Canon cannon

[alyse]

I've had this musing (I won't call it a rant, because I'm not in a ranty place and I don't think this is ranty :)) brewing for a while, because of a number of things - the discussions about Firefly, the discussions that have been revolving around the development of fannish love, and destina's new icon, about being a canon slut (which I love ::g::). Now that I've finished my new mood theme and am not in the grips of that obsession anymore, I finally have a chance to sit down and put my thoughts into some sort of order, prodded into it finally by luigifish's post about why she takes a while to dip her toes into a new fandom, and what's stopping her.

I'm a canon whore. This will not surprise anyone who knows me. I'm a canon whore like I'm a grammar, characterisation and spelling whore. Picky, in other words. For me, writing is an act of fannish love. I write because I not only love the characters and want more of them, but because there's something I want that I'm not getting on screen. For my last two fandoms, this has been slash, but it's not always been that way and I doubt it will always be that way in the future. So, given the fact that I want to explore what I don't see onscreen, why is canon so important to me?

It just is. It's that fannish love thing again. I simply can't understand those people who maintain that canon isn't important, or that you don't need to watch episodes in order to write fanfiction. For me, if I love the show enough to want to write fanfiction for it, why wouldn't I want to watch every single episode I can get my hands on? If you love the characters enough to write about, you love them enough to spell their names correctly, to correctly state their past, to build upon what you see on the show. And by God you have to watch the show - because you love them.

And yet there are those who don't feel the same way. Maybe they simply don't love the same way that I love. They don't appear to care about how many episodes they watch, or checking their facts - just look at how many different spellings of Kasuf, Sha're and Skaara there are in fanfiction (and on those names you get given leeway by me anyway, since movie canon and tv show canon differ, most noticeably for Sha're/Sha'uri). And I wonder why. It's a rare writer indeed who manages to capture a character after watching only two or three episodes, and I envy them. There appear, however, to be many more writers who simply don't care about canon, who simply want to tell the story they have in their heads, to get it out there as quickly as possible and to whom 'research' is an alien word. And is there anything wrong with that?

No, not in the sense of the fact that it is, after all, a hobby and anyone at all is entitled to write what they want, when they want and sod canon. In fact, let's sod characterisation and grammar and spelling too, while we're at it. It's supposed to be fun. And it is... for the writer. Because it's not much fun for me to read. No, I'm not going to go all 'police state' and dictate what people should or should not be writing. The most I have ever done is suggest to a friend that she might want to think about getting a grasp on canon before she launched into a new love, because her comments to me showed that she didn't have the first idea about it and, strange though it may seem, I was worried about her leaping into a large fandom making such a newbie mistake, particularly a fandom that has been around for years and can be vitriolic at times. And even then what I said was 'If you feel like you've got a good enough grasp of canon, go for it.'

I should be clear that I make a distinction between not having a grasp of canon because you can't see a show and because you can't be arsed watching a show - it's difficult to see CI5: The New Professionals for example, since it's never been sold to the States but the one writer who tried to write after only seeing a couple of episodes was torn apart by a certain portion of the fandom for her poor grasp of canon and her poor characterisation. It was never clear which camp she fell into, but in the end it didn't matter because her characterisation was so far off the mark, and her writing was lacking in other ways. And that, sadly, seems to be the case. Those who scream loudest that canon doesn't matter also seem to think that characterisation doesn't matter, spelling doesn't matter... etc, etc. Not always the way, of course, but it's like cheese and pickle... often found together in an unappetising sandwich.

