flyingskull (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
flyingskull) wrote2005-08-27 07:39 pm
flyingskull) wrote2005-08-27 07:39 pm
Entry tags:
AU-ness, OOC-ness and fanfic writing. Oh yes fingers! More fingers!
Gah. I now have the use of seven fingers in toto and I've discovered I'd forgotten how to type with more than three, YAY anyway, I'm sure it's like riding a bike, it'll come to me, eventually. Meanwhile, let's put our hopes in the spell checker and essay.
Have you ever thought what a perfectly canon fanfic with IC characters would end up being like? I've noticed a deplorable tendency to raise hysterical yells of 'This is not canon!' 'This should be AU!' 'Aargh the OOC-ness of the characters!' by the canon fundies (why is it easy for me to suspect most of them are homophobes? Because they generally raise yells of despair and hatred at slash stories? - memo to self, ponder this later) every time that a good new fanfic appears. But do they understand the implications? If Canon is a holy text to be followed in every aspect, then not only plot, location and characterisation must be rigidly adhered to, but also author's style and vocabulary. In other words a perfectly IC fic would be an imitiation of the original and, to me, as interesting as dishwater.
Let me use an example, to make myself clear. I'll use LOTR because it's widespread and I've read the books - though not seen the films thank Fate - it's also such an extreme work in so many aspects that it can make things easy. Let's say that I'll write a fic about an episode of the long interval between Aragorn betrothing himself to Arwen and the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring. Lots of years pass, so I have scope... of a sort. Aragorn is a ranger and passes this time in canon roaming the land, protecting the Shire from the orcs and generally killing a lot of sentient beings. We can presume he eats, drinks, smokes his pipe, walks a whole lot, kills things and gets rid of bodily wastes. We also presume he talks, very little, to landlords and peasants of all species and, more at length, to other rangers and elves. Now, I've chosen Aragorn as Strider because, quite frankly I don't want to have to learn several non-existent languages in order to write a fanfic; I prefer to study real languages, dead or alive, so I can read books in them and converse with real people. For the aforesaid reason, I'll pass on the encounters with the elves, which actually doesn't make a whit of difference, because I don't want to write a novel, just a novelette or a shortie.
Now I've set my general parametres, let's see what I can make Aragorn do in my story. Not much actually, apart from killing things and staying in inns to have a bit of a listen to the local gossip. Right, let's do it. I study Tolkien vocab and turn of phrase, Aragorn personal vocab, brush up on my sonorous periods and go. At the end, since I know my grammar and spelling and I'm rather good at imitating styles, I produce a perfect IC fic that will be so dull I'll probably fall asleep while reading it.
Why? Because I don't give a fig for the ability of Strider to kill things at a hundred paces or up close and personal, or for the safety of the Shire, because, let's face it, we all know the Shire will be safe and Aragorn will become king and wed his rather nebulous lady. Where's the conflict? Where's the interest? Where's a comfy chair to slump asleep into?
Ah, but if I'm a naughty not particularly preoccupied with canon writer I'll ask myself how in hell has Strider stood that imposible long wait between love and kiss and the wedding? He's human, remember, not an elf. Male, human, adult... What does he do between killing things and supping ale in silence to catch the news? Does he wank until he chafes? Does he find relief in mercenary beds? After all LOTR is medievalish in setting, so a man was expected to while the time before marrying - and afterwards too, but let's be civillised about canon and not smash it flat - with tavern wenches, who were prtty cheap too and no more than a normal, sexy rugged man could afford. This is not canon? Who says it ain't? Tolkien may have been a sexually repressed fervid Catholic with a horror of the human body, but I'm not and moreover he knew where babies came from, he just didn't like to dwell on it. So I write this piece on how Strider found relief of sorts and I can make him angst civilly about it or not, depending on which side of canon!Aragorn I'm focusing on. Not that there are sides except one, I mean, but one can imagine sides that are coherent with the one side we are shown. Hmm, this one is a little better, and though quite IC, it'll be surely detested by the fundies, but that's a minor irritation.
Now let's take another step. Say Strider has a fellow ranger who's as lonely and as desperate for sex as he is. Say they have to patrol the Shire for a while. Could it happen? Certainly in real life it has happened time and time again and the people involved were not homos. So it could have happened, but, and this is an important but, if we bend canon a little more than in the other example. Now I for one would do it, I mean that's what fanfic is for to me, exploring the possibilities inherent in a world I haven't created, stretch the envelope, see how far I can go before I land myself in another universe entirely. The fundies will scream at me and also threaten GBH, but I'm a strong woman.
