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I'm not dead--but my computer almost is. At this point opening Internet Explorer takes something like 30 minutes. Sometimes things just disappear too--oh, you've just written 8 pages of something in word? Zap! Where did word go? Ha ha! It's gone!
So I apologize to the many posts I've managed to read in the past week and not comment on. (And to my icons that no longer get used because that adds another 15 minutes to a post!)
I was just reading this post on whether fanfic authors should try to conform to the "morality" of original authors. That kind of question always interests me because on one hand it's usually a yes/no answer, but really it gets into that whole central tangle of issues about fanfic.
In the first place, you can only guess what somebody's morals are going to be, and often you're going to be wrong. Even if you might correctly guess that an author was pro or against something, you might not understand why and so still not get it right.
(As an aside, I remember once reading an H/D fic I appreciated where Hermione was kind of a homophobe--not because I think she is canonically, but more often in H/D Ron is this raging gay-basher. And I get why people do that (besides just wanting to villain-ize him) because his family has a lot of traditional gender stuff in canon (not that this means gay-bashing, of course, but you can see from where people jump off). But still that doesn't mean he'd be vicious and stupid. What I liked about this fic with Hermione was that it didn't just assume, as usual, that since Hermione started SPEW she's got a pass on all bigotry. (I've also heard people bizarrely argue that canonically Draco Malfoy would have to be a homophobe while the Trio wouldn't because he's bigoted against Muggle-borns, so must obviously embody all other types of bigotry, even though superficially at least, I'd peg the Slytherins as more open about that kind of thing.) In this fic, iirc, Hermione was one of those people who was kind to gay people because they had a mental disorder and needed therapy. It was just a nice change both in Hermione's role and in the variety of homophobia. The point is, it's not always strictly logical. (Demanding total logic is, imo, why HP fandom still can't accept the portrayal of Slytherin Half-Bloods in canon and keeps trying to insist on a type of prejudice that isn't there.)
Then there's the question of how much an author's values even influence his or her own writing. I mean, I definitely believe they do, but believing something doesn't mean that an author must have all his/her characters believing that same thing. (I know plenty of fanfic authors who have people accuse them of believing horrible things because they had their villains argue something too well, or wrote about characters with certain beliefs because they were interested in exploring characters who had those beliefs.)
Mostly I get edgy at the very idea of having any responsibility to recreate the author's beliefs about anything, because to be honest to me that immediately translates into "Here's why my fanfic is just a little bit more canon than yours" and just...no. It's not. You could be total soul mates with the author and you still wouldn't be canon.
Still, you do sometimes read things that seem wrong, and I'm always kind of interested in what things throw me out of the story. As I said in my comment on the linked post, it's weird to me how I can read Tolkien fanfic and find slash in the Shire--including certain types of pretty open acceptance--totally in tune with the canon, but be thrown out by anything that sounds too Neo-Pagan. I could probably explain why the different things strike me as IC or not but that's still just about me. There are some characterizations that I would agree were non-canonical and yet I can still read with no problem because, I suppose, they're still on my same wavelength about the character. Meanwhile something else that's maybe far less extreme would drive me crazy.
I think this also gets into something that always struck me in HP fanfic when people would talk about "canonical" fanfic as if it didn't include Slytherfic, as if Slytherins weren't canon. Presumably it meant that certain Slytherfic made the Slytherin heroes or presented them and their beliefs in a positive or romanticized way. In those kinds of fics you do feel like the author's view in the story is being challenged or argued against, but it's less clear, imo, exactly which morals of the author's are being left out, since portraying the bad guys as universally unpleasant and pathetic etc. isn't exactly a morality, it's just the way you present those characters. It's like...there is a moral discussion going on there, it's just not so simple picking out exactly what it is. It's just probably not pro vs. anti-Nazi.
I don't know...sometimes it's just a case of feeling happier in the moral atmosphere of one fanfic or another. I know I have been known to feel...safer?...in plenty of HP fanfics than I do in the canon, where as in Tolkien or The Dark is Rising it's just different. I guess because I don't find either of those canons jarring--so if I'm going to be jarred it's going to be in fanfic.
