Thoughts on fanfiction as a tool for criticising Canon, or "Because Jo said so" is not a good reason

[mr_mercutio]

In fandom, if you read the loads of meta that get posted all over the place, one regularly runs into musings on the nature of fanfiction, or that fancy new term they've got these days, "transformative works" or whatever. In any case, you read a lot about what fanfiction means, why it's written, why it ostensibly should be written, etc. etc.

Comments

[thejim]

Which is fair enough; it speaks really to fundamental character difference, I think. I much prefer situations like in Star Wars or LotR. Give me good guys who are good and bad guys who are jerks. There's room for good guys who are jerks and bad guys who are just on the wrong side, but I prefer things to be fairly cut and dried in regards to my fiction. Real life is so full of shades and colours that I like the unambiguous nature of stories where Heroes are Heroic, Villains are Vilainous, Men are Manly and Sheep are scared. Wait, strike those last two.

Seriously, though, you're right about the characters being shallow. More depth of character would have been great, but Rowling didn't set out to write a character-driven story, I think. She's got all the elements of your archetypal "Prophecy Quest" story and she runs with it. Hell, it's practically Star Wars in it's set up: Dumbledore is Obi-Wan, Snape is Lando, Sirius is Han, Hermionie and Ron are 3P0 and R2, Harry is Luke, etc. Harry/Luke is the Chosen One who will Defeat Voldemort/Bring Balance to the Force. Snape/Lando is thought to be working for the Death Eaters/Empire, but saves the day at one point, etc. You get where I'm going with it?

You're right about there being lots of potential to develop it into a mature story for mature readers, but you have to remember she was writing for 11 year olds at first and scaling up from there. You can't make a story for 11 year olds suddenly a story that would appeal to 25 year olds without fundamentally altering what made it appeal to the 11 year olds, you know what I mean?

[shiftingpath]

I always thought this was appropriate.