Now let's go further. Does Aragorn love Arwen? Really? Remember he's human, not an elf, he's not immortal, just long-lived by our standards. He's human and humans do not get fixated on their first love when they have no chance to have a relationship with said lover. So he sees the beauteous Arwen and, beign eighteen, he gets a testosterone rush that slams him to his knees. Perfectly normal. He's a bold brave Gryffindor... oops, that's my parody, sorry. He's a bold brave hero and he declares his love after the usual stuttering-and-looking-at-tits-flushing-looking-at-floor stage. They have a memorable kiss in a memorable place which must have been awkward as hell as she's never kissed in all her hundreds of years and he's ditto, though younger. Then things grind to a dead halt for years and years. And he still loves her? How? He has an idealised version of a godess come to Earth... oops Middle Earth to grace his life, but love is all about the nitty gritty of living and the Lady Arwen is soignèe and lovely to look at and gravely wise and possibly a bit of a nag, but the nitty gritty and her are not even on speaking terms. Sooo, let's formulate the 'denial od sexuality' hypothesis. Yes, ladies and gentleman, we have proper slash. Which is by definition non canon, though, IMO, not as anti-canon as, for example, making Aragorn have a shag with Eowyn and then telling her 'sodoff, lady, I'm a taken man'. He's callous enough to tell her 'sorry, luv, can't return your affection' and she slutty enough to more or less repliy 'Oh well then' and to go and shag Faramir. Canon is unreal enough as it is. At this point I'll probably have to hire a bodyguard to protect me from the fundies on the warpath and serious spitting may occur. They'll also rant at me to call this last hypothesis of a fic AU, as the Eowyn shagging - though repsectable from a homophobic point of view - is not canon.
The Aragorn/Eowyn postulated shag is clearly AU, because it takes place during the LOTR time-frame. Or is it?
To me AU has always meant taking the characters in a novel/film/cartoon/comic and changing the setting in which they usually live and operate. A change of pairing that takes place in the original setting may be anti-canon, but not AU.
When you change a canon pairing, your characters are OOC by definition, but is this so bad? I repeat, I think it's much more interesting to explore the possibilities than to parrot an author who, for the most part is mediocre. I've seen fanfics based on excellent books by genius authors, including Shakespeare and they are alright, I suppose. I wouldn't read them for love or money, but I don't see why not except that a good author, an artist, gives you so much subtext and layered text that frankly there's very little to explore. But that's just me, of course. To get back to shipping, let's say we have a good author with some flaws (Tolkien in fact) why not explore the flaws and try and resolve them in context? I'm not sure I would slash Aragorn, nor am I particularly interested in the sex lives of other species, but I wouldn't certainly make the poor man wait so long in torment to get at least peace of tonker. I'd make use of the darker aspects and the - barely - implied complexities of his double life as a ranger to let the poor man have a long, loving, up-and-down relationship in which he can feel alive and human and which he has to hide from the Elrond gang at all costs, because he can't risk wrecking the goodwill of the powerful elves in the coming... coming... coming... war with the Dark Lord. He's heir to throne and so, very IC, he may very well a family on the side that never crosses the official path of his royalty and friendship with Elrond.
If i were to slash Aragorn, I'd either use Boromir and angst him to death; pick a rohirrim, any rohirrim; or invent an OC: another ranger. They couldn't have a happy ending, of course. In this particular case there's no way Arry can have a happy ending with someone who's not Arwen, and I wouldn't call that a happy ending either. ;) If I were writing in other fandoms, I could probably manage to find space for a happy ending for my slashed couple. The point is I think it's alright to bend canon, but only up to a point. When canon breaks and dissolves instead of creaking, then it's time to reconsider. Better change canon and inspiration, or plunge into huge canon morasses like those Marvel so thoughtfully provides, so much so that now it's impossible to be anti-canon or OOC in Marvel fics. :D
Looking at the whole thing from another point of view, though, if I were writing a humorous fic, then the whole question of canon, anti-canon, IC and OOC would have no meaning in LOTR. There's not an ounce of fun and if that ghastly feast and dialogue are meant to indicate that hobbits have more fun or are capable of humour and wit, then poor Tolkien failed miserably. As for the rest of the bunch they are gloomy bastard to a man and may eternal Death spare me from elven song and dance. Elves must be frightful teases. They ponce around, sing and dance all pretty lovely in their flowing locks and bright eyes and then when the old sap rises and the juices flow freely it's goodnight with no even a chaste kiss. Gah.
