v-s.net v0.6

Wednesday, 2:27 pm in Storytime

If there’s one thing that Corner and the DCU conspired to teach me, it was that canon really doesn’t matter. I’m still trying to decide whether that’s a good thing or not.

See, I was reading some more responses to Moffat’s latest Doctor Who run, and the following line slapped me in the face:

I find RTD brilliant in his own right; he’s written my favorite eps of the series and he’s got a great gift for characterization and dialogue. He’s pretty weak with plot, though, which is a major flaw in this sort of scifi writing, and I’d like to see him return to more character-focused drama like Queer as Folk. Or else he can come write for SGA, since plot is hardly their selling point anyway!

Quoted From: xparrot: Who-ing it up

Some more background: About six months or so ago now I was sitting in the foodcourt at Woden with my mum, talking about me-as-a-writer. One of the things mum said to me was that she thought I had a strong grasp of dialogue and characterisation. I thought about it, and after a few self-involved moments agreed that she was probably correct. My grasp of plot has always been tenuous at best; to me, the plot is something that happens in the background to give the characters something to react to. It’s not a ‘thing’ in and of itself. The reason I love Terry Pratchett is because I adore his characters; think they have depth and nuance and feel alive to me. The reason I can’t stand J.K. Rowling is because I loathe hers; think they’re thin, flimsy and unreal.

Corner really hammered this home for me. The plot there is about characterisation; it’s all about Loki’s identity crisis. Chainbreaker is more directly plot-driven but you can blame randomredux for that one; anything that moves the story is probably his. That was the other thing working with randomredux taught me; he’s scoped the plotlines for Urban Mythica out to a degree that just makes my jaw drop. Corner’s plot is pretty much: “Book One: Loki fights Baldr, meets Sigmund, has identity crisis, possibly with end-of-the-world. Book Two: Loki fights Ed. Ed is or is not Odin. Book Three: Profit!” The chain of set-pieces is there, but the filler tends to change every time I think about it. The canon is mutable, in other words (which causes all sorts of fun with Chainbreaker, let me assure you); the point is more about the characters’ experiences than the actual events that happen.

And when I read fanfic, it’s the same deal. I like some plot, but only inasmuch as it gives the characters something to rail against. One of my favourite fic series right now is The Identical Series (and I will link this as soon as I get home, honest). It’s very plot heavy, but the plot itself isn’t what makes the fic worth reading. Actually, the plot is kinda, well… silly. Which isn’t to denigrate the fic at all (like I said, I think the damn thing’s brilliant), only to say that the premise – Lionel clones Lex’s more-eviller replacement, disinherits real Lex – has been done so often that it was old in the Silver Age.¹ The thing that makes this fic great is the characterisation.

I think this is probably where my extremely high tolerance for off-canon, AU² and crackfic comes from. So long as you can write my characters in a way I can believe in, I don’t care how crackish or clichéd your plot is. In fact, I think the main reason I like clichéd fics (I have a regrettably serious kink for “fake boyfriends” style stories) is because it all-but forces the author to concentrate on the characterisation in order to pull them off. Because, seriously, you plot is not your drawcard.

To be honest, I think the vast bulk of slashfic is written this way.

But people still cling to the idea of canon. I used to, as well; I remember sitting next to reams and reams of printed FFVII background for Untitled 5. I made the newbie mistake of writing Rinoa out of Futureloop in the very first chapter. But my time in the DCU taught me that, well, it’s just really not that important. The DCU’s canon is a twisty and treacherous thing at the best of times, and it’s not at all uncommon to see what I suppose you could think of as “combined canons”; the most common is the “Smallville-to-movieverse” setting. And, sure, this makes no sense whatsoever (the relationships between Clark, Lois, Lex and Jor-El are too all over the place) but the stories written here still work because they take liberties and gloss over the rough bits. And I like that. I like that fic writers in the DCU feel free to pick-and-choose; the fanon of one individual story is more important than a strict adherence to canon because, let’s face it, half the time not even the canon knows what it’s doing (or, occasionally, is so criminally stupid that you wish it didn’t).

And somewhere between then and now, I’ve found myself writing more-and-more off-canon fic. When I construct a fanon to write against, I go through a process of picking out major canon events. Mostly these are things that are in some fashion character-defining and, yeah, when I take canon I try to take canon as accurately as I can (Wikipedia, Google, damo-in-japan and randomredux are my very good allies in this endeavour). M[y sins against canon are almost exclusively sins of omission; events that didn’t happen, characters that never showed up, words that were never said.

I admit that this laissez-faire approach probably bothers some people. I mean, I know the standard procedure is to follow canon religiously up to a point then deviate off from that but… meh. I don’t necessarily want to write my story from that first deviation; maybe I want to skip lightly across canon and write my story twenty years from that now (as is the case with, for example, Déjà Vu). Fics like this are really common in any serialised canon, of course, but most of them were written years ago and their discrepancies are the result of having been jossed in the interim. I figure that if people can manage to still enjoy those fics that they can still enjoy “faux-jossed” stories that were written later but as if they came from earlier.

So maybe this is a broad-stroked disclaimer. I’m not writing “DCU!movieverse” or “Authority” or “Smallville” fic; I’m writing “movieverse-ish” or “Authority-ish” or “SV-esque” fic. What I mean is that I’m taking approximations those characters and doing my own thing with them; if I don’t like something, consider it retconned. If you’re lucky, I might even tell you about it. The enjoyment is not so much playing in someone else’s sandpit as it is stealing their sand and making my own.

And I’m good with that.

Long live the derivative work.

1. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, DCU canon!Lex Luthor is – or at least was, at some point, for a while – his own clone. I believe the story in question was called something cheerful like “They Saved Lex Luthor’s Brain!”. Oh comic-book brain transplants, never change okay? ^
2. The difference? Well, I’d think of a “Clark isn’t married to Lois” fic as being off-canon, while “Bruce is a dashing space pirate” as an AU. ^

• Tags » canon vs. fanon, fanfic, meta, writing