From: yahtzee63	Date: June 27th, 2006 03:48 pm (UTC)		(Link)

By and large, this is the kind of game I try to play too with fanfic, but it's taken me a long time to get there. And I do understand that there are relationships that, if they do become canon, would screw with my understanding of a character. (If, for instance, Draco/Hermione suddenly whipped up out of nowhere and became canon in Book 7, I would have to dramatically alter my ideas about Hermione -- and even though she's not one of the HP characters I'm most invested in, I know that the alteration would probably change my feelings about Hermione for the negative. Of course, this is an unlikely and extreme example.) I know that, for some fans, seeing Remus with Tonks (or, for that matter, with any female) is a shift they're not happy about making. I may not personally share that kind of reluctance anymore (bisexuality for the win!), but I do understand where it comes from.

That said, getting outraged because somebody is writing fic pairing a noncanonical couple is just silly. Maybe it's implausible; maybe it's a bad idea. But it all boils down to a quality issue, not the moral one some people seem to want to make it.

	From: minisinoo	Date: June 27th, 2006 03:56 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Usually canon leaves us room to write a number of different pairings believably, and that's part of what makes fanfic fun -- we can play with all the things that might be true given what we see on the page or onscreen, even if many of those things aren't true in the author's head.

EXACTLY. And not just for pairings, either, at least for me. This is part of why I enjoy reading different takes on favorite characters. As long as it proceeds from canon and is not (at least to my mind) some wildly OOC characterization, I find it fascinating how two people can read the SAME character just a bit differently.

To be completely fair, there are some pairings I see as more likely and some I see as less -- but that isn't always dependent on canon. Sometimes CANON annoys me because it seems to assume. I often complain about the assumed S/J in X-men. SHOW me why it works, don't assume, Marvel. The most annoying example of this recently was in Ultimate X-Men where, to me at first, Scott and Jean made little sense as anything more than longing on his part and friendly affection on hers, at least as Millar first drew them. Later, their pairing felt shoe-horned and not properly set up. They were together because they're 'always' together. I felt no better, really, about Morrison's putting together of Scott and Emma. That seemed done as much for shock value as for real reasons. I've seen it done better in fanfic, by Dex, in fact. So even the 'canon' doesn't always handle a relationship well.

It's the author's job to convince me. If the author can do that, I'll follow along willingly. If the author can't do that -- even the original author of the source material -- I won't follow. I'm not a sheep. ;>

	From: ficbyzee	Date: June 27th, 2006 03:59 pm (UTC)		(Link)

See, yeah. That's the game I'm playing, too. And maybe it's just that I come from comics canon where canon is really just more of a guideline, but the way I see it, no two fans are ever going to view a given canon in the exact same way--Fan A is going to see things there that I don't see, and vice versa. And so arguing about what's a canonical relationship and what's not is just... I mean, you're never going to *win* an argument like that, because everyone sees canon differently.

And who cares, anyway? Nothing we write is going to end up canon (probably). We're playing in an entirely different sandbox.

	From: cereta	Date: June 27th, 2006 04:01 pm (UTC)		(Link)

I'll admit, I don't get it, either. I don't know how much of that comes out of being a slasher almost as long as I've been reading fanfic, but it would never occur to me to get worked up about whether or not my favorite pairing was canon. Yes, I sometimes get distressed when canon makes it harder for me to be into a relationship (saying, marrying one of the characters to someone else), but when people start writing long essays to prove to me that A/B isn't canon, my only response is, "Um...yeah?"

Above all, I'm not sure what they expect the response to be. Okay, it's not canon. How do you expect that information to change people's behavior?

Honestly, I suspect with HP, some of it is that there's a segment of the fandom that came to fandom and fanfic through HP, have never really mingled in other fandoms, and so when they see slashers in particular acting like, well, slashers (and in particular not bothering to append, "seen through a slashy lens" to every observation they make about a pairing), they really misunderstand, well, a lot. In particular, I think they honestly don't get sometimes that we (a) know it's not canon and (b) don't care. It's really a culture clash, and I go back and forth between trying to explain it and deciding that if they haven't figured it out by now, it's not my problem.

	From: musesfool	Date: June 27th, 2006 04:02 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Yeah, there's an ideological divide between people who seem to feel they can only ship things that are explicitly canon, and the rest of us, who seem to fall on a broader, looser spectrum ranging from, "Well, it would make some things in canon make a lot more sense" or "it can be supported by this interpretation of canon" to "whee! pretty!"

I find the insistence that things the author is unaware of can't possibly be in the text/subtext irritating - that to me seems like the argument made by someone who's never written something and then gone back and said, 'Holy shit, did I put that in there? cool!' - and the whole thing seems kind of ridiculous in terms of people who write fanfic. I mean, authorial intention is interesting, and ought to be taken into account, but it's not the end all and be all of interpreting a text.

	From: sionnain	Date: June 27th, 2006 04:39 pm (UTC)		(Link)

I've never really understood the idea of only writing canon couples to the exclusion of other things. I mean...they're there already, yeah? Besides, half the fun of fanfic is taking a universe and playing with it, and if we were constrained to make it just like the author did, what would be the point?

I don't see this as much in X-Men as HP, but I think that's because any possible combination of characters in X-Men *is* canon. *g*

Personally, I enjoy fics where people take two characters I never would have thought of together and make it work. That's fun! Why can't we just embrace the fun? Embrace it, I say! *waves fist about*

I shall use my happy OTP icon here, methinks. One time someone took the time to leave me a comment to a story that said my pairing "was just stupid."

People are weird.

	From: artbox	Date: June 27th, 2006 04:46 pm (UTC)		(Link)

I agree. Like a 'behind the scenes' kind of thing - we see 'x, y, z' (canon), without realising that 'a, b, c' (fanfic) is also going on, if you see what I mean.

	From: storydivagirl	Date: June 27th, 2006 04:51 pm (UTC)		(Link)

I'm with you on that. I mean, if you can make Harry/Draco or Remus/Sirius work with the canon, than that's the main goal. And rather than spending your time deciding that someone's story isn't possible in canon, why not just skip over it? I mean, there are some pairings I just don't care about, but I don't claim that it's not possible.

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