bad canon! no viewing!
Today's fannish5 asks: Five canon events that would cause you to leave a fandom (or at least think seriously about it).
These aren't in any particular order:
Ethical incoherence. I don't mean ambiguity, which I'm all in favor of, but actual contradiction. This usually means an explicit moral that is contradicted by the events of the story or that itself contradicts the normal ethical worldview of the text. TV Tropes's quite delightful name for this phenomenon is Broken Aesop (and I owe this link to penknife, who did this meme earlier today and linked to it). The ending of Angel: the Series was an Aesop so broken the bits were microscopic: the show had insisted over and over again that the fight against evil is incremental and that grand heroic gestures are useless and sometimes actively counterproductive. And then it ended with Angel and friends unleashing hell on earth in order to stop the bad guys, except they knew it wouldn't really stop them, except that apparently dying heroically was more important than living to fight another day, even if you forced thousands of innocent Angelenos to die alongside you. Blech.
The ending of the Harry Potter books also falls into this category, especially with the redemption of Narcissa and Lucius Malfoy for no reason except that they loved their son. Their actions caused a lot of other people's children (and parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, friends, etc.) to die, but apparently that didn't matter.
De-gaying or compulsory heterosexuality. Angel managed to combine a de-gaying with a Broken Aesop in the scene where Andrew lectures Angel and Spike about knowing yourself, and then goes off on a date with two women. Heroes de-gayed Claire's friend Zach (apparently at the insistence of the actor) by making a public announcement that the character was completely heterosexual despite all the hints to the contrary in the scripts; it was the beginning of my disenchantment with the show. Robin Hobb has a tendency to hint at gayness and then retract it in a very panicky way; she does this in both the Farseer books (no, Fitz's true love is not the Fool after all, it's his old girlfriend who married somebody else!) and the Liveship books (where the same-sex desire that seemed to be redeeming a character inexplicably causes him to rape the sister of the young man he fancies). This is one reason why I don't read her books anymore; the other (which is probably not unrelated to her desire to protect her characters from Teh Gay) is her rabid anti-fanfic stance.
And then there's Harry Potter, where Remus is de-gayed via shotgun wedding, Sirius is de-gayed via a girly poster on his bedroom wall, the epilogue puts every surviving character into a heterosexual marriage with children, and oh, yes, Dumbledore was gay but JKR couldn't be arsed to actually put it into the books. Also, Dumbledore's gayness made him evil and he had to spend the rest of his life doing penance. *froths at mouth with RAGE*
ETA: And I can't believe I forgot to talk about the de-gaying of Torchwood! In the first season, every main character had at least a same-sex kiss, and there were three important same-sex relationships (Tosh/alien necklace girl, Jack/Ianto, Jack/real!Jack). In the second season, there was no hint of bisexuality for Tosh, Gwen, and Owen. In addition, the Jack/Ianto relationship was systematically shown as less emotionally significant than the Jack/Gwen relationship, and male/male relationships in general were depicted as primarily sexual, while male/female relationships involved real love. It was a huge disappointment, and I don't understand why the creators (and a lot of fans) don't see how offensive it is.
World without consequences. I was really enamored with Marvel comics (specifically the X-Men universe) for about six or eight months, until it dawned on me that nothing interesting was ever going to happen. Things would seem interesting, but they'd be dropped or retconned out of existence. Nobody would really die, no mutants with major roles in the storyline would permanently lose their powers, no progress (and no lasting regression, either) would occur in the tension between humans and mutants. And that was it for me as a reader, because I couldn't care about a world where the stakes are so low.
Plots on crack. I stopped watching House in the second season, when I could no longer believe that he wouldn't lose his medical license because of his various antics. And my interest in Nip/Tuck has never really recovered from the utterly stupid organ-theft-ring plot of S4. As a fan of science fiction and fantasy, I can suspend disbelief a hell of a lot. But even a universe with, say, time travel needs to follow its own rules, and if something's supposedly set in our real world, the story needs to behave accordingly.
Authorial game-playing, especially about characters' sexuality. I stopped reading X-Factor not too long after Peter David's blog post where he disavowed his own scene of Rictor's apparent coming out as bi and said that he loved to tease the readers. Similarly, part of my disgust with both House and Angel came from the sense that slashy subtext was being deliberately inserted as fanservice, but that it would always remain at the level of a joke. It would always be deniable, and denied. It bugs me because either (a) the creator thinks same-sex desire is a joke, or (b) the creator is fully aware that some fans would like to see more LGBT characters, and hints around in order to get positive reactions from those fans, but is unwilling to follow through for fear of pissing off homophobes. I mean seriously, how many people have been squeeing over every bit of House/Wilson subtext for years? IT AIN'T NEVER GONNA HAPPEN. Because the network doesn't want it to.
Other kinds of game-playing also bother me. I really hate fake-outs like Rose's "this is the story of how I died" on Doctor Who or the "is Giles the First Evil?" stuff on Buffy. But it's not usually a deal-breaker for me unless it's about sexuality, because I am offended by homophobia.
