Canon fodder, or: why I phased out of HP fandom

[resonant]

When I posted my HP WIPs, I said, "A pox on open-canon fandoms," and 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.

Comments

[vee-fic.livejournal.com]

Novel-writers can aim towards a particular goal over the course of their series and still leave the kind of open canonicity that invites fanfic. (No less so than TV writers can do the same, over a season-long arc.) It is not a necessary component of writing an arc that all details serve the arc and the arc only. Actually, I would say that's a hallmark of bad writing.

I'm not sure that open/arc or closed/episodic canon is the issue you're driving at here, or you might be describing predominant signs but not the disease itself. The issue, from what you're describing, sounds like the difference between a rich world and a poor one: a rich world always has more stories in it -- stories that fit in after the arc is over, or before it began, or into the interstices between segments, even if the originating author doesn't intend any more stories; a poor world doesn't have enough extraneous detail to support any other stories, even if the author wants to tell them.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the words were badly chosen. I'm still flailing toward a concept I can't quite articulate.

a rich world always has more stories in it -- stories that fit in after the arc is over, or before it began, or into the interstices between segments, even if the originating author doesn't intend any more stories; a poor world doesn't have enough extraneous detail to support any other stories, even if the author wants to tell them.

Maybe what it is is that I'm afraid book 7 is going to transform HP from a rich world into a poor one? There are tons of stories in HP, millions of them; they multiply with every new character introduced. I think the world is extraordinarily rich, though the main Harry-Voldemort conflict is to me one of the least interesting of the available stories.

[vee-fic.livejournal.com]

It's entirely possible to get to the end of an arc-y epic and suddenly -- all the characters get married! Even the minor ones! To each other! Even if they've never met!! And the ones who don't get married join convents or die!!!

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, coffeeandink and I discuss this occasionally and like to say that a good fic universe is a universe that's incoherent -- which is a less-flattering way of saying that it leaves enough texture lying around that we can make something of it. Kind of two different ways to look at the same ficability.)

[zelempa.livejournal.com]

And sometimes a good fic universe IS, actually, incoherent. :)

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 Strauss Shaw 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.

[vee-fic.livejournal.com]

Oh, Hitchcock's a good example. His narrative economy is so spare, to fic anything of his would be to fic it entirely on his terms. His worlds are made up of exactly what Hitchcock has put into them, and no more.

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.

[myalexandria.livejournal.com]

I think the world is extraordinarily rich, though the main Harry-Voldemort conflict is to me one of the least interesting of the available stories.

I think this is *exactly right*. In a lot of ways they're the two least interesting characters in the series -- or at least, they're not interesting when they're in relationship to each other. In relationship to themselves, or to other people, they can become interesting.

So I also, when I read HP stories, am usually looking for the other characters to become what I refer to as "real people" -- three-dimensional, with a reality of their own which doesn't depend on their service to the plot.

One of my rules for good writing is that if you have to sacrifice your character to your plot -- making them do something idiotic if they're not idiots, or whatever -- then you need to think much harder about why you want the plot to go in exactly that direction. I think this is something Rowling is *awful* at.