writing games. What may seem like a strange run of "wild sex in the Quidditch changing room" tales might be traceable to a challenge to write exactly that, answered by many people, whose stories then inspired imitators.
Fanon Can Be Useful and Fun!
I like fanon. This is not to say that I love each and every fanon concept there is. In fact, many, maybe even the majority of them make me twitch and start gibbering things like "Snape…Would…Never…DO…That!"
But I like fanon as a whole. I love the idea of a group consensus on how to fill a nasty canon gap or blatant contradiction. I like the quiet jokes that some fanon concepts are. And most of all I love the insight fanon gives on what people like to read and write. Although authors may borrow details from other fics for many reasons, both political and personal, I believe that primarily they do it because the ideas are ideas they like. So fanon is a window into what alterations and additions to canon largish groups of fans tend to invent, select, and adopt as their own. One of my biggest interests re slash (as well as fanfic in general) is where people derive their reading pleasure, and fanon gives me a nice way to get at that issue.
Here are two examples of HP fanon which I quite like, and which I think help to demonstrate that fanon is more than "Snape's collection of scented bath soap."
Sirius' full name is Sirius Orion Black. I've seen this bit of fanon indulged in by all kinds of authors, from ff.net to my flist. *g* Like a meme, this fanon idea has propagated from one side of the fandom to the other. It's successful fanon for a few reasons. It's a simple, obvious bit of silliness. The initials spell S.O.B., and Sirius certainly is one at times, so it's appropriate and easy to remember. Also the name "Orion" fits well with canon. JKR establishes that the family has star-related names, but never names Sirius's father, so the addition disturbs nothing canonical and makes sense with already known information. It's a gentle joke at Rowling's expense: she left the space for that detail open, and her fans found a sly, consistent way to fill the gap. That kind of fanon is just fun.
A wizard can Apparate someone else under limited conditions. This fanon concept also appears in all kinds of stories by all kinds of authors, even authors well-known for their careful canon research and adherence to book detail.
It's clearly stated by JKR in the first book that a wizard can only Apparate himself (though objects he's carrying and his clothing do go with him, at least if he's done it right). This is why Harry and the Weaselys use Floo powder to travel to Diagon Alley to shop for school supplies, because though the older Weasleys can Apparate, the underage wizards can’t. It's also established that Apparation requires concentration and paying attention, or you can splinch yourself even if you do know what you’re doing.
However, this leaves a bit of a puzzle in JKR's universe. How *do* you move people around quickly in the wizarding world, who are too young or too injured to Apparate themselves? Floo powder's nice if you have some, if where you are has a fireplace, and so does where you're going. Not always true, particularly in an emergency. Portkeys work fine too, as they can move a whole group, but they're extremely rare, and you'd have to have one with you at all times. Travel by broom is slow compared to the instant methods, but underage wizards can at least fly. This is a bad solution for moving injured people though. How are they supposed to stay on a broom? I've seen some strange contraptions in fanfic, including stretcher-type sidecar devices trailing behind the back of a broom, based perhaps on Snape's instant stretchers in POA. But in canon, there's just no good solution. Instant stretchers are nice, but stretchers, magical or no, still appear to have to be moved the hard way, by someone pushing them.
Even JKR herself needs to move injured people over a distance: when McGonagall is hit by four Stunning spells in OOtP, she is transferred from Hogwarts to the hospital for Magical Maladies. But how is she moved? It's never explained. Hmmm!
So quite a few fanfic writers have "fixed" that bit of inconvenient canon and declared that it's possible for someone to Apparate another person at need, even authors who otherwise play the canon game with great scrupulousness. (Two examples I can think of are marinarusalka's "Harry Potter and the Polka-Dot Plague", one of the most canon-authentic stories ever, and fabularasa's "Stone Cold Sober", which does a great deal of expanding beyond canon, but doesn't set any canon aside lightly.) In this case, fanon is employed as a sort of group act of civil disobedience, where a problem in the canon is patched up by fan authors en masse, usually in a way that disturbs the rest of the canon as little as possible.
