Canon to the right of them, canon to the left of them

[prillalar]

"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold."

When Yeats wrote that, I bet he was trying to make sense of some fandom's canon so he could write some fic.

I've been fanwanking all weekend -- I won't even get into what and why -- and every thread I tie up looses two more, like Herakles and the Hydra, if the Hydra were made of thread, which I have on good authority it was not.

Is there any watertight canon? Even BtVS/AtS has its weak points. Even Tolkien kept changing his bloody mind.

I've wondered this since my X-Files days and I still don't know the answer: Is my responsibility to the canon greater than the creator(s)'s? Especially if the creator(s) don't seem to have taken much care to make it consistent.

When do I get to say, "That makes no sense -- I'm just going to make some shit up"? When do I get to say, "Character X would never do that, I don't care if I saw it on the bloody screen"?

If I do make shit up, will my readers demand some detailed notes on what and why or will they Just Not Care?

Maybe I'm the only one who cares. Or will even notice. Or gets drawn into an ever-expanding web of research for what started out as a fairly simple story idea.

Maybe it's time for a drink.

But before I do, let me take this opportunity to say: Han Solo shot first and there's not a goddamn thing Lucas can do to change that.

Comments

[katallison.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm firmly of the camp that says make shit up if you have to, disregard pieces of canon if you have to, as long as you're hanging true to the essential core of the characters and universe. (I catch flak sometimes for this, but hell, you can't make everyone happy, and a camel is a horse built by committee, and the sun don't shine on the same dog's ass all the time [to continue the parade of aphorisms].)

It's that whole thing of separating the essentials from the non-essentials. I really don't give a toot when exactly Mulder went to Oxford, for example, but it really does matter to me that he has a *brain,* and so does Scully, and when they do damnfool things they need to be the kind of damnfool things really brainy people might do, as opposed to adolescent nitwits or greenhorn rookies. And you've got an excellent sense of such distinctions, so fanwank away, is what I'd say.

[prillalar]

Thanks, hon. I do tend to get caught up in details, especially when I'm trying to logically extrapolate something and it turns out not to be logical.