When Bad Fanfic Happens to Good Characters, Part IIIA
Moving along with the real Part Three: Canon, What Canon? Also not about Fire Emblem, FYI.
Okey-dokey. Now we roll up the sleeves and take on the big targets. Fire Emblem fandom, for good or ill, has nothing on the 900-pound silverback gorillas elsewhere on the Internets.
Prior to Fire Emblem, my fandom of interest was Harry Potter. I do not think they are really great books with the exception of Prisoner of Azkaban, but that is neither here nor there. I was in the fandom for the fandom, because it was a hell of a lot more fun than re-reading Chamber of Secrets. And by “fun,” I of course mean “batshit crazy.“
Now, part of the crazy fun, up to the release of Deathly Hallows, was anticipating and predicting where things would go next. Whereas the first four books flowed in a logical sequence, the last three in the series introduced shifts in tone, plot twists and devices out of nowhere (wtf Horcruxes? wtf Deathly Hallows? wtf inbred snake-handling sociopaths?) that left fans in a lather of their own wank for months after the release party. Online “theorists” would stew and retool their theories, LJ comms rose and fell, and it made for a merry spectator sport.
But, at last, HP and the Deathly Hallows landed in our midst with an apocalyptic thump, canon officially closed (except for all the author interviews), and it was time to collect on the bets. And the more batshit among us went raving, drooling, fucking insane.
The Harry/Hermione fans (I used to be one) had been consigned to the fandom short bus since Half-Blood Prince, but the Snape fans really went over the edge in book seven. Rather, a subset of Snape fans. A very vocal subset. And so we find, scattered on LJ and elsewhere, these pockets of grieving and resentful fans-- petulant toward Harry Potter, filled with resentment and hatred of Albus Dumbledore, and most of all angry at one Jo Rowling for “tricking” them. I will not name names, but the most innocuous of the lot is the cheerfully deranged character responsible for a collection of “theories” entitled “The Great Grey Spot,” which are maybe 3% canonical evidence and 97% moonshine and fairy dust. The chick is a nut, one who seems to think that “Jo is leading [her] on” and there’s some real, as-yet-unpublished truth Out There somewhere.
And then there are the Snapewives and other sad cases who just don’t seem to have been reading the same books the rest of us picked up. I don’t want to get into the moral or mental deficiencies exhibited by these people, but there’s a hell of a difference between proclaiming the Death of the Author and just Making Shit Up.
And these ladies are Making Shit Up. Canon, what canon? Oh, you mean the books about that little asswipe Harry James Potter, scion of that privileged and bullying twat James Potter, who SO deserved to be murdered at the age of twenty-one, which would have left his red-headed slut of a wife free to be claimed by her true love, Sev--
Excuse me. I need to go retch all over the floor.
Oh, yes, the fanfiction. There is quite a lot of “denial” fanfiction out there, and the meta-theorist Red Hen has a number of the classics archived at her Red Hen Publications site. I’ve read ‘em and enjoyed some of them despite the, er, tenuous connection to canon. But those were the cream of the literary crop; most of the reactionary HP ‘fics are as wacky as you’d expect, the product of minds who don’t understand that they are “loving” their characters-- mostly Snape, Draco, and the other Slytherins-- right into oblivion. They don’t understand that the things they celebrate are either not IN the canon characterizations, or are the things that we, the readers, are not supposed to embrace. Like the, er, bigotry and hatred and stuff.
There are, and always will be, characters whose full potential is not recognized by the author/creator. It happens. But the Snape “reclaimed” from his canonical grave by fanatics isn’t so much a character that Rowling neglected as one that never fucking existed, save in the minds of said fanatics... and in their own fanfiction.
Kind of like the Lord Snape of Snape Manor idea that Half-Blood Prince finally quashed.
Anyone who's hung out with me for a while probably has a sense of what's coming in Part IIIB. That is, the ne plus ultra of Canon, What Canon?
Okey-dokey. Now we roll up the sleeves and take on the big targets. Fire Emblem fandom, for good or ill, has nothing on the 900-pound silverback gorillas elsewhere on the Internets.
Prior to Fire Emblem, my fandom of interest was Harry Potter. I do not think they are really great books with the exception of Prisoner of Azkaban, but that is neither here nor there. I was in the fandom for the fandom, because it was a hell of a lot more fun than re-reading Chamber of Secrets. And by “fun,” I of course mean “batshit crazy.“
Now, part of the crazy fun, up to the release of Deathly Hallows, was anticipating and predicting where things would go next. Whereas the first four books flowed in a logical sequence, the last three in the series introduced shifts in tone, plot twists and devices out of nowhere (wtf Horcruxes? wtf Deathly Hallows? wtf inbred snake-handling sociopaths?) that left fans in a lather of their own wank for months after the release party. Online “theorists” would stew and retool their theories, LJ comms rose and fell, and it made for a merry spectator sport.
But, at last, HP and the Deathly Hallows landed in our midst with an apocalyptic thump, canon officially closed (except for all the author interviews), and it was time to collect on the bets. And the more batshit among us went raving, drooling, fucking insane.
The Harry/Hermione fans (I used to be one) had been consigned to the fandom short bus since Half-Blood Prince, but the Snape fans really went over the edge in book seven. Rather, a subset of Snape fans. A very vocal subset. And so we find, scattered on LJ and elsewhere, these pockets of grieving and resentful fans-- petulant toward Harry Potter, filled with resentment and hatred of Albus Dumbledore, and most of all angry at one Jo Rowling for “tricking” them. I will not name names, but the most innocuous of the lot is the cheerfully deranged character responsible for a collection of “theories” entitled “The Great Grey Spot,” which are maybe 3% canonical evidence and 97% moonshine and fairy dust. The chick is a nut, one who seems to think that “Jo is leading [her] on” and there’s some real, as-yet-unpublished truth Out There somewhere.
And then there are the Snapewives and other sad cases who just don’t seem to have been reading the same books the rest of us picked up. I don’t want to get into the moral or mental deficiencies exhibited by these people, but there’s a hell of a difference between proclaiming the Death of the Author and just Making Shit Up.
And these ladies are Making Shit Up. Canon, what canon? Oh, you mean the books about that little asswipe Harry James Potter, scion of that privileged and bullying twat James Potter, who SO deserved to be murdered at the age of twenty-one, which would have left his red-headed slut of a wife free to be claimed by her true love, Sev--
Excuse me. I need to go retch all over the floor.
Oh, yes, the fanfiction. There is quite a lot of “denial” fanfiction out there, and the meta-theorist Red Hen has a number of the classics archived at her Red Hen Publications site. I’ve read ‘em and enjoyed some of them despite the, er, tenuous connection to canon. But those were the cream of the literary crop; most of the reactionary HP ‘fics are as wacky as you’d expect, the product of minds who don’t understand that they are “loving” their characters-- mostly Snape, Draco, and the other Slytherins-- right into oblivion. They don’t understand that the things they celebrate are either not IN the canon characterizations, or are the things that we, the readers, are not supposed to embrace. Like the, er, bigotry and hatred and stuff.
There are, and always will be, characters whose full potential is not recognized by the author/creator. It happens. But the Snape “reclaimed” from his canonical grave by fanatics isn’t so much a character that Rowling neglected as one that never fucking existed, save in the minds of said fanatics... and in their own fanfiction.
Kind of like the Lord Snape of Snape Manor idea that Half-Blood Prince finally quashed.
Anyone who's hung out with me for a while probably has a sense of what's coming in Part IIIB. That is, the ne plus ultra of Canon, What Canon?