Fanon Can Make You Want to Jump Off a Tall Building
Fanon has a tendency to travel, meme-like, though fan communities. That in itself can make it bothersome, as perhaps the first fifteen fics that make Sirius a chain smoker with his pack rolled up in his sleeve a la James Dean may be interesting, but the next hundred begin to drive you mad. It can get very boring to encounter the same tropes over and over again, even if you liked or were amused by them at first. (Even canonical character tics can get annoying this way!)
One of the biggest complaints about fanon is that "uncanonical" characterizations, like Snape with his lavender scented bath collection, or Blair's often-mistaken-for-canon vegetarianism, can spread virus-like from story to story, until they are everywhere. I've thought a little bit about the kinds of characterizations where this happens, and I think maybe the easy spread of these ideas reveals something about what some people like to read, as well as about how some people write.
One category of "pernicious" fanon is the completion of a character's nearest stereotype. That is, in canon, a character may start out hovering pretty close to a given stereotype. Blair in Sentinel is a really good example. He's portrayed canonically as very close to a Standard Issue '90's Alterna-Hippie: he studies shamanism, he's got long hair, his mom's a hippie, he dresses grunge, etc. Pernicious fanon surrounding Blair often consists of his character being filled in by the remaining traits from this stereotype. So you get a Blair who's vegetarian (not true), anti-gun (not true), a health food freak (not true) and all that sort of thing, which causes many TS fans (including me) to spit nails in fury.
Why do people do this? Partly, I think, it's just lazy writing. Not always willfully lazy; it's quite possible that a writer just thinks, "Hmm, it seems *right* for Blair to be a vegetarian," without realizing from where in the zeitgeist she's plucked that idea. Following a stereotype is a very easy way to fill in a character's additional traits and background. And as in all things, it's no surprise that in fanfiction, some people take the easiest route.
Why else do people do it? People often *like* the stereotype they're using. If a 90's Alterna-Hippie is your ideal boyfriend, such a version of Blair may seem very yummy to you, and you might want to write him that way regardless of the snags in canon that contradict you. To you, he may not seem at all far from that image, so it does not feel like stretching canon too badly. And the image, if you love it enough, may well not seem like a stereotype (despite the fact that writing your ideal anything is fraught with some of the same traps that surround writing the dreaded Mary Sue.)
So, yup, some really poor stories have been written with alterna-hippie-vegetarian-peace-activist Blair, probably by starry-eyed alterna-hippie-vegetarian-peace-activist authors. But whether this kind of thing works can often be determined by an author's skill - or simply by whether that author's writing the stereotype base for Blair (or whoever) that you prefer. I've seen quite a few Harried-Graduate-Student Blairs that I know were written by harried graduate student authors. And I loved 'em. But, um, I was a harried grad student as well. So "pernicious" may be in the eye of the beholder.
Wimpy!Blair, Wimpy!Faramir and So Forth
The pernicious fanon variant where a character is wimpified (I personally hate using the word feminized for this phenomenon, for a number of reasons) deserves its own essay. Suffice it to say, for now, that 1) at least some people really like to read and write such versions of the characters, and 2) that the wimpification of the characters is so similar across fandoms that it can transcend the character's original canon entirely. Wimpy!Blair often has more in common with Wimpy!Faramir than either has with the canonical version of themselves. So Wimpy!Whoever has its own draw for readers and writers. I'm also of the opinion that wimpified characters may sometimes be a clumsy way of trying to get at concepts and situations that, handled with more skill, are also driving some of the most well-loved and acclaimed stories in fandom. More on this in another essay, which I started doing in response to encountering the Wimpy!Faramir *shakes head in despair* phenomenon.
My Sirius Can Beat Up Your Sirius
Blake's 7 fandom, or at least the segment of it that I inhabited, has the custom of referring to people's personal versions of the canon characters. So you might say, for example, "My Avon would do that without a moment's hesitation, because of how he still feels about Anna, and also because of my own bit of backstory for him. But (other fanwriter)'s Avon never would." In this way, the lists I was on were able to discuss some of the nitty-gritty details of characterization and canon interpretation (which are sometimes no-go zones in discussions among groups of fic authors) without anyone killing each other. Which was both refreshing and a lot of fun.