AUs I see differently, at least intentional AUs. To me, an AU is a deliberate decision to veer from canon and in order to do that you have to know canon. I don't mean you have to be a geek, or analyse every nuance in every episode minutely, but watching a fair few episodes definitely helps. AUs that aren't deliberate are just bad. You know the ones... the ones where they become an AU simply by virtue of someone not considering canon or because they simply can't be arsed to do a little research. Or, you know, actually watch episodes. Oops. Almost let my inner bitch off the leash there. Oh, sod it. Letting her run free is so much fun. The ones that forget that Sam has one sibling, a brother, and that Daniel was an only child. And has them as long lost separated at birth siblings, adopted by different people. Or forgetting that Catherine is in her 70s in the movie (she was about 8 or 9 in 1924) and supposedly the same at the beginning of the TV show, which makes the possibility of her being Daniel's mother who gave him up for adoption (Daniel being 32 in 1997, meaning Catherine was in her 40s when she had him - not impossible but unlikely, and he damned well can't be Ernest Littlefield's son as he disappeared through the Stargate twenty years before Daniel was born). Those kind of AUs. Sloppy ones, ones that don't specifically start off as being an AU but then take that sharp veer because someone didn't care enough to do their sums.

I cringe at those because, to me, time is a finite resource and I simply can't bear to waste it on this kind of sloppy writing. It's not lack of opportunity to check canon, since there are resources out there, it may be lack of ability but often it's simply lack of care. That whole 'can't be arsed' attitude combined with the whole 'wouldn't it be cool' thing that I've ranted about before. And I'm left wondering why they feel the need to write fanfiction for the show, when they don't feel the need to watch it.

In some cases it may well be the 'ain't it cool' thing. In others, maybe they're simply so gripped with the love of the characters that they can't wait to write about it, which may go some way to explain the whole Firefly phenomenon. But what about established shows rather than new ones? Stargate, New Professionals, things that have been around for years? I've seen people enthuse about how much they love character Y because he's so much like character X in their favourite TV show, that they have so much in common. And my response has been 'What? The fact that they're both linguists?' because as far as I could see that was all they had in common. I've seen this before, too. To my mind, (and moving away from specifics to the general) if someone loves character X so much that they have to slot all other characters into boxes marked 'Like X' or 'Not Like X' then why aren't they simply writing about character X? He's their fannish love, the one they want to write about and in some cases make their own, personal property (like shellmidwife talks about) or, even worse, their own personal Mary Sue (another rant for another day). So why the need to write fanfiction for a show that they know little about? I could go on to talk about crossovers, particularly slash crossovers where you throw two disparate characters into bed together because in your opinion they would look hot together but I won't. I still want some people on my friends list to talk to me ::g:: But it still leaves my question. Why? Why do it?

I did wonder if it was something to do with fannish participation and the fact that there is still a heirarchy which puts the producers of fannish commodities on a rung above the consumers so that people feel pushed into producing fic in order to achieve some kind of status, but I'm not so sure that that's it either. Presumably, in order to have a stake in the community you have to have that fannish love, to have to have watched the show and want to share that love with others who are as obsessive. Actually, thinking about it, maybe that is part of it, because these days there is so much movement between fandoms with the same kind of hierarchies. So newbies to a fandom may feel the need to produce something straight off the bat in order to make a mark rather than lurking for a while. Attention seeking, in other words, where the knowledge of canon, or lack thereof, takes a back seat to visibility. And, of course, it works (much to my disgust - musesfool has an entry on why does badfic get good feedback here). But not from me, because it comes down to one simple fact.

If there are writers who don't think that canon is important, or who can't be arsed watching the show in order to grasp the basics never mind the nuances, why should I be arsed to read their fics? Especially not when there are writers who care, who agonise over how to fit their ideas into canon, writers who do take that time to get it right like minkboylove and destina and elke_tanzer and widget285 and... the list goes on and on and I love you all for it. Feed my addiction. I still remember Anais agonising over having to watch D&C repeatedly for Scratch and I felt her pain ::g:: The constipated puppy looks that Jack and Sam kept exchanging were, frankly, painful in the extreme. But she did it, and her writing shows the care she takes. So why should I be bothered about reading a story from an author who doesn't?

In short, I can't.

[Edit: widget285 has some taken one of my threads and added some very good points about the difference between fannish love and fannish infatuation here. Go read :) ]