You know this brings up a very interesting point, and given that your sister is an SPN fan, I'd be curious about her take on the recent wank that the series took that seemingly to my untrained eye was a direct slap in the face to the wincest crowd. And it seems a lot of people in the fandom who write wincest see it that way too, but maybe I'm just reading the vocal minority.
But it says something profound about the proprietary nature of fandom. How we adopt these characters to fit our fantasy and spin tales about them so that the fanon seems more realistic at a certain point than the canon. If someone said to me, there is aboslutely no basis in fact for your stories with Will and Jack having any sort of sexual relationship, I'd have to agree with them! (and this goes back to my recent essay on what the fuck is canon anyway!). Just like I felt about the sparrabethers insistence that J/E existed and that pesky wedding was nothing more than Elizabeth being trapped into marriage by convention (yeah, to a blacksmith, THAT was conventional in the 18th century!). But they certain felt that their interpretation was correct and the fact it turned out to be woefully wrong is not only a comment on how freaking bizarre was their interpretation of the events of that movie, but in some touching way of how much they WANTED it to be that way.
Case in point: I've come into two fandoms ass backwards, reading the best of the fanfiction first and THEN watching the shows. due South was one and Stargate Atlantis is the second. And the thing about SGA is that the show is pretty cheesy and, well, lame, but the actors give it their best shot. Joe Flanigan has a ridiculous amount of charm and David Hewlett can actually act, so between the two of them, they make it work like gangbusters, or at least enough so that the stupid shit that the creators pull you can effectively ignore. Most of the time. And watching this show, with the background of some really EXCELLENT writers who taken over the storyline, it's like they've created an alternative universe where a simple act, John Sheppard throwing a nickel to decide if he's going to Atlantis or not becomes, an entire frigging jumping off point for the psychology of John Sheppard. It becomes fanon which then becomes canon! In the show it has something like a two second appearance and fandom has made this into something much, much more. And this is only one instance of where a simple act by a screenwriter becomes a psychological or physical manifestation of a character's psyche!
And I think we all do this to one extent of another. We adopt these characters and make them our own. And when the creators/writers/producers/directors have the nerve to either tell fandom STFU, we are outraged. It's as if we own them. Witness how much angst that stupid DMC elicited?
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Date: 2009-04-05 10:31 pm (UTC)You know this brings up a very interesting point, and given that your sister is an SPN fan, I'd be curious about her take on the recent wank that the series took that seemingly to my untrained eye was a direct slap in the face to the wincest crowd. And it seems a lot of people in the fandom who write wincest see it that way too, but maybe I'm just reading the vocal minority.
But it says something profound about the proprietary nature of fandom. How we adopt these characters to fit our fantasy and spin tales about them so that the fanon seems more realistic at a certain point than the canon. If someone said to me, there is aboslutely no basis in fact for your stories with Will and Jack having any sort of sexual relationship, I'd have to agree with them! (and this goes back to my recent essay on what the fuck is canon anyway!). Just like I felt about the sparrabethers insistence that J/E existed and that pesky wedding was nothing more than Elizabeth being trapped into marriage by convention (yeah, to a blacksmith, THAT was conventional in the 18th century!). But they certain felt that their interpretation was correct and the fact it turned out to be woefully wrong is not only a comment on how freaking bizarre was their interpretation of the events of that movie, but in some touching way of how much they WANTED it to be that way.
Case in point: I've come into two fandoms ass backwards, reading the best of the fanfiction first and THEN watching the shows. due South was one and Stargate Atlantis is the second. And the thing about SGA is that the show is pretty cheesy and, well, lame, but the actors give it their best shot. Joe Flanigan has a ridiculous amount of charm and David Hewlett can actually act, so between the two of them, they make it work like gangbusters, or at least enough so that the stupid shit that the creators pull you can effectively ignore. Most of the time. And watching this show, with the background of some really EXCELLENT writers who taken over the storyline, it's like they've created an alternative universe where a simple act, John Sheppard throwing a nickel to decide if he's going to Atlantis or not becomes, an entire frigging jumping off point for the psychology of John Sheppard. It becomes fanon which then becomes canon! In the show it has something like a two second appearance and fandom has made this into something much, much more. And this is only one instance of where a simple act by a screenwriter becomes a psychological or physical manifestation of a character's psyche!
And I think we all do this to one extent of another. We adopt these characters and make them our own. And when the creators/writers/producers/directors have the nerve to either tell fandom STFU, we are outraged. It's as if we own them. Witness how much angst that stupid DMC elicited?
Fascinating stuff, fandom!