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30 days of fanfic meme, day 13
Jul. 8th, 2011 11:21 amDay 13: Do you prefer canon or fanon when you write? Has writing fanfic for a fandom changed the way you see some or even all of the original source material?
For my ST:TNG stories, the highest compliment I usually wanted was that it felt as if it could have been an episode (possibly with 'if you were allowed to show that on television' as a corollary). I did my best to stick close to canon, because I wanted *those* characters in my stories, not those characters twice removed.
I'm not altogether sure what was fanon instead of canon in the ST:TNG universe anyway.
For popslash… well, hmm. Difficult.
I do think RPF canon is generally much more usable than FPF canon. With ST:TNG, it was entirely possible to be familiar with *all* the canon, although one tended to have to make choices, as there were plenty of contradictions. (My story The Things that Julianna Didn't Say was an attempt to reconcile the disparities between the Lore, Soong and Julianna episodes.) Also, fictional canon doesn't always hold up. Star Trek canon certainly doesn't. RPF canon, by contrast, works because it's true. The universe holds up - we don't *know* what it's like to be a millionaire popstar, but we know it's possible. We can check how long it takes to get from A to B - try doing that with warp speed!
At the same time, we cannot possibly know all the canon, because that's every minute of a person's life, or, every possible sighting and appearance, every interview, every paparazzi moment... each fan has her own personal experience of RPF canon, so our gaps are all slightly different. And, instead of having canon revealed in the order the creators came up with it, we can find out stuff randomly, sometimes years after the event, which change our viewpoint on who these people are and what they've done.
I prefer, on the whole, canon-based stories to outright AUs (although there are some awesome AUs around, and I've written some of which I'm very fond). But canon-based means basically "They're popstars", and can include genderswap, telepathy, random unicorns, all kinds of stuff that is not 'canon' at all. Also, it's sometimes hard to distinguish between fictional content and the real thing—I remember reading a story which referenced a Much Music appearance, and assuming it was made up, only to happen upon the actual interview years later!
I have discovered the joys of writing AUs, but if I possibly can I like to include canon references—eg in It Pays To Advertise Lou Pearlman was the agency owner who went to prison for embezzling. There were references in If You Want To Fly that someone unfamiliar with our canon would miss—any popslash fan would instantly identify the dragons, for instance, and although a non-fan could enjoy those dragons, they'd be missing out on a layer of the story. I don't see the point in writing a fan story that could perfectly well be original fic, because somewhere in there, it ceases to be fanfic and becomes a story where we know what the protagonists look like, which isn't the same thing.
For my ST:TNG stories, the highest compliment I usually wanted was that it felt as if it could have been an episode (possibly with 'if you were allowed to show that on television' as a corollary). I did my best to stick close to canon, because I wanted *those* characters in my stories, not those characters twice removed.
I'm not altogether sure what was fanon instead of canon in the ST:TNG universe anyway.
For popslash… well, hmm. Difficult.
I do think RPF canon is generally much more usable than FPF canon. With ST:TNG, it was entirely possible to be familiar with *all* the canon, although one tended to have to make choices, as there were plenty of contradictions. (My story The Things that Julianna Didn't Say was an attempt to reconcile the disparities between the Lore, Soong and Julianna episodes.) Also, fictional canon doesn't always hold up. Star Trek canon certainly doesn't. RPF canon, by contrast, works because it's true. The universe holds up - we don't *know* what it's like to be a millionaire popstar, but we know it's possible. We can check how long it takes to get from A to B - try doing that with warp speed!
At the same time, we cannot possibly know all the canon, because that's every minute of a person's life, or, every possible sighting and appearance, every interview, every paparazzi moment... each fan has her own personal experience of RPF canon, so our gaps are all slightly different. And, instead of having canon revealed in the order the creators came up with it, we can find out stuff randomly, sometimes years after the event, which change our viewpoint on who these people are and what they've done.
I prefer, on the whole, canon-based stories to outright AUs (although there are some awesome AUs around, and I've written some of which I'm very fond). But canon-based means basically "They're popstars", and can include genderswap, telepathy, random unicorns, all kinds of stuff that is not 'canon' at all. Also, it's sometimes hard to distinguish between fictional content and the real thing—I remember reading a story which referenced a Much Music appearance, and assuming it was made up, only to happen upon the actual interview years later!
I have discovered the joys of writing AUs, but if I possibly can I like to include canon references—eg in It Pays To Advertise Lou Pearlman was the agency owner who went to prison for embezzling. There were references in If You Want To Fly that someone unfamiliar with our canon would miss—any popslash fan would instantly identify the dragons, for instance, and although a non-fan could enjoy those dragons, they'd be missing out on a layer of the story. I don't see the point in writing a fan story that could perfectly well be original fic, because somewhere in there, it ceases to be fanfic and becomes a story where we know what the protagonists look like, which isn't the same thing.