Here from metafandom. I think that this is one of the tricky things about designations of "canon" in fandoms with multiple creators. With a single creator, as in the HP fandom (mine, alas), it's easy enough to dismiss charges of the author "getting it wrong." The further away from the auteur model you get, though, the more difficult I think it becomes to maintain the mental firewalls between "canon" and "fanon."
Have you read Matt Hills? In Fan Cultures (2002), he tries to outline some of the qualities of fiction that he believes to be typical of texts which are likely to inspire fandom activity, or to achieve "cult status." One of the three things he identifies is auteurism, the identification of a single person who (whether accurately or not) fans can point to as responsible for the fictional world.
He also points out that sometimes, as in long-running television shows, the identity of the auteur can change over time, but that it seems somehow important to fans to have the sense that there is, so to speak, someone - some individual person - in charge.
I remember thinking when I first read that passage that it didn't really work too well as a description of comics, in which corporate-owned characters are farmed out to different artists over many years. My experience with people who do "fannish" stuff (write fanfic, play RPGs, etc.) based on comics canon is that they usually need to identify ahead of time which version of the characters and of the universe(s) they are choosing to accept as canon for purposes of the activity.
As for the upset Harry Potter fans - I'm not one of them myself, but I think that the "totally unacceptable as canon and everyone ought to continue as if it was never published" statement can make sense in some very specific situations. A small community of fanfic writers, for example, might all agree by consensus to continue to write stories "as if the last book never happened." Hey, whatever floats their boat. I do agree, however, that it would be very foolish for such a group to attempt to demand this as a universal response, rather than as a niche preference in a contained community, or to refuse to recognize that everyone else will consider their work AU.
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Date: 2005-09-15 04:29 am (UTC)Have you read Matt Hills? In Fan Cultures (2002), he tries to outline some of the qualities of fiction that he believes to be typical of texts which are likely to inspire fandom activity, or to achieve "cult status." One of the three things he identifies is auteurism, the identification of a single person who (whether accurately or not) fans can point to as responsible for the fictional world.
He also points out that sometimes, as in long-running television shows, the identity of the auteur can change over time, but that it seems somehow important to fans to have the sense that there is, so to speak, someone - some individual person - in charge.
I remember thinking when I first read that passage that it didn't really work too well as a description of comics, in which corporate-owned characters are farmed out to different artists over many years. My experience with people who do "fannish" stuff (write fanfic, play RPGs, etc.) based on comics canon is that they usually need to identify ahead of time which version of the characters and of the universe(s) they are choosing to accept as canon for purposes of the activity.
As for the upset Harry Potter fans - I'm not one of them myself, but I think that the "totally unacceptable as canon and everyone ought to continue as if it was never published" statement can make sense in some very specific situations. A small community of fanfic writers, for example, might all agree by consensus to continue to write stories "as if the last book never happened." Hey, whatever floats their boat. I do agree, however, that it would be very foolish for such a group to attempt to demand this as a universal response, rather than as a niche preference in a contained community, or to refuse to recognize that everyone else will consider their work AU.