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Canon fodder, or: why I phased out of HP fandom
When I posted my HP WIPs, I said, "A pox on open-canon fandoms," and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
arby_m said, "I totally agree, but what about SGA? (Does the openness of canon not count, because it is SGA after all and the writers are on crack?)"
Crack helps, but really I have two problems with writing in HP fandom now: (1) unity vs. episodic-ness, and (2) how much I trust JKR, which is not much.
There are no spoilers in this post, but it's the sort of discussion that could easily generate spoilers in the comments, so beware.
A TV show is episodic, pretty much by definition. And when your canon is episodic, there are multiple conflicts, multiple antagonists, multiple resolutions -- and thus multiple points of entry. You can come in in any episode.
And because there are so many episodes, you also have the feeling that what you've been told isn't comprehensive, that the characters are having many other adventures in between the episodes we've been shown. Often an episodic story will also make you feel that the adventures could go on after the end.
Take Stargate:Atlantis. You can be fairly certain that they won't end the series without dealing pretty comprehensively with the Wraith, but maybe it's Atlantis vs. the Wraith and maybe it's Earth vs. the Wraith and maybe the Atlantis people trick everybody so it ends up being the Genii vs. the Wraith. Or maybe the Wraith find Earth and it ends up being the Wraith vs. the Common Cold. Or maybe (this would be unwise, but not impossible) they wipe out or humanize the Wraith day after tomorrow, and the rest of the series is devoted to the Genii or the Replicators or some other antagonist. You just can't predict right now what the climax is going to be.
Some novels are episodic (The Hobbit is, and so are most of the Hornblower books; that's why they make such a lovely miniseries), but it seems to me that the current novel market places a high value on unity in novels.
The HP series is kind of an extreme example of this; six volumes so far, all basically telling one story. One antagonist, one conflict, one confrontation for the climax, two possible outcomes depending on who wins that conflict. The climax of Book 7 can't possibly be anything but Harry vs. Voldemort, can it? And either Voldemort wins or Harry does, and at that point the series is over.
Now, problem 2, which is related, is how much I trust JKR, which is not much.
Please understand, this isn't a literary criticism. The choices she's making are perfectly legitimate from a literary point of view. But they're choices that make it difficult for fanfic writers to find a place in her universe. In a nutshell, I don't trust her to value her characters as much as I do.
Think of the death of Dumbledore. Of course it was inevitable -- I killed him myself in Transfigurations -- but I was very surprised that she killed him so soon. Placed that early in the series, his death really served almost no purpose except to throw suspicion on Snape.
No, think about that for a second. She threw away Dumbledore in order to throw suspicion on Snape.
Basically this tells me that she's only telling one story, she's only got one conflict, and she's going to throw everything she's got at it.
Now I myself think there are lots of stories to be told after the war; when I was writing HP, I had a sort of a minor concentration in stories that amounted to "Voldemort's dead. Now what?" But I don't think that interests JKR much. I think she's going to tie up every loose end, and some of them she's going to tie up in shrouds, because once the Harry vs. Voldemort conflict is finished, she's done.
That's as closed as a canon can be. Too closed for me.
arby_m said, "I totally agree, but what about SGA? (Does the openness of canon not count, because it is SGA after all and the writers are on crack?)" Crack helps, but really I have two problems with writing in HP fandom now: (1) unity vs. episodic-ness, and (2) how much I trust JKR, which is not much.
There are no spoilers in this post, but it's the sort of discussion that could easily generate spoilers in the comments, so beware.
A TV show is episodic, pretty much by definition. And when your canon is episodic, there are multiple conflicts, multiple antagonists, multiple resolutions -- and thus multiple points of entry. You can come in in any episode.
And because there are so many episodes, you also have the feeling that what you've been told isn't comprehensive, that the characters are having many other adventures in between the episodes we've been shown. Often an episodic story will also make you feel that the adventures could go on after the end.