HP fandom has sometimes used this approach, most noticeably for me when people were doing the "ask my characters a question" meme. They'd refer to "Snape from Story X" or "Harry from Story Y".
It would be neat, I think, to see this custom used more. Discussions where you can actually compare your Sirius with someone else's, or even one of your own Sirii with another of your Sirii, are rare, but they're very interesting. You discover groups of Avons or Sirii that share certain traits this way, another sort of fanon that isn’t at all a bad thing, and which I personally find quite fascinating. And you can find out why authors choose the interpretations they do, which is really illuminating, particularly for interpretations you *don’t* share.
Fanfiction as a Game (This will get us to fanon and canon, I promise…)
One interesting way of looking at fanfiction, I think, is as a game. (Or perhaps a set of related games played with the same materials, just as one can play bridge, gin rummy, or war with the same deck of 52 cards.)
The game of fanfiction can be played alone, like solitaire, with just an author and their canon of choice, where all stories are written in secret and never shared. Or it can be played more typically, where an author uses a beta reader or two, revises, posts to a community of readers and receives feedback. It can even be played as a large group and with additional formal rules, like the Severus Snape Fuh-Q-Fest, or the challenges on hp100 or pornish_pixies. And of course, it can be played in all kinds of ways in between.
What is the object of the game of fanfiction? One possible answer is "to write stories using characters, a setting, or both, which have been borrowed from a pre-existing source." I think that comes pretty close.
What are the rules of the game of fanfiction? To qualify as fanfiction, a story must borrow at least some of its characters or details from one or more canons. It does not have to borrow them well or accurately, it just has to borrow them recognizably enough that you can tell where they came from. So that fic where "Hermoine" the supermodel has wings and purple hair and attends "Hogwrats" is still an example of Harry Potter fanfiction, as long as most readers can make out what fandom it belongs to. Even if they can decipher nothing else about the story. *g*
As to borrowing from canon accurately and well, or writing the stories themselves accurately and well… those distinctions, IMO, are part of *how* the game is played. Even the sorriest, most badly spelt Mary Sue on ff.net is still fanfiction, and its nine year old author is still playing the same basic game the rest of us are. There are, however, many many groups of players, and many subgames, and many different sets of rules.
Canon is essential for all of it, or else you are not writing fanfiction. But the degree of departure allowed from canon varies enormously, depending on who is writing and what they want to achieve. So you have authors following rulesets all the way from "Not one thing stated in the text may be altered under pain of death" to "Hey, I wanna write two hotties having sex, I didn’t read the HP books but I read some Harry and Draco stories on LJ, good enough, let's go!"
All of it is still fanfiction. *grin* But it is no wonder much quibbling occurs about what the rules are and who's playing the game "correctly".
Fanon Defined
The definition of fanon I'm going to use is my own, pulled it from the way I've seen the word most commonly used over my 10 years in fandom. Here's my shot at it:
"Ideas related to a canon universe, such as details of character background or behavior, which are not part of the canon universe, but which multiple authors incorporate into their fanfiction."
Fanon most often comes from widely read fics, but it doesn't have to. It can come from discussions on mailing lists or LJ, etc. I've seen quite a bit of fanon get started that way. (Being in very small fandoms helps with this; you get a chance to see where lots of fanon concepts have their exact origins, since you can monitor most of the discussion and fic in the entire fandom.) Sometimes fanon originates as both, where someone will ask "why did so-and-so do that, anyway?" Someone else responds by writing a fic that explains why, and then others who like the explanation proceed to use it in their own stories.
Fanon can also come from challenges and other writing games. What may seem like a strange run of "wild sex in the Quidditch changing room" tales might be traceable to a challenge to write exactly that, answered by many people, whose stories then inspired imitators.
Fanon Can Be Useful and Fun!
I like fanon. This is not to say that I love each and every fanon concept there is. In fact, many, maybe even the majority of them make me twitch and start gibbering things like "Snape…Would…Never…DO…That!"
