Thinking too hard about fanfic again
The ramblings below are going to be mostly about Cable and Deadpool/Marvel Comics, but if anyone who's completely unfamiliar with that fandom wants to throw in their two cents on broader canonical-accuracy-in-fanfic issues, please do join in. I'm in a discussion-y sort of mood.
With Let Slip the Dogs of War mostly done now (main story finished, epilogue two off to the beta reader) it's time to get working on the next idea that's sunk its little plot-snake fangs into me for this fandom. The only trouble with this particular idea is that it requires a lot of early scenes set in the early New Mutants/X-Force era - and that's a bit awkward, because outside of the Deadpool-related issues, I've read next to nothing from that part of the series, and only have a very vague understanding about who was around and what was going on. Since the whole idea depends on sending the timeline veering into AU territory I have leeway to fudge the details, but I'm not going to get very far without mentioning anything about the non-Cable-or-Deadpool characters and conflicts from around then. More importantly, I run the risk of putting off people who do know that part of the series well by getting things wrong.
Sure, most of the people likely to read it will probably be in the same boat as me - in it for C&DP, and interested in their earliest appearances mostly for backstory reasons, but I've been thrown out of fic myself before because a minor character I'd gotten myself attached to was acting wildly OOC. * I should be making at least a token effort not to make the same mistake.
So, yeah - in short, I'm stuck in that old fanfic question: just how well should you know canon before you can get away with writing about it?
When writing for a series like Marvel Comics, my general rule of thumb for this (ie, you should probably try to go through all the main source canon available for the series before you write much fic for it) just doesn't work. The total quantity of published work for the Marvelverse is insane - just keeping up with everything that happens in it on a monthly basis would be a job and a half. Many individual titles have issues going back to the '60s, if not much further (and even if they don't, there's probably at least one supporting cast member with important connections to a title that does). Most of them also include long periods where the quality of the writing rollercoasters around wildly, or which have since been retconned into oblivion. Even most of the professional writers Marvel employs probably haven't read half the canon out there (and a few make you wonder if they ever bothered to read material from a year ago...) Even for a really dedicated writer working in a universe that enormous, sooner or later the problem isn't going to be whether you know canon well enough, it's whether the plot elements you're referencing are so random and obscure that half your readers won't be familiar with them. Factor in that canon itself is so wildly and gleefully inconsistent, and not only is it virtually impossible to get yourself up to date with everything in canon, there's really not much point.
The part that matters to this fic, the New Mutants/X-Force era, is a much more limited subset, of course, but outside of the Deadpool-related issues (few and far apart), I don't have access to many of those comics - nor, to be honest, much interest in going out of my way to track them down. The writing's not terrible - I wouldn't be writing in that era at all if there was nothing that caught my interest - but we're talking a lot of Liefeld art, and there's a limit to how much I want to put my eyeballs through. This is canon so early that even the writers are still figuring out who the characters are, everything we're told about them can and probably will be contradicted later.
As for what I have gathered about that part of the series... well. Cable's playing mentor to a bunch of mutant kids called the New Mutants/X-Force. Active bad guys include Stryfe, who will at some point turn out to be Cable's evil clone from the future, and Tolliver, who Deadpool's working for, and who will at some point turn out to be Cable's evil son from the future. Cable gets back together with Domino, who later turns out to have really been Deadpool's shape-shifter ex-girlfriend Copycat posing as her while the real Domino was held captive by the bad guys. Other characters include Siryn, who I know mostly from when she not-quite-dated Deadpool, Cannonball, who may or may not be immortal, Riktor and Shatterstar, who finally came out of the closet lately (much to fandom's glee and Liefeld's horror), and a few extras like Kane, who by odd coincidence was both on Cable's old Six Pack team and in the Weapon X program at the same time Deadpool was. In short, it's pretty much one big soap opera about people with superpowers. **
And even with that much, we've got bizarre retcons and contradictions cropping up: because unless there's some major mitigating factor I'm missing, Tolliver sent both Deadpool and Copycat in to infiltrate the New Mutants/kill Cable at the same time, so that Copycat shows up, posing as Domino, just in time to shoot Deadpool in the back. Unless Tolliver is crazier than the Joker, this makes no sense whatsoever. Unlike the writers at the time, I'm not going to have the luxury of glossing over that particular plothole without dealing with it - so me and canon are already looking at each other sideways at this point.
Also keep in mind that if current canon ever does reference any of these events again, odds are half the awkward details will be delivered with enough spin to make them fit the current status quo, if not retconned right out of existence.
Even with that in mind, I do still feel like I should probably make an effort to show some respect for that era of the series if I'm writing fic based on it. On the other hand, if most of the people who are reading have even less interest in that part of canon than me, is it really worth the bother? And on a third hand, since the whole point of the story involves turning the timeline on its head, should I worry about any of this at all?
So here's where I throw this out there for discussion - are there a lot of people in C&DP fandom who have a lot invested in Cable's earlier misadventures? Are there any particular issues or summaries I should be looking at in particular? Or is that all going to pale into insignificance as long as I can guarantee that the fic's going to involve C&DP getting it on at some point?
