Jews in Fanfic

[mofic]

I imagine we have a number of fanfic authors in this community. I'd love to hear how folks deal with Jewish issues in writing fanfic, if at all and any related thoughts on the topic

Comments

[mofic]

But, somehow, it's okay in fic to make noncanonically gay characters gay but not noncanonically Jewish characters Jewish. So...there's that. LOL.

I write m/m slash and I think that we should follow the same rules for both. It's okay to write something about a character that is not shown in canon, but it's up to the author to make it believable. If the character appears to be heterosexual (or at least sexually/romantically involved with a woman), then the slash writer who chooses to write him as gay (and not all slash depicts self-identified gay characters just as many real life MSM do not identify as gay) needs to deal with that. And there are lots of ways to do that - he might be intentionally deceiving because he doesn't want it known he's gay, he might be self-deceiving because he thinks he can get over being gay, he might not yet realize he's gay. All of those things happen with real life gay men and all of them can be credibly written into fiction.

Similarly, if a fanfic writer wants to write a character as Jewish when canon shows him/her as not Jewish (or never specifies one way or another) I'm all for it, as long as it's done credibly. And again, I think there are lots of credible ways to do it and which one is chosen will depend on the fandom, on the author, and on the story s/he wants to tell.

[marag]

I've written two stories in which I portray Robin (of Batman and...) as Jewish. One was a throwaway joke piece and the other was a bit more serious. Since his religion is never identified in the comics, as far as I can tell (and I've read a good chunk of the comics he's appeared in!), I figured it was safe.

I...I wanted to play with the character a bit, I guess. Making him Jewish in the silly piece was purely a way to give him a nice Jewish Bubbe to pester him about settling down, but in the second, I wanted to use his not-very-Jewish background to look at what he does. I didn't completely succeed, but that was my goal.