But I like fanon as a whole. I love the idea of a group consensus on how to fill a nasty canon gap or blatant contradiction. I like the quiet jokes that some fanon concepts are. And most of all I love the insight fanon gives on what people like to read and write. Although authors may borrow details from other fics for many reasons, both political and personal, I believe that primarily they do it because the ideas are ideas they like. So fanon is a window into what alterations and additions to canon largish groups of fans tend to invent, select, and adopt as their own. One of my biggest interests re slash (as well as fanfic in general) is where people derive their reading pleasure, and fanon gives me a nice way to get at that issue.
Here are two examples of HP fanon which I quite like, and which I think help to demonstrate that fanon is more than "Snape's collection of scented bath soap."
Sirius' full name is Sirius Orion Black. I've seen this bit of fanon indulged in by all kinds of authors, from ff.net to my flist. *g* Like a meme, this fanon idea has propagated from one side of the fandom to the other. It's successful fanon for a few reasons. It's a simple, obvious bit of silliness. The initials spell S.O.B., and Sirius certainly is one at times, so it's appropriate and easy to remember. Also the name "Orion" fits well with canon. JKR establishes that the family has star-related names, but never names Sirius's father, so the addition disturbs nothing canonical and makes sense with already known information. It's a gentle joke at Rowling's expense: she left the space for that detail open, and her fans found a sly, consistent way to fill the gap. That kind of fanon is just fun.
A wizard can Apparate someone else under limited conditions. This fanon concept also appears in all kinds of stories by all kinds of authors, even authors well-known for their careful canon research and adherence to book detail.
It's clearly stated by JKR in the first book that a wizard can only Apparate himself (though objects he's carrying and his clothing do go with him, at least if he's done it right). This is why Harry and the Weaselys use Floo powder to travel to Diagon Alley to shop for school supplies, because though the older Weasleys can Apparate, the underage wizards can’t. It's also established that Apparation requires concentration and paying attention, or you can splinch yourself even if you do know what you’re doing.
However, this leaves a bit of a puzzle in JKR's universe. How *do* you move people around quickly in the wizarding world, who are too young or too injured to Apparate themselves? Floo powder's nice if you have some, if where you are has a fireplace, and so does where you're going. Not always true, particularly in an emergency. Portkeys work fine too, as they can move a whole group, but they're extremely rare, and you'd have to have one with you at all times. Travel by broom is slow compared to the instant methods, but underage wizards can at least fly. This is a bad solution for moving injured people though. How are they supposed to stay on a broom? I've seen some strange contraptions in fanfic, including stretcher-type sidecar devices trailing behind the back of a broom, based perhaps on Snape's instant stretchers in POA. But in canon, there's just no good solution. Instant stretchers are nice, but stretchers, magical or no, still appear to have to be moved the hard way, by someone pushing them.
Even JKR herself needs to move injured people over a distance: when McGonagall is hit by four Stunning spells in OOtP, she is transferred from Hogwarts to the hospital for Magical Maladies. But how is she moved? It's never explained. Hmmm!
So quite a few fanfic writers have "fixed" that bit of inconvenient canon and declared that it's possible for someone to Apparate another person at need, even authors who otherwise play the canon game with great scrupulousness. (Two examples I can think of are marinarusalka's "Harry Potter and the Polka-Dot Plague", one of the most canon-authentic stories ever, and fabularasa's "Stone Cold Sober", which does a great deal of expanding beyond canon, but doesn't set any canon aside lightly.) In this case, fanon is employed as a sort of group act of civil disobedience, where a problem in the canon is patched up by fan authors en masse, usually in a way that disturbs the rest of the canon as little as possible.
Fanon Can Make You Want to Jump Off a Tall Building
Fanon has a tendency to travel, meme-like, though fan communities. That in itself can make it bothersome, as perhaps the first fifteen fics that make Sirius a chain smoker with his pack rolled up in his sleeve a la James Dean may be interesting, but the next hundred begin to drive you mad. It can get very boring to encounter the same tropes over and over again, even if you liked or were amused by them at first. (Even canonical character tics can get annoying this way!)
One of the biggest complaints about fanon is that "uncanonical" characterizations, like Snape with his lavender scented bath collection, or Blair's often-mistaken-for-canon vegetarianism, can spread virus-like from story to story, until they are everywhere. I've thought a little bit about the kinds of characterizations where this happens, and I think maybe the easy spread of these ideas reveals something about what some people like to read, as well as about how some people write.
