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I was reading/having a conversation today about fandom that made me see a sort of pattern to the way I fall on certain fandom questions. In this case, I think I was talking about fanfics and writing IC or OOC and things like that. It wasn't that simple, but I wound up saying something about how I really don't think I read fics hoping they will be IC. That is, of course you appreciate being able to recognize the characters you like, etc. A certain level of IC-ness is expected. But in some vague way I like feeling like I'm reading X's fic, and listening to what X has to say, rather than going for any sort of simulation of canon. It's not that I read fic for meta, exactly, but I feel like the fics I like best probably give me the feeling that author just knows his/her take on canon well enough and is now telling a story, as opposed to somebody who's really trying to fit itself into canon or fill a hole. Because really I'm still getting what X is saying and not canon at all.
What's interesting about that is that often that's what fanfic will be described as, specifically when it's being defended to people who don't like it, you know? Like I've seen people reject slash or porn or weird or fanon-ized and say no, fanfic is a testament to the author because people are filling in those moments the author didn't write about, or it's speculating or whatever--it's just those fringe weirdoes who have the boys kissing. The rest of us are showing respect. And I realized that it's not just fanfic where I fall on this side (and ironically, whenever I hear people describing their own superior work that way my possibly unfair thought is that it sounds like their stuff sounds really boring). In fandom in general I tend to always lean towards whatever side of the issue says fandom is about fan reaction to the source material rather than the source material itself, if that makes sense.
It reminded me of something I seem to remember reading by Joseph Campbell where he was talking about different types of spiritualities, and he compared Middle Eastern religions to Western religions by comparing
Job vs. Prometheus.
In the story of Job, Job is tormented, after God and the devil make a bet. The devil hopes that if Job is tormented enough he'll reject God. Instead Job falls down and praises God anyway. Prometheus, by contrast (the way Campbell was laying it out), steals fire to give to man and is punished by being chained to a rock and having his entrails eaten every night. All he has to do to be freed is to apologize and submit to Zeus for doing this--and he won't do it. Looking at these two stories, I think Campbell was noting the different attitude towards the Deity. Once you make gods separate from humans, so that the two are interacting, you have to pick a side. Are you on God's side or humans' side? Job is on God's side--it doesn't matter what God does, you worship him because it is his due. Prometheus is on man's side--he's not going to submit to Zeus.
Okay, it's not exactly the same thing, but when I was thinking about fandom I thought hmmm, I'm definitely with Prometheus/the humanists on this, and if the author is God in fandom, I'm still with Prometheus.:-)
It's not just a case of wanting to say hey, the creator *isn't* God that it's blasphemous to criticize and not liking something or criticizing it isn't some terrible thing to do in fandom--it's a normal part of it. Fandom's really more about how often and how closely you look at the source material, not how pretty you think it is. A Snape and a Sirius fan whose views of canon are totally at odds and liable to erupt into flamewar at any moment are still closer in understanding to each other than they are to any random HP reader who thinks Snape is funny or it was a shame when Sirius died.
I do believe those things above about criticism not being a bad thing or making you not a fan, but for me the issue also often bleeds into the sense that claiming the creator is God is sometimes the first step to attempting to get closer to that God whatever way you can. Sort of, perhaps, the way the many very religious people will seem to blur the line between saying God is always right and saying whatever they say is right is what God says is right.
I can just think of fandoms I've been in and felt oversensitive to this sort of thing. For instance, I remember this one girl in XF fandom who lived for the spoilers she could get hold of and dole out to people. She loved speaking as some sort of voice of authority. She'd be the first to point to someone else as being a crazy stalker type if they said they loved David Duchovny, but also flew to California and bid a fifty dollars so that she could own a crumpled cigarette wrapper used on the show. I'm not trying to now turn around and say that *she* was a crazy stalker and the David Duchovny lover was superior, or that I'm superior to either, it's just that I myself couldn't see the appeal of doing that sort of thing. It just often seemed like she was making this big distinction between herself and other fans, in that she had maybe a foot over that line that separates the fans from the people involved in the movie or show.
But this is not to say that someone like that has a swelled head while I'm this wonderfully humble fan--the opposite is true, in fact. I think part of the reason I want to distance myself from creators etc. is that I don't like feeling like the relationship is unequal. Like, if I'm going to meet the star of a TV show I like, I'm probably not going to want to do it as fan to actor. I consider myself an equal, so would want to meet them as such.
Really, it maybe comes down to that same Prometheus thing. I want to be God too. Only rather than doing that by identifying someone else as God of fandom and trying to put myself in line with his/her thinking or get closer to him/her so that I can speak for them or give myself authority through them, I want to just declare myself a God as a fan.
So to get back to fanfic writers, for instance, I don't think of people being good because they're in character, nor do I think of people as being good because their version of characters are just as good as/better than/a fabulous spin on the author's. I think I just want to take the canon as understood to be the basis for everything and not call much attention to it. It's like canon is the paint, the raw materials we know everyone is working with. So rather than say, "Your Hermione is so in character!" I'd think more, "I like what you've done with Hermione," and say what it says to me meta-wise about canon and how it works within the story. If I'm reading crackfic or whatever then I probably assume that whatever cliché is being used already says something about canon (Veela!Draco, Sickly!Frodo, etc.).
