Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I’ve been accused of writing “canon” and I don’t object to the label, partly
because I don’t believe canon and fanon are mutually exclusive. The way I see it,
writing canon means writing that has a significant relationship to the show as
broadcast - speaking a language that anyone who watched the show could
understand. Writing fanon is writing with an eye to the traditions of fanfic. How
deeply you delve into canon or fanon determines how “canon” or “fanon” the
resulting story is.

They’re not quite symmetric, because fanon is both easy to ignore, easy to
stumble into, and easy to create. Fanon spreads like a virus - you
pick it up somewhere, without quite remembering which fic it came from, and
incorporate it into your fic, spreading it to others. Canon is hard to ignore,
hard to get right, and impossible to create unless you’re TPTB.

Writing fanfic is always a dialogue with canon - sometimes it’s shouting
“you should have been this way,” and sometimes it’s whispering,
“you really were this way.” The quality of the fanfic is determined
by how convincing the argument is - people who prefer to shout down their
opponents like their fanfic over-the-top. Readers with a more
hermeneutic approach will prefer a convincing moment of characterization or
fanfix to an arbitrary chapter of familiar but unfounded fanon plot.

To give a specific example: a fanon story tells you that
Janeway finally saw the light and told Chakotay how she really felt about him.
A canon story tells you how Janeway saw the light. There’s no
good reason one story can’t do both, though there are bad reasons.
Fanon-leaning people tend to be angry at canon and refuse to deal with certain
events, or deal with them in a hasty, out-of-character way. Canon-leaning
people tend to shy away from any consequences, as if TPTB themselves
were leaning over their computers insisting that the characters be returned
unaltered for next week’s episode. Fluff worn on your sleeve or angst hidden
in your heart…

I really was going to write about communication in fandom, but it’s late so
that will have to wait until tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 20th, 2002 at 10:14 pm and is filed under Fanfic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.