* I've been thrown out of professionally published comics for the same reason. Alas, such is the nature of the medium, le sigh.
** Totally different from Marvel today, of course. *cough*
With Let Slip the Dogs of War mostly done now (main story finished, epilogue two off to the beta reader) it's time to get working on the next idea that's sunk its little plot-snake fangs into me for this fandom. The only trouble with this particular idea is that it requires a lot of early scenes set in the early New Mutants/X-Force era - and that's a bit awkward, because outside of the Deadpool-related issues, I've read next to nothing from that part of the series, and only have a very vague understanding about who was around and what was going on. Since the whole idea depends on sending the timeline veering into AU territory I have leeway to fudge the details, but I'm not going to get very far without mentioning anything about the non-Cable-or-Deadpool characters and conflicts from around then. More importantly, I run the risk of putting off people who do know that part of the series well by getting things wrong.
Sure, most of the people likely to read it will probably be in the same boat as me - in it for C&DP, and interested in their earliest appearances mostly for backstory reasons, but I've been thrown out of fic myself before because a minor character I'd gotten myself attached to was acting wildly OOC. * I should be making at least a token effort not to make the same mistake.
So, yeah - in short, I'm stuck in that old fanfic question: just how well should you know canon before you can get away with writing about it?
When writing for a series like Marvel Comics, my general rule of thumb for this (ie, you should probably try to go through all the main source canon available for the series before you write much fic for it) just doesn't work. The total quantity of published work for the Marvelverse is insane - just keeping up with everything that happens in it on a monthly basis would be a job and a half. Many individual titles have issues going back to the '60s, if not much further (and even if they don't, there's probably at least one supporting cast member with important connections to a title that does). Most of them also include long periods where the quality of the writing rollercoasters around wildly, or which have since been retconned into oblivion. Even most of the professional writers Marvel employs probably haven't read half the canon out there (and a few make you wonder if they ever bothered to read material from a year ago...) Even for a really dedicated writer working in a universe that enormous, sooner or later the problem isn't going to be whether you know canon well enough, it's whether the plot elements you're referencing are so random and obscure that half your readers won't be familiar with them. Factor in that canon itself is so wildly and gleefully inconsistent, and not only is it virtually impossible to get yourself up to date with everything in canon, there's really not much point.
The part that matters to this fic, the New Mutants/X-Force era, is a much more limited subset, of course, but outside of the Deadpool-related issues (few and far apart), I don't have access to many of those comics - nor, to be honest, much interest in going out of my way to track them down. The writing's not terrible - I wouldn't be writing in that era at all if there was nothing that caught my interest - but we're talking a lot of Liefeld art, and there's a limit to how much I want to put my eyeballs through. This is canon so early that even the writers are still figuring out who the characters are, everything we're told about them can and probably will be contradicted later.
As for what I have gathered about that part of the series... well. Cable's playing mentor to a bunch of mutant kids called the New Mutants/X-Force. Active bad guys include Stryfe, who will at some point turn out to be Cable's evil clone from the future, and Tolliver, who Deadpool's working for, and who will at some point turn out to be Cable's evil son from the future. Cable gets back together with Domino, who later turns out to have really been Deadpool's shape-shifter ex-girlfriend Copycat posing as her while the real Domino was held captive by the bad guys. Other characters include Siryn, who I know mostly from when she not-quite-dated Deadpool, Cannonball, who may or may not be immortal, Riktor and Shatterstar, who finally came out of the closet lately (much to fandom's glee and Liefeld's horror), and a few extras like Kane, who by odd coincidence was both on Cable's old Six Pack team and in the Weapon X program at the same time Deadpool was. In short, it's pretty much one big soap opera about people with superpowers. **
And even with that much, we've got bizarre retcons and contradictions cropping up: because unless there's some major mitigating factor I'm missing, Tolliver sent both Deadpool and Copycat in to infiltrate the New Mutants/kill Cable at the same time, so that Copycat shows up, posing as Domino, just in time to shoot Deadpool in the back. Unless Tolliver is crazier than the Joker, this makes no sense whatsoever. Unlike the writers at the time, I'm not going to have the luxury of glossing over that particular plothole without dealing with it - so me and canon are already looking at each other sideways at this point.
Also keep in mind that if current canon ever does reference any of these events again, odds are half the awkward details will be delivered with enough spin to make them fit the current status quo, if not retconned right out of existence.
Even with that in mind, I do still feel like I should probably make an effort to show some respect for that era of the series if I'm writing fic based on it. On the other hand, if most of the people who are reading have even less interest in that part of canon than me, is it really worth the bother? And on a third hand, since the whole point of the story involves turning the timeline on its head, should I worry about any of this at all?
So here's where I throw this out there for discussion - are there a lot of people in C&DP fandom who have a lot invested in Cable's earlier misadventures? Are there any particular issues or summaries I should be looking at in particular? Or is that all going to pale into insignificance as long as I can guarantee that the fic's going to involve C&DP getting it on at some point?
* I've been thrown out of professionally published comics for the same reason. Alas, such is the nature of the medium, le sigh.
** Totally different from Marvel today, of course. *cough*