I mean, so many fandom discussions boil down to the idea of knowing your place, don't they? Like whenever somebody gets into a twist because it's so wanky somebody said they preferred whatever fanfic to canon—well, does that really matter? Can you really force yourself to enjoy one thing over another? Does that really mean you've overstepped your place? Can't you acknowledge the author/creator's unique contribution of original work without doing that? Fanfic and Original Fic are just totally different animals. If I enjoyed reading a certain fic to a certain episode or book in a canon, should that matter? Not really to me, because hey, I'm a god. If I enjoyed it more, I must have a perfectly divine reason for it.;-)
p.s. I finally saw one of the clips of my friend and me on AMC. If you watch that channel, sometimes they do these fast montages of "Movie People" talking about different movies. I think they've used several different clips of us at different times, talking about different movies, but this is the first time I've seen one even though we taped it a long time ago. At first I totally didn't realize it was us. I was looking at myself and I seemed like some other person.
Anyway, it was a good clip, part of a montage where people are talking about horror movies. In our bit I guess I'm going through the Rules of Slasher movies and how important they are in life because they tell you how to survive psycho killer attacks. I'm telling them to my friend, who is less familiar with them. So the clip is:
What sells it is that she delivers those lines with totally clueless sincerity and genuine alarm. She's totally not acting.
What's interesting about that is that often that's what fanfic will be described as, specifically when it's being defended to people who don't like it, you know? Like I've seen people reject slash or porn or weird or fanon-ized and say no, fanfic is a testament to the author because people are filling in those moments the author didn't write about, or it's speculating or whatever--it's just those fringe weirdoes who have the boys kissing. The rest of us are showing respect. And I realized that it's not just fanfic where I fall on this side (and ironically, whenever I hear people describing their own superior work that way my possibly unfair thought is that it sounds like their stuff sounds really boring). In fandom in general I tend to always lean towards whatever side of the issue says fandom is about fan reaction to the source material rather than the source material itself, if that makes sense.
It reminded me of something I seem to remember reading by Joseph Campbell where he was talking about different types of spiritualities, and he compared Middle Eastern religions to Western religions by comparing
Job vs. Prometheus.
In the story of Job, Job is tormented, after God and the devil make a bet. The devil hopes that if Job is tormented enough he'll reject God. Instead Job falls down and praises God anyway. Prometheus, by contrast (the way Campbell was laying it out), steals fire to give to man and is punished by being chained to a rock and having his entrails eaten every night. All he has to do to be freed is to apologize and submit to Zeus for doing this--and he won't do it. Looking at these two stories, I think Campbell was noting the different attitude towards the Deity. Once you make gods separate from humans, so that the two are interacting, you have to pick a side. Are you on God's side or humans' side? Job is on God's side--it doesn't matter what God does, you worship him because it is his due. Prometheus is on man's side--he's not going to submit to Zeus.
Okay, it's not exactly the same thing, but when I was thinking about fandom I thought hmmm, I'm definitely with Prometheus/the humanists on this, and if the author is God in fandom, I'm still with Prometheus.:-)
It's not just a case of wanting to say hey, the creator *isn't* God that it's blasphemous to criticize and not liking something or criticizing it isn't some terrible thing to do in fandom--it's a normal part of it. Fandom's really more about how often and how closely you look at the source material, not how pretty you think it is. A Snape and a Sirius fan whose views of canon are totally at odds and liable to erupt into flamewar at any moment are still closer in understanding to each other than they are to any random HP reader who thinks Snape is funny or it was a shame when Sirius died.
I do believe those things above about criticism not being a bad thing or making you not a fan, but for me the issue also often bleeds into the sense that claiming the creator is God is sometimes the first step to attempting to get closer to that God whatever way you can. Sort of, perhaps, the way the many very religious people will seem to blur the line between saying God is always right and saying whatever they say is right is what God says is right.
I can just think of fandoms I've been in and felt oversensitive to this sort of thing. For instance, I remember this one girl in XF fandom who lived for the spoilers she could get hold of and dole out to people. She loved speaking as some sort of voice of authority. She'd be the first to point to someone else as being a crazy stalker type if they said they loved David Duchovny, but also flew to California and bid a fifty dollars so that she could own a crumpled cigarette wrapper used on the show. I'm not trying to now turn around and say that *she* was a crazy stalker and the David Duchovny lover was superior, or that I'm superior to either, it's just that I myself couldn't see the appeal of doing that sort of thing. It just often seemed like she was making this big distinction between herself and other fans, in that she had maybe a foot over that line that separates the fans from the people involved in the movie or show.
But this is not to say that someone like that has a swelled head while I'm this wonderfully humble fan--the opposite is true, in fact. I think part of the reason I want to distance myself from creators etc. is that I don't like feeling like the relationship is unequal. Like, if I'm going to meet the star of a TV show I like, I'm probably not going to want to do it as fan to actor. I consider myself an equal, so would want to meet them as such.