To quote Maya's Rat: "sweet Lord, will no-one stop me?"
Have you ever thought what a perfectly canon fanfic with IC characters would end up being like? I've noticed a deplorable tendency to raise hysterical yells of 'This is not canon!' 'This should be AU!' 'Aargh the OOC-ness of the characters!' by the canon fundies (why is it easy for me to suspect most of them are homophobes? Because they generally raise yells of despair and hatred at slash stories? - memo to self, ponder this later) every time that a good new fanfic appears. But do they understand the implications? If Canon is a holy text to be followed in every aspect, then not only plot, location and characterisation must be rigidly adhered to, but also author's style and vocabulary. In other words a perfectly IC fic would be an imitiation of the original and, to me, as interesting as dishwater.
Let me use an example, to make myself clear. I'll use LOTR because it's widespread and I've read the books - though not seen the films thank Fate - it's also such an extreme work in so many aspects that it can make things easy. Let's say that I'll write a fic about an episode of the long interval between Aragorn betrothing himself to Arwen and the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring. Lots of years pass, so I have scope... of a sort. Aragorn is a ranger and passes this time in canon roaming the land, protecting the Shire from the orcs and generally killing a lot of sentient beings. We can presume he eats, drinks, smokes his pipe, walks a whole lot, kills things and gets rid of bodily wastes. We also presume he talks, very little, to landlords and peasants of all species and, more at length, to other rangers and elves. Now, I've chosen Aragorn as Strider because, quite frankly I don't want to have to learn several non-existent languages in order to write a fanfic; I prefer to study real languages, dead or alive, so I can read books in them and converse with real people. For the aforesaid reason, I'll pass on the encounters with the elves, which actually doesn't make a whit of difference, because I don't want to write a novel, just a novelette or a shortie.
Now I've set my general parametres, let's see what I can make Aragorn do in my story. Not much actually, apart from killing things and staying in inns to have a bit of a listen to the local gossip. Right, let's do it. I study Tolkien vocab and turn of phrase, Aragorn personal vocab, brush up on my sonorous periods and go. At the end, since I know my grammar and spelling and I'm rather good at imitating styles, I produce a perfect IC fic that will be so dull I'll probably fall asleep while reading it.
Why? Because I don't give a fig for the ability of Strider to kill things at a hundred paces or up close and personal, or for the safety of the Shire, because, let's face it, we all know the Shire will be safe and Aragorn will become king and wed his rather nebulous lady. Where's the conflict? Where's the interest? Where's a comfy chair to slump asleep into?
Ah, but if I'm a naughty not particularly preoccupied with canon writer I'll ask myself how in hell has Strider stood that imposible long wait between love and kiss and the wedding? He's human, remember, not an elf. Male, human, adult... What does he do between killing things and supping ale in silence to catch the news? Does he wank until he chafes? Does he find relief in mercenary beds? After all LOTR is medievalish in setting, so a man was expected to while the time before marrying - and afterwards too, but let's be civillised about canon and not smash it flat - with tavern wenches, who were prtty cheap too and no more than a normal, sexy rugged man could afford. This is not canon? Who says it ain't? Tolkien may have been a sexually repressed fervid Catholic with a horror of the human body, but I'm not and moreover he knew where babies came from, he just didn't like to dwell on it. So I write this piece on how Strider found relief of sorts and I can make him angst civilly about it or not, depending on which side of canon!Aragorn I'm focusing on. Not that there are sides except one, I mean, but one can imagine sides that are coherent with the one side we are shown. Hmm, this one is a little better, and though quite IC, it'll be surely detested by the fundies, but that's a minor irritation.
Now let's take another step. Say Strider has a fellow ranger who's as lonely and as desperate for sex as he is. Say they have to patrol the Shire for a while. Could it happen? Certainly in real life it has happened time and time again and the people involved were not homos. So it could have happened, but, and this is an important but, if we bend canon a little more than in the other example. Now I for one would do it, I mean that's what fanfic is for to me, exploring the possibilities inherent in a world I haven't created, stretch the envelope, see how far I can go before I land myself in another universe entirely. The fundies will scream at me and also threaten GBH, but I'm a strong woman.
