Canonical Imperfection Breeds Much Fic
Oct. 7th, 2020 08:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
armoredsuperheavyI’ve been thinking a bit lately about the relationship between corporate near-monopoly ownership of our shared stories/modern mythologies, how the for-profit model drives creative decisions in that realm, and how the shortcomings or missing elements in the resulting canon media drives fic writing and fandom participation.
Secondly, @Nymphomachy on Twitter put out a great tweet discussion about the Harry Potter series, its canonical shortcomings, and how that breeds a huge amount of fic. They also criticize the way in which not-for-profit fandom, bred by inadequacies of original text, end up creating a feedback loop that makes the creators of the original canon even richer. ( Part 1, Part 2 and a great reply thread by @arthur_affect ) Warning it’s got some vitriolic criticism of the HP canon and JKR.
Two things I read got me thinking:
First, @sbooksbowm on Tumblr is doing her dissertation on the place of fanfic in book history and the social mechanics of fandom, I'm doing a terrible job explaining. Here browse the dissertation masterpost! You can also read her in her own words about it It's fascinating! But this observation from the introduction jumped out at me:
First, @sbooksbowm on Tumblr is doing her dissertation on the place of fanfic in book history and the social mechanics of fandom, I'm doing a terrible job explaining. Here browse the dissertation masterpost! You can also read her in her own words about it It's fascinating! But this observation from the introduction jumped out at me:
Fic ‘rewrites and transforms other stories currently owned by others’. Coppa elaborates: ‘it is only in such a system—where storytelling has been industrialized to the point that our shared culture is owned by others—that a category like “fanfiction” makes sense’ [1]. That is to say, in a system where stories can be bought or sold, the transformative, for-pleasure work of fanfiction is defined in contradistinction to for-profit story production and distribution; in a system without purchase and ownership of stories, the work of fanfiction would be called ‘folklore’.[2]
[1] Francesca Coppa, The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), p.7.
[2] @sbooksbowm, Dissertation, Draft - Introduction Part 1 (2020)
[2] @sbooksbowm, Dissertation, Draft - Introduction Part 1 (2020)
Secondly, @Nymphomachy on Twitter put out a great tweet discussion about the Harry Potter series, its canonical shortcomings, and how that breeds a huge amount of fic. They also criticize the way in which not-for-profit fandom, bred by inadequacies of original text, end up creating a feedback loop that makes the creators of the original canon even richer. ( Part 1, Part 2 and a great reply thread by @arthur_affect ) Warning it’s got some vitriolic criticism of the HP canon and JKR.
To me this echoes the firestorm of criticism that’s been leveled at other huge television and film franchises. Most notably on my radar, the widespread panning of Avengers: Endgame and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. But other properties see this stuff too, such as the Supernatural series' later seasons.
The right environment to breed a lot of fic seems to be a canon with engaging qualities that draw you in, numerous characters with inconsistent or incomplete character development, handwavey worldbuilding, and niggling details of the plot (not to say holes) that fans want to see addressed. These kind of issues with big properties, along with the nature of IP laws today and how we as a culture have permitted certain entities to own our shared mythologies, is why I think fanfic has exploded over the last 20 years. Fanfic has an entire subclass called “fix-it” and this is clearly one of the fundamental drivers behind writing a lot of fic. Fic spackles in the cracks, makes the pearl around the grain of sand.
Fanfic exists as an underclass of storytelling, in counterpoint to canon, corporate, officially recognized storytelling. Fanfic has no gatekeeper and no editorial green light. Fanfic is telling all the leftover and left-out stories that aren’t globally marketable or palatable to a mass audience. Fanfic is full of heartbreak, trauma, sweet domesticity, profound emotional connections, and demons exorcised. Its value isn’t measured in dollars, and frankly I don’t think it can be. As with other forms of emotional labor, its value will never be calculated or fully appreciated if you are thinking in terms of money. The tales told in the democratized world of fic are by their nature niche and personal. If they weren’t, then they’d be the tales that we see on the big screen to begin with!
I think fanfic will continue to boom as long as our mass media continues to deliver huge, shiny, beautiful, incomplete and emotionally shallow adventure tales. On one level I'm so happy to see fanfiction boom the way it is now - hell, canon + fanon is our modern-day shared mythology! On another level I'd like to see storytelling democratized more fundamentally. But in our capitalist society, the only way we can have that self-deterministic, open-to-all-comers creation without editorial vetos etc, is in a liminal noncommercial or not-for-profit space. (Donate to OTW/AO3!)
A side note though. I do think mainstream publishing has started to take note to some degree. Notably, TOR has been picking up some books in what I consider to be the “original fic” side of the broader “fic” genre. (e.g. K.M. Szpara's Docile and Everina Maxwell's Winter's Orbit aka The Course of Honour by Avoliot) These books tell the type of tales and tropes we often seek in fanfic but aren’t composed on the framework of an existing canon. I’m excited by this development, and looking forward to see what’s next.
no subject
Date: 2020-10-16 01:24 am (UTC)WRT the Harry Potter series, I was always a half-assed fan, enjoyed several book and then dropped them at a certain point for no good reason but my attention span wandered. I'm currently enjoying reading some fics starring Draco being moody and suffering in various ways, and enjoying that. JKR is an ass, but that's kind of neither here nor there for me. Do we burn all our Weinstein Company DVDs? *shrug*
Sometimes bad people make good art. We'd all be blissfully ignorant of this, and probably coexisting a little more peacefully, if it weren't for the internet which ensures we all have virtually no privacy and our worst personality traits are out there for the world to see.
no subject
Date: 2020-10-17 05:11 pm (UTC)I will say, though, that sometimes that doesn't work... retroactively, for me? Just in terms of how certain knowledge affects my actual desires. In that, a lot of the time I'm inspired to pick up someone's fiction after reading their nonfiction-- I'll read an interview with an author, and like what they have to say about the writing process and their general attitude towards the world and being a person, and think, "hm, this is someone whose brain I would like to be invited into, which is what fiction is for-- I'll pick up their book!" And for me personally, reading JKR's "nonfiction," so to speak, has given me the opposite effect. It's not that she's "cancelled," but when I think of her, my instinctive reaction is "nah, don't really need to spend any more time in this person's mind than I already have." (The only real effect I can imagine that having, since I had no interest n the fandom anyway, is that... a lot of parents choose books to read to their kids on the basis of "what childrens' literature did I love and want to revisit," and while obviously my future kids will be allowed to read whatever they want, Harry Potter probably isn't something I'll choose to experience again with them, if it turns out to be something they're interested in.)
Which is just to do with my personal desires, but yeah, I think the way that I choose fiction does have something to do with the author themselves.
no subject
Date: 2020-10-19 12:57 pm (UTC)Also I think there's a huge difference between your entirely reasonable "eh not interested in going there anymore" and people who are tearfully setting their books on a bonfire, beating their breasts about how they're not allowed to love it anymore.