My fandom *is* fanon.

[odditycollector]

 
Last week, DC Comics put out Batman 644, the conclusion of the War Crimes storyline. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

(For those of you lucky to have no idea what I'm talking about... Bill Willingham wrote an issue wherein Leslie Thompson - a doctor who was steadily characterized as a pacifist for decades - was suddenly revealed to have murdered one of Batman's sidekicks. Other people have already written about the nearly impossible stupidity levels on the storytelling, stoyteller, and meta levels, so I'll just take that as read.)

My first reaction after reading it was fairly predictable: a goodly helping of Oh, bitch, you didn't, and Well, that certainly didn't happen. My second reaction was to open Photoshop and, well, *retcon* it.

It was very therapeutic. But also very strange because, in my brain, the Leslie-Bruce confrontation I threw together gets waaay more canon points than what Willingham put out, which gets none. Despite, you know, actually being canon.

I was thinking a little bit about that, because I still don't understand the Harry Potter fans who got upset after The Half Blood Prince came out and announced that it was a diverting read, thank you, but totally unacceptable as canon and everyone ought to continue as if it was never published. And I'm sure I'd love you guys if I knew you better, really, and I'm glad you're happy in your little AU bubbles... but that doesn't make you less delusional. The characters are JK Rowling's, and she can do with them as she pleases.*

And I think that, right there, is the problem. For something like the DCU, which is complicated and has very little immutable history and has creative minds in charge who grew up as fans themselves... who exactly owns the characters? (No, I'm not talking copyright here.) Bob Kane "invented" Batman in 1939 - but hundreds of writers, artists and editors have worked with character since. Some of them have left more of a lasting impression on the characters than others, but I challenge anyone to point to one person - or two, or three - who are totally and solely responsible for his development up to now. Or who will be totally and solely responsible from this moment on.

It's impossible, even ignoring the movies and the cartoons and the influential out-of-continuity stories and that there's a lot more feedback between the fans and creators of comics than in most other mediums. So whose characters are they? Who has the right to fuck the DCU around?

Well, it sure as hell isn't Willingham.

And I think many things people have been shouting that I agree with - that Willingham doesn't understand or respect the characters he's writing, nor the people who he's ostensibly writing them for - stem from his inability to grasp that. These characters are not his. They did not spring into existence when he started writing them, and they do not merely exist to forward the stories he would like to tell. (If anything, it's the other way - any stories he involves them in should forward the characters.) Every writer in the Batverse comes in with his or her own interpretation of the characters, but this should be built from stuff that came before.

Leslie is not "a doctor" and Bruce is not "a rich guy who dresses up like a bat and fights for justice" and Tim Drake is not "a boy who got involved in the justice fighting for a bit" and Steph was is not "his girlfriend".

Now personally, I like Fables, also penned by him. It's not the greatest thing going, but it's usually one of the better books I spend money on. And I'm not going to boycott that title, just because its writer is an insulting idiot who incites homicidal rage in myself and many people I like and respect. But Fables is Willingham's world, and if he decides that the major baddy is going to turn out to be Snow White, that's just fine. He'd better at least try to make me believe it, but even if he fails, it's ultimately his prerogative.

I know I'm picking on Willingham here (but wow, does he deserve it). My point wasn't actually meant to be that this guy in particular sucks, but that the DCU (and Marvelverse, I'd assume) of comics is just one big exercise in fanon, for which the original canon has long since been lost. Writers are playing with someone's interpretations of what one fan speculated about the artwork in that AU an editor suggested as a response to a story the first writer scripted.

More often than not, it works reasonably well. It's fun. And occasionally the entire fandom will get together and have a Crisis-themed ficathon, but you know it'll all blow over sooner or later and everyone will get back to their Batman/Gotham WIP and their Supergirl crack-fic and their arguments re: Lex Luthor's motivations. Because that's the way fandom is.

It's just that every once in a while some n00b starts posting the equivalent of gorilla ass-rape mpreg stories all over the place - and means them to be serious and angsty and epic - and you have to ignore them until they go away. Or, you know, mock them mercilessly. Whichever.

*IMO, as someone fairly totally outside the fandom. It may be that book and tv series and movie fandoms feel the same for other people as the DCU one does for me, but the argument that there's more of a definite *line* between canon and fanon still stands (until someone knocks it down).


 

Comments

[skelkins.livejournal.com]

But it’s fairly easy to see much of the DCU as closer to *fandom* than anything.

Yes, definitely! Which of course, was the main point of your original post. But I just went off digressing all over the details instead, because...errr, I dunno. Because I'm lame? Because all I had to say about your main premise was just a big fat "I agree, and what a cool observation!" Which would have been sort of boring. And I felt like talking.

[the auteur thing]

I wonder if this is why so much is made of the *Jossverse*, rather than as the Buffy-verse or similar.

I think it may well be. It often strikes me that it's characteristic of fandom to try to maintain the belief that the fictive universe is internally logical and coherent...no many how many indications there may be to the contrary. Fans like to come up with in-world explanations for things, no matter how obvious it may be that the real reason for them was an actor's contract dispute, or an authorial screw-up, or an editing error, or whatever. Fans are all about the retcon -- and hey, there's yet another way in which the DCU shows its true colours as fanon!

Anyway, I think it's much easier to maintain that delusion belief in a coherent fictive universe if you have an auteur you can point to as the source of the Almighty Overriding Vision (TM). Even in HP fandom, which really does have an auteur, the fans still tend to exaggerate the extent to which Rowling "has it all planned out," insisting that every tiny little detail of the canon must have great intentional significance, for example, even in the face of overwhelming evidence - indeed, even direct authorial admission - to the contrary.

So yeah, I do think that the emphasis on Whedon's role in the "Jossverse" fandoms is probably symptomatic of a larger trend.

Of course, you DCU folks have transcended all of that. :-)

Of all the HP AU communities out there which frighten me, this is not one of them.

*laughs*

Oh, indeed. A "let's just quietly do our own little AU thing off in this corner here and leave other people to do their own things in peace" community? In the Harry Potter fandom?

My. Well. That would be a refreshing change, wouldn't it?

And when that person in charge has no real auteurial claim, things get bloody.

Well, yeah. Basically, you're looking at a situation in which it feels like there's this one fanfic author who has been inexplicably elevated to a position of power over all of the other fans, and whose actions while in this temporary postion of power are first to engage in egregious character rape, and then to defend his actions by posting what amounts to a really arrogant and oblivious "ha ha, I'm glad I upset you, you losers!" gloat on a public forum.

I mean, I don't even follow the DCU, and reading that exchange still made me feel a little bit frustrated and frothy. I can only imagine how I might have responded if it had involved characters with whom I had any form of emotional investment.

Ah, well. With luck, it will just get ret-conned out of existence completely eventually, and then it will just be like a baaaaad dreeeeam. A bit like that singing frog, actually. Which used to give me nightmares as a child, I'll have you know!