~~ the myth of the anti-fanfic
Aug. 5th, 2005 05:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
reenkaI was just thinking earlier that oddly enough, after my initial indignant 'wtf??!' reaction to the idea that many people felt new canon (both HBP & OoTP) was 'just like another fanfic', I find myself fascinated with the idea. Often enough people seem disappointed that it's not somehow qualitatively different enough from fanfic-- that it's not... inherently superior? That it doesn't, as a piece of writing taken on its own merits, re-establish the hierarchy of canon on top, fanon on the bottom. Suddenly, after years of swimming in the fanon sea, canon is just another fish, albeit a much larger, more puffed-out fish.
Actually, I can empathize with the feeling pretty well-- it's just that I found myself thinking, with both books 5 & 6, that this is much better that any fanfic I'd read at, er, predicting canon, I guess? I don't know if that makes sense, but whenever I read extrapolative in-Hogwarts fics, something is -always- off. Always. With the actual books, even if something happens that I didn't expect, they're so inherently linear and rational that I could always see the progression, the why, so in the end I can accept it.
In nearly all fanfic, either some character isn't given enough attention, or some other character seems to be drawn too sympathetically (that is, one thing I really love about Rowling is how unsympathetic even her heroes are a lot of times, though I realize most people hate this), or we have plot devices (that is, ways to kill Voldy or what have you) that come out of nowhere and don't seem really all that connected to the rest of the books. I can't think of one, not even one in-Hogwarts H/D fic where I felt the Riddle and Snape storylines was dealt with satisfactorily, without something being brushed off or left well enough alone entirely.
Then again, I'm very very very picky with fanon, perhaps moreso than with canon because fanon has definite guidelines (that is, canon is its constant shadow) whereas I do believe canon has much more... uh, ability to redefine itself by introducing new information, sometimes out of left field (which always feels even more anvilicious in fanon, though it's still groan-worthy in canon). As a reader, I'm much more willing to swallow things whole in canon because... well, the closest analogy I can come up with is that it's like a floppy disk that has both write and read access enabled, whereas with fanon you have read access but to write you'd need to use another disk.
I do think that differences in this 'willingness to swallow' are behind people's response to canon as if it was a fanfic. I mean, I can even see how a fanfic could be seen as having more leeway, because canon -should- be more 'responsible' whereas a fanfic has no responsibility and can be 'just for fun'.
So yeah, the thing I kept feeling very strongly (especially with OoTP) was that here, finally, was someone who played with nearly every ball in the air-- Rowling herself. So perhaps I read the books in comparison with fandom too, since one can't help it, it's just that I don't have such a high opinion of what fandom produces (not in terms of quality but in terms of believability), so JKR's stuff was a breath of fresh air. Not that the books aren't full of their own inconsistencies and errors and implausible turns and sloppiness at times, but that this was still miles better than fanon, which often doesn't even try to patch up all the holes, only the interesting ones to the author, so to speak. I dunno.
This is really odd and contradictory and hard to make sense of entirely-- a fandom's quirky, often nearly confrontational relationship with the canon that spawned it. The sense of ownership we secretly start to have a lot of times, the exponentially growing expectation to be surprised even after a million monkeys write a million possible directions for canon to go, and the disappointment if we're surprised in any way we weren't expecting (that is, but some things we wanted canon to leave well enough alone, didn't we-- just like good old fanon would).
I think, basically, I was satisfied with canon largely because what I was looking for was the anti-fanfic like everyone else, yes, but in a very particular way.
Perhaps most importantly, I don't really see fanfic as being "that thing that is shippy" (like some people do) or canon as being "that thing that isn't", so this probably helped me along. Because no matter what, I think canon is shippy in a different way than any fanfic I've ever seen-- no matter how emotionally explicit it gets, it's not really an emotionally-driven narrative, so it doesn't feel shippy. Perhaps this is what freaked people out (because they know what they like, and they like their shippiness emotionally explicit), whereas for me it was great because it was different.