One category of "pernicious" fanon is the completion of a character's nearest stereotype. That is, in canon, a character may start out hovering pretty close to a given stereotype. Blair in Sentinel is a really good example. He's portrayed canonically as very close to a Standard Issue '90's Alterna-Hippie: he studies shamanism, he's got long hair, his mom's a hippie, he dresses grunge, etc. Pernicious fanon surrounding Blair often consists of his character being filled in by the remaining traits from this stereotype. So you get a Blair who's vegetarian (not true), anti-gun (not true), a health food freak (not true) and all that sort of thing, which causes many TS fans (including me) to spit nails in fury.
Why do people do this? Partly, I think, it's just lazy writing. Not always willfully lazy; it's quite possible that a writer just thinks, "Hmm, it seems *right* for Blair to be a vegetarian," without realizing from where in the zeitgeist she's plucked that idea. Following a stereotype is a very easy way to fill in a character's additional traits and background. And as in all things, it's no surprise that in fanfiction, some people take the easiest route.
Why else do people do it? People often *like* the stereotype they're using. If a 90's Alterna-Hippie is your ideal boyfriend, such a version of Blair may seem very yummy to you, and you might want to write him that way regardless of the snags in canon that contradict you. To you, he may not seem at all far from that image, so it does not feel like stretching canon too badly. And the image, if you love it enough, may well not seem like a stereotype (despite the fact that writing your ideal anything is fraught with some of the same traps that surround writing the dreaded Mary Sue.)
So, yup, some really poor stories have been written with alterna-hippie-vegetarian-peace-activist Blair, probably by starry-eyed alterna-hippie-vegetarian-peace-activist authors. But whether this kind of thing works can often be determined by an author's skill - or simply by whether that author's writing the stereotype base for Blair (or whoever) that you prefer. I've seen quite a few Harried-Graduate-Student Blairs that I know were written by harried graduate student authors. And I loved 'em. But, um, I was a harried grad student as well. So "pernicious" may be in the eye of the beholder.
Wimpy!Blair, Wimpy!Faramir and So Forth
The pernicious fanon variant where a character is wimpified (I personally hate using the word feminized for this phenomenon, for a number of reasons) deserves its own essay. Suffice it to say, for now, that 1) at least some people really like to read and write such versions of the characters, and 2) that the wimpification of the characters is so similar across fandoms that it can transcend the character's original canon entirely. Wimpy!Blair often has more in common with Wimpy!Faramir than either has with the canonical version of themselves. So Wimpy!Whoever has its own draw for readers and writers. I'm also of the opinion that wimpified characters may sometimes be a clumsy way of trying to get at concepts and situations that, handled with more skill, are also driving some of the most well-loved and acclaimed stories in fandom. More on this in another essay, which I started doing in response to encountering the Wimpy!Faramir *shakes head in despair* phenomenon.
My Sirius Can Beat Up Your Sirius
Blake's 7 fandom, or at least the segment of it that I inhabited, has the custom of referring to people's personal versions of the canon characters. So you might say, for example, "My Avon would do that without a moment's hesitation, because of how he still feels about Anna, and also because of my own bit of backstory for him. But (other fanwriter)'s Avon never would." In this way, the lists I was on were able to discuss some of the nitty-gritty details of characterization and canon interpretation (which are sometimes no-go zones in discussions among groups of fic authors) without anyone killing each other. Which was both refreshing and a lot of fun.
HP fandom has sometimes used this approach, most noticeably for me when people were doing the "ask my characters a question" meme. They'd refer to "Snape from Story X" or "Harry from Story Y".
It would be neat, I think, to see this custom used more. Discussions where you can actually compare your Sirius with someone else's, or even one of your own Sirii with another of your Sirii, are rare, but they're very interesting. You discover groups of Avons or Sirii that share certain traits this way, another sort of fanon that isn’t at all a bad thing, and which I personally find quite fascinating. And you can find out why authors choose the interpretations they do, which is really illuminating, particularly for interpretations you *don’t* share.