Now let's go further. Does Aragorn love Arwen? Really? Remember he's human, not an elf, he's not immortal, just long-lived by our standards. He's human and humans do not get fixated on their first love when they have no chance to have a relationship with said lover. So he sees the beauteous Arwen and, beign eighteen, he gets a testosterone rush that slams him to his knees. Perfectly normal. He's a bold brave Gryffindor... oops, that's my parody, sorry. He's a bold brave hero and he declares his love after the usual stuttering-and-looking-at-tits-flushing-looking-at-floor stage. They have a memorable kiss in a memorable place which must have been awkward as hell as she's never kissed in all her hundreds of years and he's ditto, though younger. Then things grind to a dead halt for years and years. And he still loves her? How? He has an idealised version of a godess come to Earth... oops Middle Earth to grace his life, but love is all about the nitty gritty of living and the Lady Arwen is soignèe and lovely to look at and gravely wise and possibly a bit of a nag, but the nitty gritty and her are not even on speaking terms. Sooo, let's formulate the 'denial od sexuality' hypothesis. Yes, ladies and gentleman, we have proper slash. Which is by definition non canon, though, IMO, not as anti-canon as, for example, making Aragorn have a shag with Eowyn and then telling her 'sodoff, lady, I'm a taken man'. He's callous enough to tell her 'sorry, luv, can't return your affection' and she slutty enough to more or less repliy 'Oh well then' and to go and shag Faramir. Canon is unreal enough as it is. At this point I'll probably have to hire a bodyguard to protect me from the fundies on the warpath and serious spitting may occur. They'll also rant at me to call this last hypothesis of a fic AU, as the Eowyn shagging - though repsectable from a homophobic point of view - is not canon.
The Aragorn/Eowyn postulated shag is clearly AU, because it takes place during the LOTR time-frame. Or is it?
To me AU has always meant taking the characters in a novel/film/cartoon/comic and changing the setting in which they usually live and operate. A change of pairing that takes place in the original setting may be anti-canon, but not AU.
When you change a canon pairing, your characters are OOC by definition, but is this so bad? I repeat, I think it's much more interesting to explore the possibilities than to parrot an author who, for the most part is mediocre. I've seen fanfics based on excellent books by genius authors, including Shakespeare and they are alright, I suppose. I wouldn't read them for love or money, but I don't see why not except that a good author, an artist, gives you so much subtext and layered text that frankly there's very little to explore. But that's just me, of course. To get back to shipping, let's say we have a good author with some flaws (Tolkien in fact) why not explore the flaws and try and resolve them in context? I'm not sure I would slash Aragorn, nor am I particularly interested in the sex lives of other species, but I wouldn't certainly make the poor man wait so long in torment to get at least peace of tonker. I'd make use of the darker aspects and the - barely - implied complexities of his double life as a ranger to let the poor man have a long, loving, up-and-down relationship in which he can feel alive and human and which he has to hide from the Elrond gang at all costs, because he can't risk wrecking the goodwill of the powerful elves in the coming... coming... coming... war with the Dark Lord. He's heir to throne and so, very IC, he may very well a family on the side that never crosses the official path of his royalty and friendship with Elrond.
If i were to slash Aragorn, I'd either use Boromir and angst him to death; pick a rohirrim, any rohirrim; or invent an OC: another ranger. They couldn't have a happy ending, of course. In this particular case there's no way Arry can have a happy ending with someone who's not Arwen, and I wouldn't call that a happy ending either. ;) If I were writing in other fandoms, I could probably manage to find space for a happy ending for my slashed couple. The point is I think it's alright to bend canon, but only up to a point. When canon breaks and dissolves instead of creaking, then it's time to reconsider. Better change canon and inspiration, or plunge into huge canon morasses like those Marvel so thoughtfully provides, so much so that now it's impossible to be anti-canon or OOC in Marvel fics. :D
Looking at the whole thing from another point of view, though, if I were writing a humorous fic, then the whole question of canon, anti-canon, IC and OOC would have no meaning in LOTR. There's not an ounce of fun and if that ghastly feast and dialogue are meant to indicate that hobbits have more fun or are capable of humour and wit, then poor Tolkien failed miserably. As for the rest of the bunch they are gloomy bastard to a man and may eternal Death spare me from elven song and dance. Elves must be frightful teases. They ponce around, sing and dance all pretty lovely in their flowing locks and bright eyes and then when the old sap rises and the juices flow freely it's goodnight with no even a chaste kiss. Gah.
To quote Maya's Rat: "sweet Lord, will no-one stop me?"
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