Harry doesn't actually think that much about his own emotional states, much less those of others, and I like him that way. Nearly no one else writes him like this but JK Rowling. I guess it's too tempting to be like, 'well, let's give Harry an inner Hermione so that he might get a clue and we might like him more'. I tend to think of that as cheating, on some level. I like my teenagers clueless and semi-assholish and dorky and realistically dense-- thanks, JKR. I really... really hate sugar-coating things, and this pet peeve has just grown worse with 3 years of fandom and fic after fic with misunderstood, intellectual, debonair Draco and me wishing him to die a messy, ugly death. (To be fair, it's not just Draco-- I kind of hate debonair people unless they're pure pulp testosterone icons like James Bond or like, secretly assholes like Sirius.)
Anyway, what was my point?
I'm just rambling, wondering if, aside from my own reasons for attraction to HP canon over fanfic lately (ie, bitterness), there -is- such a thing as 'the anti-fanfic'. Of course there will be elements that seem too familiar (deja-vu, anyone?) and elements that come uncomfortably close to some bad fic (because there are, of course, enough fics written that it's pretty inevitable) and elements that are purely 'wtf??!' because they don't mesh well with our expectations or desires or prior understandings or... whatever. But this desire to have canon be perfectly, 100% plausible and "real" also makes me laugh, because this is HP, of all things, and plausibility and fully realistic progression was never high on its list of goals or actual attributes, I don't believe. So it's like, why the surprise?
I do like the idea of canon being made non-hierarchal, non-dominant, by some repeated re-evaluation in the fans' minds. The ultimate in reader-as-consumer-driven culture, in a way, is to say that whatever doesn't satisfy you or work for you isn't really good enough.
And I'm thinking of the many books that ultimately didn't 'work' for me on the instinctive 'this should never have happened' level (like say, Alcott's 'Little Women'), and how I never doubted it -did- happen and I just had to suck it up. The fannish reader is a different, evolved sort of beast, I think. Or perhaps not evolved; maybe the metaphor of having bitten on the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge would work better.
Actually, I can empathize with the feeling pretty well-- it's just that I found myself thinking, with both books 5 & 6, that this is much better that any fanfic I'd read at, er, predicting canon, I guess? I don't know if that makes sense, but whenever I read extrapolative in-Hogwarts fics, something is -always- off. Always. With the actual books, even if something happens that I didn't expect, they're so inherently linear and rational that I could always see the progression, the why, so in the end I can accept it.
In nearly all fanfic, either some character isn't given enough attention, or some other character seems to be drawn too sympathetically (that is, one thing I really love about Rowling is how unsympathetic even her heroes are a lot of times, though I realize most people hate this), or we have plot devices (that is, ways to kill Voldy or what have you) that come out of nowhere and don't seem really all that connected to the rest of the books. I can't think of one, not even one in-Hogwarts H/D fic where I felt the Riddle and Snape storylines was dealt with satisfactorily, without something being brushed off or left well enough alone entirely.
Then again, I'm very very very picky with fanon, perhaps moreso than with canon because fanon has definite guidelines (that is, canon is its constant shadow) whereas I do believe canon has much more... uh, ability to redefine itself by introducing new information, sometimes out of left field (which always feels even more anvilicious in fanon, though it's still groan-worthy in canon). As a reader, I'm much more willing to swallow things whole in canon because... well, the closest analogy I can come up with is that it's like a floppy disk that has both write and read access enabled, whereas with fanon you have read access but to write you'd need to use another disk.
I do think that differences in this 'willingness to swallow' are behind people's response to canon as if it was a fanfic. I mean, I can even see how a fanfic could be seen as having more leeway, because canon -should- be more 'responsible' whereas a fanfic has no responsibility and can be 'just for fun'.
So yeah, the thing I kept feeling very strongly (especially with OoTP) was that here, finally, was someone who played with nearly every ball in the air-- Rowling herself. So perhaps I read the books in comparison with fandom too, since one can't help it, it's just that I don't have such a high opinion of what fandom produces (not in terms of quality but in terms of believability), so JKR's stuff was a breath of fresh air. Not that the books aren't full of their own inconsistencies and errors and implausible turns and sloppiness at times, but that this was still miles better than fanon, which often doesn't even try to patch up all the holes, only the interesting ones to the author, so to speak. I dunno.
