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."
*nods* HP and the DCU are on two fairly extreme ends of that spectrum. JK Rowling has pretty close to *total* creative control (give or take an editor) and, as far as I can tell from skipping the outskirts of HP fandom, a story that is affected little by audience feedback. The DCU on the other hand… well, one of the reasons the canon/fanon line is so fuzzy might be the people involved.
Devin Grayson, a writer on the Bat-titles, wrote fanfic first, and publicly admits to slashing Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson in her head (although not in the text. But she does make it easy for *us*). Allan Heinberg, the writer for Young Avengers, iirc, mentioned in an interview that he’d be changing how he dealt with the characters in his title because of the way fans responded to the (fairly blatant) subtext. Mark Waid has his Legion characters reading and discussing reader mail in short “out of continuity” segments.
I could go on and on (but I won’t, ‘cause I want you to like me). But it’s fairly easy to see much of the DCU as closer to *fandom* than anything. Maybe as some kind of weird round robin, where half the writers are ignoring what the other half are doing at any given time. (A week or two after the Batman issue I lambasted above came out, another title was published wherein Dr. Leslie Thompkins was working in Gotham, oblivious to her fate in the other.)
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.
Oooh. I have not, but it looks shiny. I’ll have to check it out. I wonder if this is why so much is made of the *Jossverse*, rather than as the Buffy-verse or similar. Not that I’m denying the Joss Whedon genius, but you very rarely see mention of the *other* name in the Angel credits.
...Or maybe a single creator with a strong direction (of some fashion) in mind is just more likely to produce that kind of text? But I think that’s not the issue you’re talking about.
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.
*laughs* Yeah. This has less to do with agreeing with any particular writer… or auteur one agrees with most closely, as that every so often the universe gets completely rebooted. It’s important to know if you’re playing in the continuity where Batman has a rainbow costume for those special occasions and Superman makes a robot spank Lois Lane… or the more recent one, where all the DCU heroes ought to remember meeting the Looney Toons characters. Especially for an RPG, I would imagine.
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.”
Of all the HP AU communities out there which frighten me, this is not one of them. I was mostly talking about the couple people I saw who were very, very upset just after reading it, and apparently fairly confused that not everyone agreed with them. It’s probably a lot like any fandom, really. After a while, we get to feel that the characters are somehow *ours*, and when the person in charge does something we don’t agree with, it’s hard not to take it personally.
And when that person in charge has no real auteurial claim, things get bloody.
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Date: 2005-09-15 05:48 am (UTC)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."
*nods* HP and the DCU are on two fairly extreme ends of that spectrum. JK Rowling has pretty close to *total* creative control (give or take an editor) and, as far as I can tell from skipping the outskirts of HP fandom, a story that is affected little by audience feedback. The DCU on the other hand… well, one of the reasons the canon/fanon line is so fuzzy might be the people involved.
Devin Grayson, a writer on the Bat-titles, wrote fanfic first, and publicly admits to slashing Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson in her head (although not in the text. But she does make it easy for *us*). Allan Heinberg, the writer for Young Avengers, iirc, mentioned in an interview that he’d be changing how he dealt with the characters in his title because of the way fans responded to the (fairly blatant) subtext. Mark Waid has his Legion characters reading and discussing reader mail in short “out of continuity” segments.
I could go on and on (but I won’t, ‘cause I want you to like me). But it’s fairly easy to see much of the DCU as closer to *fandom* than anything. Maybe as some kind of weird round robin, where half the writers are ignoring what the other half are doing at any given time. (A week or two after the Batman issue I lambasted above came out, another title was published wherein Dr. Leslie Thompkins was working in Gotham, oblivious to her fate in the other.)
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.
Oooh. I have not, but it looks shiny. I’ll have to check it out. I wonder if this is why so much is made of the *Jossverse*, rather than as the Buffy-verse or similar. Not that I’m denying the Joss Whedon genius, but you very rarely see mention of the *other* name in the Angel credits.
...Or maybe a single creator with a strong direction (of some fashion) in mind is just more likely to produce that kind of text? But I think that’s not the issue you’re talking about.
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.
*laughs* Yeah. This has less to do with agreeing with any particular writer… or auteur one agrees with most closely, as that every so often the universe gets completely rebooted. It’s important to know if you’re playing in the continuity where Batman has a rainbow costume for those special occasions and Superman makes a robot spank Lois Lane… or the more recent one, where all the DCU heroes ought to remember meeting the Looney Toons characters. Especially for an RPG, I would imagine.
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.”
Of all the HP AU communities out there which frighten me, this is not one of them. I was mostly talking about the couple people I saw who were very, very upset just after reading it, and apparently fairly confused that not everyone agreed with them. It’s probably a lot like any fandom, really. After a while, we get to feel that the characters are somehow *ours*, and when the person in charge does something we don’t agree with, it’s hard not to take it personally.
And when that person in charge has no real auteurial claim, things get bloody.