meme day 13 omg
13 - Do you prefer canon or fanon when you write? Has writing fanfic for a fandom changed the way you see some or even all of the original source material?
Hmm. I’m not sure…my first reaction to this question was that I’ve never been in a fandom where the fanon was really drastically divergent from the canon, but then I was missing the quite obvious issue of slash. I guess there are all kinds of arguments to be made - some people like to point out subtext is a natural part of canon, whereas others would argue that subext is not text. But if you consider that male/male pairings are not technically canon in any of my fandoms, even if canon doesn’t explicitly say they can’t be together, then I guess I have to say fanon. But I’m going to be honest, I am really a bit of a canon-thumper at heart. AU and other departures take creativity and can be brilliant. But I do love when an author can manage to make a fic seem like just an extension of canon; when they can capture and recreate the whole mood of it, or extrapolate on one of the main themes and take us further/deeper, or when tiny details from canon are used in clever ways in a fic that give you that sense of continuity. It’s love of canon that draws us to a fandom in the first place, after all.
This could be more splitting of hairs, but I feel like the way I view canon material doesn’t really change, but that my understanding of the characters gets deeper and more detailed and granular, without really changing the meaning for me of what the original canon was trying to say. If we go back to the issue of slash, I’ve argued up and down that some canon is overtly slashy and some requires goggles. On first viewing, I slotted Fast and Furious (and Supernatural) into the overt category and Die Hard 4 into goggling required. After a year of writing and study and meta out the wazoo on DH4, no matter how obsessed I’ve managed to become with John/Matt I still think that holds true. No matter how much I might like it to be now, it’s no more slashy than any other buddy movie can ever help but be. I can watch it now and see what others are seeing with my lovely, stylish goggles on - the truly inordinate amount of time John spends physically covering and touching and protecting Matt from literally the first moments they meet (something he did not do with Zeus’ character last time around in DH3, although this difference could be explained by the age differential if John is feeling paternal here instead of gropy), and definitely their heart-to-heart moments every time they get into a car together. But it really pales in comparison to hearing jokes like “you must have mistaken me for another Angel, the one in the dirty trench coat who is IN LOVE WITH YOU” or a description of two characters being “co-dependent” in every way including “emotionally” and “erotically” (Supernatural), or hearing Mia tell Brian (Fast and Furious) Dom “owns you now” and everything is “drawn to him, like gravity…even you”. I’ve even gone as far as to say the (first) Fast and Furious story doesn’t even make sense unless Brian is in love with Dom, and to call it a “Pocahontas” story in which John Smith doesn’t go native for the Princess this time…it’s the Chief he lets get away in the end! In the course of my writing and chatting and generally studying the canon I can realize some granular detail about the character, for example severina2001 pointed out a little while ago that John is attracted to brains - something that was a large part of Holly’s successful career girl character in the early DH films, and Matt definitely has in spades. Realizing something like that can help me write a better fic, but no, it doesn’t change the way I view the canon. In fact, in keeping with the question, rather than really trying to be new and original and ‘make the characters mine’ I like to save that for original stuff and try to keep everything I do with fanfic characters growing out of something that had some seed somewhere in canon, for me at least. We do all see things differently, including the canon, even though it *seems* like something that should be a touchstone for ‘truth’ about the characters. It’s still all subjective. :)