Different colours of fannish love

[sqbr]

This is rather a trite observation, but: in any sort of fandom (including scifi, fanfic, etc) you have lots of conflicts, and people often cast it in terms of "We are just expressing our love for X, while these haters putting us down are motivated by elitism/anti-intellectualism/peversion/narrow-mindedness etc" But most of the time, while those things may be in play, a lot of it is just that people are expressing their love in different ways.

I think one of the main ones which comes up in many different guises is "I love canon as is" versus "I express my love for canon by looking at it from different angeles/picking it apart/recreating it etc".

The most obvious example is people who make fanfic vs people who hate fanfic. Within fanfic you have people who stick to canon and those who write AUs etc.

You also have people who love all of canon versus people who only love certain aspects. Most people are a mix of the two. Harry Potter fandom has a lot of this: some people genuinely think the books are High Art and really well written, other people like certain characters and aspects of the setting but think they're really badly written. Both can be taken to bad extremes: at one end you have people who refuse to acknowledge any flaws in canon, including stuff like sexism and racism, at the other you have people who go on about how the author got the story wrong. And of course there's always conflict between people who love different aspects and think everyone else is missing the point, character vs plot being a common conflict.

Within fanfic fandom you have people who are in it because they love the canon, and people who are in it because they love the fandom (and again most people are mix of the two) This post was inspired while I was writing this reply to a post about fanfic fandoms lemming-like tendency to jump en masse to new fandoms.

And now I am done. I didn't have any major conclusion, just felt like getting this off my chest :)

Comments

[kadeton.livejournal.com]

My problem with AU fanfic is generally that the only connection between the characters of the original and the characters of the fic is that the author has decided they are the same person without backing that up in any way (say, by having actual similarities between them other than the name).

The reuse of characters from other authors' work is basically a sort of lazy shorthand. "My guy is just like that guy except that he's gay." Inevitably, the character written bears only passing resemblance to the original, and I can never work out why the author didn't just put some genuine effort in and write their own characters. It's essentially admitting creative bankruptcy.

[alias_sqbr]

(I'm assuming you don't mean the "what if this single change happened" AUs since in my opinion they can be some of the most interesting fanfic, but instead are just talking about the "What if they were all fish and always had been" sort)

The AUs I've read (all very highly recommended and thus probably not representative) did usually preserve the core of the dynamic between the characters. Like Clueless and Emma.

That said...
Out of curiosity I had a look at a Sylar/Mohinder community and it was all highschool AUs where they live happily ever after etc. Afaict the appeal is imagining the story with the characters played by those particular cute guys. Oh, and then there's celebrity slash AU. When I first encountered fanfic that was pretty much all I kept getting recommended, and (from my limited experience) it really is like original fiction with a note saying "Imagine the main character is being played by Viggo Morgensten..". Since I don't have a very visual imagination the effect is rather lost on me!

Personally I don't have a problem with people writing that sort of thing if it makes them and their readers happy, but it's certainly not what I look for in fanfic.

[kadeton.livejournal.com]

My problem with AU fanfic is generally that the only connection between the characters of the original and the characters of the fic is that the author has decided they are the same person without backing that up in any way (say, by having actual similarities between them other than the name).

The reuse of characters from other authors' work is basically a sort of lazy shorthand. "My guy is just like that guy except that he's gay." Inevitably, the character written bears only passing resemblance to the original, and I can never work out why the author didn't just put some genuine effort in and write their own characters. It's essentially admitting creative bankruptcy.

[alias_sqbr]

(I'm assuming you don't mean the "what if this single change happened" AUs since in my opinion they can be some of the most interesting fanfic, but instead are just talking about the "What if they were all fish and always had been" sort)

The AUs I've read (all very highly recommended and thus probably not representative) did usually preserve the core of the dynamic between the characters. Like Clueless and Emma.

That said...
Out of curiosity I had a look at a Sylar/Mohinder community and it was all highschool AUs where they live happily ever after etc. Afaict the appeal is imagining the story with the characters played by those particular cute guys. Oh, and then there's celebrity slash AU. When I first encountered fanfic that was pretty much all I kept getting recommended, and (from my limited experience) it really is like original fiction with a note saying "Imagine the main character is being played by Viggo Morgensten..". Since I don't have a very visual imagination the effect is rather lost on me!

Personally I don't have a problem with people writing that sort of thing if it makes them and their readers happy, but it's certainly not what I look for in fanfic.