Really, it maybe comes down to that same Prometheus thing. I want to be God too. Only rather than doing that by identifying someone else as God of fandom and trying to put myself in line with his/her thinking or get closer to him/her so that I can speak for them or give myself authority through them, I want to just declare myself a God as a fan.
So to get back to fanfic writers, for instance, I don't think of people being good because they're in character, nor do I think of people as being good because their version of characters are just as good as/better than/a fabulous spin on the author's. I think I just want to take the canon as understood to be the basis for everything and not call much attention to it. It's like canon is the paint, the raw materials we know everyone is working with. So rather than say, "Your Hermione is so in character!" I'd think more, "I like what you've done with Hermione," and say what it says to me meta-wise about canon and how it works within the story. If I'm reading crackfic or whatever then I probably assume that whatever cliché is being used already says something about canon (Veela!Draco, Sickly!Frodo, etc.).
I mean, so many fandom discussions boil down to the idea of knowing your place, don't they? Like whenever somebody gets into a twist because it's so wanky somebody said they preferred whatever fanfic to canon—well, does that really matter? Can you really force yourself to enjoy one thing over another? Does that really mean you've overstepped your place? Can't you acknowledge the author/creator's unique contribution of original work without doing that? Fanfic and Original Fic are just totally different animals. If I enjoyed reading a certain fic to a certain episode or book in a canon, should that matter? Not really to me, because hey, I'm a god. If I enjoyed it more, I must have a perfectly divine reason for it.;-)
p.s. I finally saw one of the clips of my friend and me on AMC. If you watch that channel, sometimes they do these fast montages of "Movie People" talking about different movies. I think they've used several different clips of us at different times, talking about different movies, but this is the first time I've seen one even though we taped it a long time ago. At first I totally didn't realize it was us. I was looking at myself and I seemed like some other person.
Anyway, it was a good clip, part of a montage where people are talking about horror movies. In our bit I guess I'm going through the Rules of Slasher movies and how important they are in life because they tell you how to survive psycho killer attacks. I'm telling them to my friend, who is less familiar with them. So the clip is:
Me: ...the virgin always survives.... See, you wouldn't have known that.
Her: No, I wouldn't have known that!
(to the camera)
I wouldn't have survived either!
What sells it is that she delivers those lines with totally clueless sincerity and genuine alarm. She's totally not acting.
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Like I've seen people reject slash or porn or weird or fanon-ized and say no, fanfic is a testament to the author because people are filling in those moments the author didn't write about, or it's speculating or whatever--it's just those fringe weirdoes who have the boys kissing. The rest of us are showing respect. And I realized that it's not just fanfic where I fall on this side (and ironically, whenever I hear people describing their own superior work that way my possibly unfair thought is that it sounds like their stuff sounds really boring)
I often enjoy "missing moments"-fics, or speculation (isn't all fanfic a sort of speculation anyway? Not speculation in "I think this will happen in Canon", but speculation in "what if THIS happened? What then?"), if it's about characters I'm interested in, I have to say. But that depends on what mood I'm in. I mean it varies what sort of fic I'm interested in, depending on where I am in my fandom-state. I'll often begin my fanfic-reading experience with "not too far out there"-fics, and then go farther and farther away from it. Like with HP, I began with fics very close to Rowling's style, either R/Hr, or from Draco's POV (but still close to JKR's style), and then continued with H/D slash, then got tired of standard slash, and continued with experimental and contraversial slash, then got tired of slash altogether, and continued with controversial het, and then went pretty much back to the beginning, reading only fics that speculated about the fifth book (yes, this was all before OotP). So, yeah, it depends. But the author isn't giving us the missing moments anyway, so I'm often interested in what other people may have thought happened, in them. :-)
From:
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I often enjoy "missing moments"-fics, or speculation (isn't all fanfic a sort of speculation anyway? Not speculation in "I think this will happen in Canon", but speculation in "what if THIS happened? What then?"), if it's about characters I'm interested in, I have to say.
Oh yes, me too. It's not that I can't like a fic that's about this at all. It's just when people present themselves as sort of Saint Canon Fan who is just trying to write exactly what the author would have written if he wrote that scene--it just seems so bland and pointless. There's a reason the author didn't write the scene, you know? But that doesn't mean that there aren't *great* fanfics based on missing moments and what if's. But in those cases I'm probably reading the fanfic because I want to hear what that author has to say about that moment etc., not because I think it's missing from canon and I want the respectful fanfic author to fill me in. It's more just how the authors were presenting themselves, like there was no personal passion in the fic, just a sort of bland care for the author.
From:
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Oh yeah, now I get what you mean. And I agree, one of my favourite Hermione-fic has been accused of being "OOC", and while I can see the point, and have bit of criticism for the beginning of the fic, I still think it's IC enough for me, just because the fic explored parts of the characters I want to see explored, and dynamics in a way I was interesting in seeing.