(no subject)
Minisinoo's poll on current and old canon in fanfic writing (look, go read the poll, it will make sense) got me thinking about different ways of ignoring canon. I thought I'd write about them here rather than wibble on about the X-Files in her journal.
I think that for the purposes of this discussion I'll separate "canon" from "characterization," using "canon" to refer to a series of events and characterization to refer to the effect of those events on the characters. This is why stories with the header "Oh, and Krycek still has both arms" usually make me hit the delete key -- the event is so important to the development of the character (at least, insofar as I find him interesting), that authors who decide to ignore it are generally not writing the kind of stories I like to read. The same is true of the betrayal (or whatever it was) in RatB: without it, the relationship between Krycek and Marita is much less interesting to me. Authors can write around it in a variety of ways, but I like them to deal with it somehow. And this brings me to a second point -- the distinction between fanfiction which ignores problematic canon and fanfiction which attempts to resolve it; I prefer the latter, but I think that may just be a matter of taste. I know that there are a number of readers who really dislike "fix-it" stories. All else being equal, I'll prefer a piece of resfic to a piece of denial fic, at least if we use resfic to include stories which explain away the (apparent) character death.
Since all else is never equal, none of these are hard-and-fast rules, as can be seen from my own stories -- I'm quite fond of The Gates of Ivory, even though it's more like denial fic than resfic, and I grew Krycek's arm back myself in Traders in Snow (although had I continued that storyline, I was planning on a scene in which Krycek nearly gets killed because he forgets he has a second working arm now, and anyway, that's a fix-it story rather than a denial story.) I think I find it difficult to accept stories which ignore one specific piece of canon while accepting the rest of it because of the way I see the characters as being shaped (to a greater or lesser extent) by events -- whereas stories which reinterpret canonical events don't seem to have that problem.
Sometimes, of course, it’s nice to write a story set earlier in the timeline, just to deal with slightly less traumatized characters, but I’m not quite sure that’s the same thing as writing a story which ignores certain parts of the shows canon -- those later events will still occur.
On a tangent, in my experience, the closure of a canon has the opposite effect (at least, on me as a writer) that I expected: it actually makes it more difficult to ignore the whole of the canon. In part, I think that this is because in XF at least, there was always the chance that canon would contradict itself -- more than a chance, really. Look at Jeffrey Spender -- we all spent seasons and seasons believing that he was dead, and then he came back at the last possible moment. I find it hard to imagine starting a story now which would diverge from canon at Two Fathers/One Son, for instance, although that's the point at which I think the mytharc more or less fell apart -- I still have no idea what the hell that whole Biogenesis arc was about. I like the idea of a story which diverges from canon at a fixed point, and ignores everything after it but I can't seem to write one. I don't feel the same pressure with Alias -- there are a set of stories which I still think of as open, like Lectio Difficilior (which I might go back to someday) although it breaks off from show canon at the end of S2. But my attitude toward Alias canon is much less bitter than it is toward X-Files canon - I think I’m probably engaged in a vicious struggle with canon, sometimes, when it comes to XF. I need to make it work, even though the sensible thing really is to take a couple deep breaths and back the hell off.
The point, I think, is that there's a difference between stories in which the author denies that acanonical event took place, and stories in which an author decides to try to fix a canonical event (usually something she doesn't like); in addition, an author can simply choose to set a story earlier than the current timeline. Each of these is doing something rather different with regard to canon, I think. And I have a distinct weakness for fix-it stories.
I think that for the purposes of this discussion I'll separate "canon" from "characterization," using "canon" to refer to a series of events and characterization to refer to the effect of those events on the characters. This is why stories with the header "Oh, and Krycek still has both arms" usually make me hit the delete key -- the event is so important to the development of the character (at least, insofar as I find him interesting), that authors who decide to ignore it are generally not writing the kind of stories I like to read. The same is true of the betrayal (or whatever it was) in RatB: without it, the relationship between Krycek and Marita is much less interesting to me. Authors can write around it in a variety of ways, but I like them to deal with it somehow. And this brings me to a second point -- the distinction between fanfiction which ignores problematic canon and fanfiction which attempts to resolve it; I prefer the latter, but I think that may just be a matter of taste. I know that there are a number of readers who really dislike "fix-it" stories. All else being equal, I'll prefer a piece of resfic to a piece of denial fic, at least if we use resfic to include stories which explain away the (apparent) character death.
Since all else is never equal, none of these are hard-and-fast rules, as can be seen from my own stories -- I'm quite fond of The Gates of Ivory, even though it's more like denial fic than resfic, and I grew Krycek's arm back myself in Traders in Snow (although had I continued that storyline, I was planning on a scene in which Krycek nearly gets killed because he forgets he has a second working arm now, and anyway, that's a fix-it story rather than a denial story.) I think I find it difficult to accept stories which ignore one specific piece of canon while accepting the rest of it because of the way I see the characters as being shaped (to a greater or lesser extent) by events -- whereas stories which reinterpret canonical events don't seem to have that problem.
Sometimes, of course, it’s nice to write a story set earlier in the timeline, just to deal with slightly less traumatized characters, but I’m not quite sure that’s the same thing as writing a story which ignores certain parts of the shows canon -- those later events will still occur.
On a tangent, in my experience, the closure of a canon has the opposite effect (at least, on me as a writer) that I expected: it actually makes it more difficult to ignore the whole of the canon. In part, I think that this is because in XF at least, there was always the chance that canon would contradict itself -- more than a chance, really. Look at Jeffrey Spender -- we all spent seasons and seasons believing that he was dead, and then he came back at the last possible moment. I find it hard to imagine starting a story now which would diverge from canon at Two Fathers/One Son, for instance, although that's the point at which I think the mytharc more or less fell apart -- I still have no idea what the hell that whole Biogenesis arc was about. I like the idea of a story which diverges from canon at a fixed point, and ignores everything after it but I can't seem to write one. I don't feel the same pressure with Alias -- there are a set of stories which I still think of as open, like Lectio Difficilior (which I might go back to someday) although it breaks off from show canon at the end of S2. But my attitude toward Alias canon is much less bitter than it is toward X-Files canon - I think I’m probably engaged in a vicious struggle with canon, sometimes, when it comes to XF. I need to make it work, even though the sensible thing really is to take a couple deep breaths and back the hell off.
The point, I think, is that there's a difference between stories in which the author denies that acanonical event took place, and stories in which an author decides to try to fix a canonical event (usually something she doesn't like); in addition, an author can simply choose to set a story earlier than the current timeline. Each of these is doing something rather different with regard to canon, I think. And I have a distinct weakness for fix-it stories.