Fanfiction, Part III: When Is Canon Not Like Canon?

(Happy Victoria Day long weekend! And happy birthday, cousin M!)

What does it mean to say a story is “like fanfiction”?

The phrase is almost always used with derogatory intent. No one says a TV show, movie, or book is like fanfiction to highlight its attractive qualities, even though there are many excellent fanfiction writers out there. The implied comparison is with bad fanfiction, the stuff that fuels writers’ complaints that their characters are being manhandled by people not creative enough to come up with their own imaginary worlds but still able to invent entirely new ways to confuse “their”, “there”, and “they’re”.

True, occasionally, this comparison is made because the author is a well known figure in the fan community, and it’s only natural to compare his or her published work with the stories for which he or she is better known. For instance, some reviewers describe Cassandra Clare’s City of Bones series as fanfiction-like because Clare was a Big Name Fan who wrote Harry Potter fanfiction, and, with this knowledge, it’s easy to find ways that her characters mirror her versions of, say, Draco, Harry, and Hermione. Although this phenomenon is interesting in and of itself, it’s not really the type of “fanfiction-like” I want to talk about.

Instead, what I’m interested in are stories referred to as fanfiction-like because the reviewer feels they possess certain negative qualities. For instance, some dissatisfied fans give this unfortunate label to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and (of course, why else would I be writing this now?) the recent season 6 finale of House, M.D, “Help Me”. And I think we can narrow down the qualities that get these stories labelled “fanfiction-like” into six main points:

1. Cliche. I chose the term “cliche” rather than “improbable turns of events” because everything in stories is improbable. That’s the way stories are. However, when our attention is drawn to the improbability of particular events rather than their signficance, it’s usually because they’re cliche. Meaning, they’re distracting not just because we’ve seen them done before, but because we know exactly why the author is using them here.

For instance, there’s a TV staple plotline where, for whatever reason, characters in conflict get trapped together in the same room or are forced to work together in an emergency. Neither of these events is horrible in and of itself, but writers using them have to be aware that their audiences will see the strings: we know perfectly well that these things are happening specifically so that the Male and Female Bickerers will have a reason to admit their feelings for each other, or so that the Two Feuding Friends who in real life would be able to avoid their quarrel forever will have to confront one another and either reconcile or split apart for good.

When plot devices aren’t handled well enough to make everyone choose to forget the strings, that’s cliche.

2. Romance. Lots of stories involve love, sex, and/or relationships, and, again, that’s not a bad thing. But professional stories called out as fanfiction-like nearly always focus on the Cupid side of things. Fans were describing “Help Me” as “the House-and-Cuddy show” before it aired; in Harry Potter 6, everyone is suddenly obsessed over who’s crushing on whom, and Harry feels the “monster” in his chest that represents his True Love for the first time.

However, it’s not the focus on romance in and of itself that seems to scream “fanfic”; rather, it’s strong focus on romance to the exclusion of other plotlines that seem to deserve equal or greater attention. What happened to Voldemort? Is it really so important that we directly experience Ron and Lavender’s hook-up but hear of the terrorism striking the wizarding world second-hand? Are we getting all this lovey-dovey stuff only because the writer or writers want to strike us with the sledgehammer of Twu Wuv and all the morals that pertain to it, not because it’s actually this vital in the world of the story?

When there’s more important or interesting stuff happening but the author’s fancies lightly turn to thoughts of love, readers or viewers understandably feel as though the plot is forced.

3. On the nose. Perhaps because of #2, fanfiction-like stories also have a tendency for getting what seemed to be subtle and self-deceiving characters to identify their exact emotions, accurately, and state them outright, either to other characters or in the narrative. “I love you. I wish I didn’t, but I can’t help it.” “I never really gave up on you. Not really. I always hoped…”

Often, viewers or readers perceive characters being on-the-nose like this as “cheesiness” — meaning that emotions are being presented in such a way that the audience doesn’t sympathize with the character feeling them. When Mr. Usually Reticent tells Ms. Formerly Heartbroken straight-up how he feels about her, it can be cute, but audiences who’ve seen a lot of love stories miss any spark of novelty that hooks them into these characters’ worlds. All it takes is one step back for hearfelt confessions to become joke-fodder, no matter how deeply the characters presumably really do feel these things in the world of the story.

In other words, on-the-nose means emotions are being told, not shown, and the reader or viewer is more inclined to interpret what’s going on in terms of what the author wants them to understand rather than what’s going on inside the characters’ hearts.

4. Deviation from expected tone. Every writer has his or her own voice, although it may change across works, and most successful published or produced series achieve a certain consistency of tone across their many installments. Even stories that don’t come in series still have to maintain an appropriate tone based on the expectations of the genre and the author’s intentions: if you want your readers to take your Very Intense war story seriously, you can’t write in the same tone as Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking series.