So I apologize to the many posts I've managed to read in the past week and not comment on. (And to my icons that no longer get used because that adds another 15 minutes to a post!)
I was just reading this post on whether fanfic authors should try to conform to the "morality" of original authors. That kind of question always interests me because on one hand it's usually a yes/no answer, but really it gets into that whole central tangle of issues about fanfic.
In the first place, you can only guess what somebody's morals are going to be, and often you're going to be wrong. Even if you might correctly guess that an author was pro or against something, you might not understand why and so still not get it right.
(As an aside, I remember once reading an H/D fic I appreciated where Hermione was kind of a homophobe--not because I think she is canonically, but more often in H/D Ron is this raging gay-basher. And I get why people do that (besides just wanting to villain-ize him) because his family has a lot of traditional gender stuff in canon (not that this means gay-bashing, of course, but you can see from where people jump off). But still that doesn't mean he'd be vicious and stupid. What I liked about this fic with Hermione was that it didn't just assume, as usual, that since Hermione started SPEW she's got a pass on all bigotry. (I've also heard people bizarrely argue that canonically Draco Malfoy would have to be a homophobe while the Trio wouldn't because he's bigoted against Muggle-borns, so must obviously embody all other types of bigotry, even though superficially at least, I'd peg the Slytherins as more open about that kind of thing.) In this fic, iirc, Hermione was one of those people who was kind to gay people because they had a mental disorder and needed therapy. It was just a nice change both in Hermione's role and in the variety of homophobia. The point is, it's not always strictly logical. (Demanding total logic is, imo, why HP fandom still can't accept the portrayal of Slytherin Half-Bloods in canon and keeps trying to insist on a type of prejudice that isn't there.)
Then there's the question of how much an author's values even influence his or her own writing. I mean, I definitely believe they do, but believing something doesn't mean that an author must have all his/her characters believing that same thing. (I know plenty of fanfic authors who have people accuse them of believing horrible things because they had their villains argue something too well, or wrote about characters with certain beliefs because they were interested in exploring characters who had those beliefs.)
Mostly I get edgy at the very idea of having any responsibility to recreate the author's beliefs about anything, because to be honest to me that immediately translates into "Here's why my fanfic is just a little bit more canon than yours" and just...no. It's not. You could be total soul mates with the author and you still wouldn't be canon.
Still, you do sometimes read things that seem wrong, and I'm always kind of interested in what things throw me out of the story. As I said in my comment on the linked post, it's weird to me how I can read Tolkien fanfic and find slash in the Shire--including certain types of pretty open acceptance--totally in tune with the canon, but be thrown out by anything that sounds too Neo-Pagan. I could probably explain why the different things strike me as IC or not but that's still just about me. There are some characterizations that I would agree were non-canonical and yet I can still read with no problem because, I suppose, they're still on my same wavelength about the character. Meanwhile something else that's maybe far less extreme would drive me crazy.
I think this also gets into something that always struck me in HP fanfic when people would talk about "canonical" fanfic as if it didn't include Slytherfic, as if Slytherins weren't canon. Presumably it meant that certain Slytherfic made the Slytherin heroes or presented them and their beliefs in a positive or romanticized way. In those kinds of fics you do feel like the author's view in the story is being challenged or argued against, but it's less clear, imo, exactly which morals of the author's are being left out, since portraying the bad guys as universally unpleasant and pathetic etc. isn't exactly a morality, it's just the way you present those characters. It's like...there is a moral discussion going on there, it's just not so simple picking out exactly what it is. It's just probably not pro vs. anti-Nazi.
I don't know...sometimes it's just a case of feeling happier in the moral atmosphere of one fanfic or another. I know I have been known to feel...safer?...in plenty of HP fanfics than I do in the canon, where as in Tolkien or The Dark is Rising it's just different. I guess because I don't find either of those canons jarring--so if I'm going to be jarred it's going to be in fanfic.