*****
These aren't in any particular order:
Ethical incoherence. I don't mean ambiguity, which I'm all in favor of, but actual contradiction. This usually means an explicit moral that is contradicted by the events of the story or that itself contradicts the normal ethical worldview of the text. TV Tropes's quite delightful name for this phenomenon is Broken Aesop (and I owe this link to penknife, who did this meme earlier today and linked to it). The ending of Angel: the Series was an Aesop so broken the bits were microscopic: the show had insisted over and over again that the fight against evil is incremental and that grand heroic gestures are useless and sometimes actively counterproductive. And then it ended with Angel and friends unleashing hell on earth in order to stop the bad guys, except they knew it wouldn't really stop them, except that apparently dying heroically was more important than living to fight another day, even if you forced thousands of innocent Angelenos to die alongside you. Blech.
The ending of the Harry Potter books also falls into this category, especially with the redemption of Narcissa and Lucius Malfoy for no reason except that they loved their son. Their actions caused a lot of other people's children (and parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, friends, etc.) to die, but apparently that didn't matter.
De-gaying or compulsory heterosexuality. Angel managed to combine a de-gaying with a Broken Aesop in the scene where Andrew lectures Angel and Spike about knowing yourself, and then goes off on a date with two women. Heroes de-gayed Claire's friend Zach (apparently at the insistence of the actor) by making a public announcement that the character was completely heterosexual despite all the hints to the contrary in the scripts; it was the beginning of my disenchantment with the show. Robin Hobb has a tendency to hint at gayness and then retract it in a very panicky way; she does this in both the Farseer books (no, Fitz's true love is not the Fool after all, it's his old girlfriend who married somebody else!) and the Liveship books (where the same-sex desire that seemed to be redeeming a character inexplicably causes him to rape the sister of the young man he fancies). This is one reason why I don't read her books anymore; the other (which is probably not unrelated to her desire to protect her characters from Teh Gay) is her rabid anti-fanfic stance.
And then there's Harry Potter, where Remus is de-gayed via shotgun wedding, Sirius is de-gayed via a girly poster on his bedroom wall, the epilogue puts every surviving character into a heterosexual marriage with children, and oh, yes, Dumbledore was gay but JKR couldn't be arsed to actually put it into the books. Also, Dumbledore's gayness made him evil and he had to spend the rest of his life doing penance. *froths at mouth with RAGE*
ETA: And I can't believe I forgot to talk about the de-gaying of Torchwood! In the first season, every main character had at least a same-sex kiss, and there were three important same-sex relationships (Tosh/alien necklace girl, Jack/Ianto, Jack/real!Jack). In the second season, there was no hint of bisexuality for Tosh, Gwen, and Owen. In addition, the Jack/Ianto relationship was systematically shown as less emotionally significant than the Jack/Gwen relationship, and male/male relationships in general were depicted as primarily sexual, while male/female relationships involved real love. It was a huge disappointment, and I don't understand why the creators (and a lot of fans) don't see how offensive it is.
World without consequences. I was really enamored with Marvel comics (specifically the X-Men universe) for about six or eight months, until it dawned on me that nothing interesting was ever going to happen. Things would seem interesting, but they'd be dropped or retconned out of existence. Nobody would really die, no mutants with major roles in the storyline would permanently lose their powers, no progress (and no lasting regression, either) would occur in the tension between humans and mutants. And that was it for me as a reader, because I couldn't care about a world where the stakes are so low.
Plots on crack. I stopped watching House in the second season, when I could no longer believe that he wouldn't lose his medical license because of his various antics. And my interest in Nip/Tuck has never really recovered from the utterly stupid organ-theft-ring plot of S4. As a fan of science fiction and fantasy, I can suspend disbelief a hell of a lot. But even a universe with, say, time travel needs to follow its own rules, and if something's supposedly set in our real world, the story needs to behave accordingly.
Authorial game-playing, especially about characters' sexuality. I stopped reading X-Factor not too long after Peter David's blog post where he disavowed his own scene of Rictor's apparent coming out as bi and said that he loved to tease the readers. Similarly, part of my disgust with both House and Angel came from the sense that slashy subtext was being deliberately inserted as fanservice, but that it would always remain at the level of a joke. It would always be deniable, and denied. It bugs me because either (a) the creator thinks same-sex desire is a joke, or (b) the creator is fully aware that some fans would like to see more LGBT characters, and hints around in order to get positive reactions from those fans, but is unwilling to follow through for fear of pissing off homophobes. I mean seriously, how many people have been squeeing over every bit of House/Wilson subtext for years? IT AIN'T NEVER GONNA HAPPEN. Because the network doesn't want it to.
Other kinds of game-playing also bother me. I really hate fake-outs like Rose's "this is the story of how I died" on Doctor Who or the "is Giles the First Evil?" stuff on Buffy. But it's not usually a deal-breaker for me unless it's about sexuality, because I am offended by homophobia.
*****