Fanfiction writers, both good and bad, often change the tone of the stories they’re building upon, sometimes purposely to show what else this world and these characters can do, often accidentally to reflect their own understanding of the story. But when the tone of a “professionally written” story deviates from what’s expected, the readers or viewers can perceive this as a broken promise. After all, they signed aboard for something different, based on the previous installments or their understanding of the type of story this was.

Changing or re-inventing the tone of a story halfway through without being jarring is difficult to pull off, and when  authors can’t do it, their audience often feels betrayed or tricked.

5. PASTEDE ON YAY! An ending that doesn’t seem to grow organically out of the rest of the story can be the most frustrating part of any piece of fiction. Incongruous endings make readers and viewers feel like they’ve wasted their time, since it seems like anything could have come before this scene, and it still would have turned out the same: i.e., whatever way the author wanted it. Or maybe the author didn’t know how it ended in the first place and just jotted down whatever he or she thought of first?

Endings are one of the toughest things to get right, so it’s no surprise that a lot of fanfiction writers– many of whom, to be fair, are interested more in exploring characters and situations than in creating a satisfying standalone blockbuster — stumble over them or just never end their stories altogether. How many of these simple blog entries just peter out or end with a silly pun? (Answer: tons.) And how much harder it must be to nail that last chapter or scene with so many characters, plot twists, and themes coming before! But an ending is what viewers and readers are left with — it’s what they’ve been promised implicitly in the opening segments.

Endings that feel like the author(s) pulled a random scene out of a hat make audiences wonder if the creator ever really knew where this story was going in the first place.

6. Resolution of a drawn-out plot line. Oy. Storytellers naturally want to raise the tension, make the reader wonder what’s going to happen next. If characters got everything they wanted and overcame each obstacle the moment they encountered it, nobody would pick up a book or watch TV. So a lot of stories have a long-running plot line — often to do with interpersonal relationships — that probably won’t be resolved until close to the end of the narrative. Because this tension can be the main point of the story for many audience members, many fanfiction authors love to offer their takes on how it could or should end.

But when it does finally break, the finale can be disappointing no matter how well it’s done. So much anticipation makes every moment of the lead-up so exciting that every moment of the resolution feels like it has to be exactly right to satisfy. And when the tension feels artificially extended for the sake of lengthening the story, audiences have plenty of time to imagine all the cooler, nicer ways this plot could have concluded.

So the end of a long-running plotline often prompts readers and viewers to compare the actual ending with all the ways they dreamed thing could have wound up — and to find canon wanting.

… OK, I admit these points are somewhat related: drawn-out plots are often romances; on-the-nose-dialogue makes audiences feel distanced from the characters’ emotions, which leads to a feeling of PASTEDE ON YAY! But here’s what I see as the common thread between all six: when a reader or viewer picks up something by a professional writer, he or she assumes that it’s passed a battery of quality control in the form of publishers, producers, actors, directors, editors, test audiences, etc. Audiences expect professional writers to provide a certain level of quality.

Contrariwise, everyone knows that anyone with a computer and access to the Internet can publish fanfiction. When web surfers click on a link to the work of an unfamiliar fanfic author, vid maker, or fan artist, they have no such assurances. If it turns out to be brilliant, great. If it turns out to be dreck — well, that’s the Internet, and it’s why we choose browsers with a “back” button.

So, IMHO, when someone labels a published or produced story as “fanfiction”-like, they’re expressing how it caused them to lose trust in its writer or writers. The benefit of the doubt normally given to professional artists — that they know the characters better than anyone else, that they will keep the characters in character and the tone of the story consistent, that the plot will make sense within the world of the story — in short, that everything that happens will happen for the sake of the story and never just to serve the writers’ own interests and feelings — is under attack. And while different audience members feel different levels of let-down because they trust storytellers to do different things, a popular cry of “fanfic!” is reason for even the most talented writers to think about why a chunk of their fanbase feels betrayed.

Even if they decide in the end that they wouldn’t change a word.

2 Replies to “Fanfiction, Part III: When Is Canon Not Like Canon?”

  1. The worst instance of something professional and complete being like fan fiction is Stephen King’s ‘The Dark Tower’ series. Starts off great, the tone and characters in the first few books are epic like an old school western got a big sfx budget and made a fantasy movie on their own set, you read for five tremendous books and then the characters enter the real world and meet Stephen King, he’s some prophet for them. It made sense in terms of his fictional world and maybe had been hinted at for some time but just seeing such a cliche of fan fiction or maybe as you mentioned seeing the strings that had been pulled cause he wanted to be in his own book killed the suspension of disbelief, only the ending of that series saved it for me.

  2. Hmmm… in theory I kind of like the idea of an author weaving him/herself into the story, but, you’re right, when I think of any way of actually doing it, it comes off as self-insert fanfic. And you get that uncomfortable feeling of walking in on a grown person playing a private game of pretend with their toys on the bedroom floor, bashing action figures into one another and making sound effects.

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