on fanfiction, again
I think part of the reason that I have absolutely no problem with fanfic (in concept; I fully acknowledge that a great deal of it is bad, or better as wish-fulfillment than narrative, or doing something different from what the author set out to do) is that I don't have a problem with multiple versions of characters existing side-by-side. I've seen completely different versions of the same character each done fabulously--why would you want to give up possibility by cutting off those different versions?
Not that I don't believe in boundaries or people's abilities to come up with new and creative ways to have characters go OOC. But I think circumstance has a lot to do with personal choices and, if the circumstances are right (as in, things happening in a fic that didn't happen in canon), you can have a character do a lot of things he or she wouldn't do in canon.
But I don't think that having a character do something that they would never do in canon harms the canon version of the character. It's just a different version, much like characters in myth and legend, whose parentage, abilities, feats and chronology change depending on time and source. I doubt--though I'm not a classicist so don't take my word for it--that anyone is out there arguing that Dione is the real mother of Aphrodite and the people who think it's about Uranus and the sea are Doing It Wrong. They're just different, and I find it interesting because they are different. Looking at how and why things differ, I think, can tell us something about the people and the culture who are interacting with the story.
I do have to wonder if part of it isn't that fic writers often have different interpretations of characters from the authors, and write them that way. But even if you ban fanfiction of your work, you can't ban people from holding different opinions about the characters than you. And I'm not just talking about getting inside a character's head--I'm talking about sympathy for the character and motivations. See Snape, for example, who has both rabid fangirls and serious haters. Different people will accept different things, but I think that's okay. It's how people work.
Just as there's space for interpretation within canon, I think there's space for interpretation around it. In sum: I don't think fanfiction harms canon by existing; it doesn't replace the original (unless an individual fan decides that it does for them) or affect it; instead I think it merely exists alongside it. And there's plenty of room for that.
Not that I don't believe in boundaries or people's abilities to come up with new and creative ways to have characters go OOC. But I think circumstance has a lot to do with personal choices and, if the circumstances are right (as in, things happening in a fic that didn't happen in canon), you can have a character do a lot of things he or she wouldn't do in canon.
But I don't think that having a character do something that they would never do in canon harms the canon version of the character. It's just a different version, much like characters in myth and legend, whose parentage, abilities, feats and chronology change depending on time and source. I doubt--though I'm not a classicist so don't take my word for it--that anyone is out there arguing that Dione is the real mother of Aphrodite and the people who think it's about Uranus and the sea are Doing It Wrong. They're just different, and I find it interesting because they are different. Looking at how and why things differ, I think, can tell us something about the people and the culture who are interacting with the story.
I do have to wonder if part of it isn't that fic writers often have different interpretations of characters from the authors, and write them that way. But even if you ban fanfiction of your work, you can't ban people from holding different opinions about the characters than you. And I'm not just talking about getting inside a character's head--I'm talking about sympathy for the character and motivations. See Snape, for example, who has both rabid fangirls and serious haters. Different people will accept different things, but I think that's okay. It's how people work.
Just as there's space for interpretation within canon, I think there's space for interpretation around it. In sum: I don't think fanfiction harms canon by existing; it doesn't replace the original (unless an individual fan decides that it does for them) or affect it; instead I think it merely exists alongside it. And there's plenty of room for that.