This is really odd and contradictory and hard to make sense of entirely-- a fandom's quirky, often nearly confrontational relationship with the canon that spawned it. The sense of ownership we secretly start to have a lot of times, the exponentially growing expectation to be surprised even after a million monkeys write a million possible directions for canon to go, and the disappointment if we're surprised in any way we weren't expecting (that is, but some things we wanted canon to leave well enough alone, didn't we-- just like good old fanon would).
I think, basically, I was satisfied with canon largely because what I was looking for was the anti-fanfic like everyone else, yes, but in a very particular way.
Perhaps most importantly, I don't really see fanfic as being "that thing that is shippy" (like some people do) or canon as being "that thing that isn't", so this probably helped me along. Because no matter what, I think canon is shippy in a different way than any fanfic I've ever seen-- no matter how emotionally explicit it gets, it's not really an emotionally-driven narrative, so it doesn't feel shippy. Perhaps this is what freaked people out (because they know what they like, and they like their shippiness emotionally explicit), whereas for me it was great because it was different.
Harry doesn't actually think that much about his own emotional states, much less those of others, and I like him that way. Nearly no one else writes him like this but JK Rowling. I guess it's too tempting to be like, 'well, let's give Harry an inner Hermione so that he might get a clue and we might like him more'. I tend to think of that as cheating, on some level. I like my teenagers clueless and semi-assholish and dorky and realistically dense-- thanks, JKR. I really... really hate sugar-coating things, and this pet peeve has just grown worse with 3 years of fandom and fic after fic with misunderstood, intellectual, debonair Draco and me wishing him to die a messy, ugly death. (To be fair, it's not just Draco-- I kind of hate debonair people unless they're pure pulp testosterone icons like James Bond or like, secretly assholes like Sirius.)
Anyway, what was my point?
I'm just rambling, wondering if, aside from my own reasons for attraction to HP canon over fanfic lately (ie, bitterness), there -is- such a thing as 'the anti-fanfic'. Of course there will be elements that seem too familiar (deja-vu, anyone?) and elements that come uncomfortably close to some bad fic (because there are, of course, enough fics written that it's pretty inevitable) and elements that are purely 'wtf??!' because they don't mesh well with our expectations or desires or prior understandings or... whatever. But this desire to have canon be perfectly, 100% plausible and "real" also makes me laugh, because this is HP, of all things, and plausibility and fully realistic progression was never high on its list of goals or actual attributes, I don't believe. So it's like, why the surprise?
I do like the idea of canon being made non-hierarchal, non-dominant, by some repeated re-evaluation in the fans' minds. The ultimate in reader-as-consumer-driven culture, in a way, is to say that whatever doesn't satisfy you or work for you isn't really good enough.
And I'm thinking of the many books that ultimately didn't 'work' for me on the instinctive 'this should never have happened' level (like say, Alcott's 'Little Women'), and how I never doubted it -did- happen and I just had to suck it up. The fannish reader is a different, evolved sort of beast, I think. Or perhaps not evolved; maybe the metaphor of having bitten on the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge would work better.
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no subject
Date: 2005-08-06 01:01 am (UTC)What fanfics occasionally manage to do which canon can't do (because of the way she's chosen to keep us mostly to Harry's point of view) is tell the story from a different angle. Harry misses things. A lot. One of the hardest things to do is to try to keep him just as heedless and self-absorbed as he is in the books and still manage to get the information across to the reader that allows us to see that maybe Harry hasn't figured it all out.
rabbit
no subject
Date: 2005-08-06 09:03 am (UTC)I love fanfic, ideally, 'cause it's not as if we're about to read that much about how Sirius', Remus' and James' friendship began, or what really happened after The Prank, or how Draco Malfoy really feels, or what would happen if (this or that or the other thing) say-- Harry was gay :D :D Of course Harry's pov is limited and there's such a rich world around him to play in-- so many backstories to create, alternative voices to use. I love fanfic. It's just... not canon :>