30 Days - day 13

[graculus]

13 – Do you prefer canon or fanon when you write? Has writing fanfic for a fandom changed the way you see some or even all of the original source material?

What is this, I don't even... Who on earth is going to admit they prefer fanon to canon? Never going to happen around here.

I suppose you could say that writing slash has made me more aware of the subtextual stuff going on (eye contact, body language) rather than just the dialogue but I'm not sure if that's what the question is going for. I prefer to think of it as seeing stuff that was already there rather than influencing how I see the source material.

Comments

[leethet.livejournal.com]

Well ... even now that HP canon's closed, there's still holes. A closed canon just has, y'know, different kinds of holes. :-) (You're right about getting jossed, though - true enough for Snapefen ... and Sirius fen, etc.).

I think it's equally easy to create fanon in either a closed or open canon and my small batch of fandoms has done both and done them very well indeed, in some cases. I can see the temptation of using good* fanon rather than crap canon (after all, I've written quite a few "Snape's alive" stories even after he was dead, simply because killing him (a) was crap and (b) didn't interrupt my muse).

* Good in the wholly personal and subjective sense.

[graculus.livejournal.com]

I guess it depends on what you're considering fanon - I don't see re-writing things so Snape survives Nagini as fanon, how could it be? That's more likely to be personal to a bunch of authors who didn't like how things went in canon and decided to reject that reality and create their own.

To me fanon is more widely accepted than that, as after all (and I'm with you on the killing-Snape-was-a-crap-move view) the vast majority of the fandom will happily have carried on with Snape being dead as the author intended.

[leethet.livejournal.com]

I don't see re-writing things so Snape survives Nagini as fanon, how could it be?


OK, this is way interesting to me to me, because to me that is an example of fanon - a group of people (that is, a lot, more than just one person) decide that something counter-canon (or even simply not canon, if you see the distinction I mean) is how they want to write it, and it becomes fully accepted within fandom asa genre/trope. Surely live Snape is a fanon trope? I mean, there are a lot of Snape fen. Like when Sirius was killed, the Sirius fen brought him back so that live-Sirius was a fanon trope. You must define fanon differently and I'd be very interested in hearing what that definition is (other than "more widely accepted" - unless you mean all of fandom accepts it???). It's totally possible that my "definition" of fanon is out of step with other fen's definition. :-)

[graculus.livejournal.com]

I think you're using fanon and trope as interchangeable terms here - for example, as in my previous example, until we had canon on Snape's upbringing a lot of people wrote fanon versions of what they thought the canon was telling them (that he was a pureblood, etc). It's only when the canon was revealed that the fanon around Snape's lineage and upbringing stopped being written. What comes after the canon, or attempts to rewrite it after the fact, don't really fit for me into the same term.

For me, when I say fanon, I'm talking about stuff that is extrapolated by the fandom from what isn't explicitly there, so in SG-1 there's a lot of fanon around Daniel's upbringing because all we know for certain is that his parents died when he was quite young and he wasn't raised by his grandfather, who preferred to go off and explore/ended up in a psychiatric unit. Apart from that, everything else people write about his childhood etc. is fanon; maybe convincing, but fanon none the less.

[leethet.livejournal.com]

It's only when the canon was revealed that the fanon around Snape's lineage and upbringing stopped being written

I would say that it didn't stop being written *g* (though it was done less often).

For me, when I say fanon, I'm talking about stuff that is extrapolated by the fandom from what isn't explicitly there

I think I understand - would you not call canon-contradictory stuff fanon? That is, alive Snape is not fanon because it contradicts canon?


Or am I still not seeing the distinction? I keep reading what you've written and going "I think I see ... no, wait, this sounds like the same thing ..."

Mind you, I'm rather dim lately. I blame lack of sleep.

[graculus.livejournal.com]

For me, fanon tends to be the 'why' rather than the 'what'... for example, because we don't have canon in UNCLE about how IK and NS first met, there's a whole genre of stories telling us about that in a wide variety of scenarios, all of which have to explain how the relationship we see in canon came to be.

When it comes to canon-contradictory stuff then you're leaning heavily into the territory of AU of various kinds - if you're taking what's in canon and then running with it, rewriting and/or explaining away what you don't like then that's not really fanon because it doesn't need to explain/be consistent with what's in the canon.

In that case, why bother with Voldemort at all? Why not have him hit by the Knight Bus and squashed in Harry's first year and then save all the trouble and misunderstandings? ;)