Take Stargate:Atlantis. You can be fairly certain that they won't end the series without dealing pretty comprehensively with the Wraith, but maybe it's Atlantis vs. the Wraith and maybe it's Earth vs. the Wraith and maybe the Atlantis people trick everybody so it ends up being the Genii vs. the Wraith. Or maybe the Wraith find Earth and it ends up being the Wraith vs. the Common Cold. Or maybe (this would be unwise, but not impossible) they wipe out or humanize the Wraith day after tomorrow, and the rest of the series is devoted to the Genii or the Replicators or some other antagonist. You just can't predict right now what the climax is going to be.
Some novels are episodic (The Hobbit is, and so are most of the Hornblower books; that's why they make such a lovely miniseries), but it seems to me that the current novel market places a high value on unity in novels.
The HP series is kind of an extreme example of this; six volumes so far, all basically telling one story. One antagonist, one conflict, one confrontation for the climax, two possible outcomes depending on who wins that conflict. The climax of Book 7 can't possibly be anything but Harry vs. Voldemort, can it? And either Voldemort wins or Harry does, and at that point the series is over.
Now, problem 2, which is related, is how much I trust JKR, which is not much.
Please understand, this isn't a literary criticism. The choices she's making are perfectly legitimate from a literary point of view. But they're choices that make it difficult for fanfic writers to find a place in her universe. In a nutshell, I don't trust her to value her characters as much as I do.
Think of the death of Dumbledore. Of course it was inevitable -- I killed him myself in Transfigurations -- but I was very surprised that she killed him so soon. Placed that early in the series, his death really served almost no purpose except to throw suspicion on Snape.
No, think about that for a second. She threw away Dumbledore in order to throw suspicion on Snape.
Basically this tells me that she's only telling one story, she's only got one conflict, and she's going to throw everything she's got at it.
Now I myself think there are lots of stories to be told after the war; when I was writing HP, I had a sort of a minor concentration in stories that amounted to "Voldemort's dead. Now what?" But I don't think that interests JKR much. I think she's going to tie up every loose end, and some of them she's going to tie up in shrouds, because once the Harry vs. Voldemort conflict is finished, she's done.
That's as closed as a canon can be. Too closed for me.
no subject
So, yes. By "rich world" I think I mean that lives are not all tied up in a bow and neatened to the point of ending. That they continue to have texture and conflict, both on the page and projectable into the future and past tenses.
(Ironically,
no subject
It's impossible to tie this in with quality of the work because both closed/poor-world/comprehensive/unified/difficult to fic and open/rich/danglybits/texturey/fic-able works can be good or bad. (Not that anyone has really said there's a correspondence, really, but I'm thinking about it and realizing there is none.)
I mean: Buffy: good show, plenty of room for fic; Sentinel: terrible show, a galaxy of fic. (And I say this out of love.)
Similarly everything fitting together in the end could be good or bad, depending on how it works/how believable/how badass it turns out to be in the context of the story. Hitchcock movies, for example, are great, but I don't think you could really fic them, since you're given information so economically and the scenes which are implied but not shown are not shown precisely because they don't need to be: it's clear exactly what must have happened.
On the other hand,
Steiner and StraussShaw and Morgan in Rope are very very gay. (Sorry, I was thinking of the Leopold and & Loeb guys in Compulsion. That's kind of an incoherent telling of that story, much more ficable, except the guys are maybe less pretty.)I think I lost track of where I was going with this.
no subject
Whereas, despite the grisly ending for most of the characters in Titanic, the movie brings up enough extraneous details to provide a lot of jumping-off points for fic. It's intentionally mimicking reality (with the addition of some Hollywood flourish and rassenfrassen Celine Dion), in all its narrative inefficiency.
One of the funny instances of the authors narrowing the universe, but not being able to decrease the ficability, is Blake's Seven. Everybody dies in the end! Violently! And yet, you wouldn't believe how much post-series fic there is out there.