My Queer as Folk “Golden Age” is not strictly canonical, although I wish it was. In my imagination, it’s the time period after Justin has lost the bet in Season Four, but before Brian gets cancer, which in canon lasted for zero seconds, as in winning the bet, Brian finds out he has cancer. In my fantasy world, Justin’s back at PIFA, Brian’s at Kinnetik, and they have some time… months, years, as much as we can get… of their grown-up, non-monogamous, unconventional, yet SO MARRIED Season Four relationship, which is my favorite of all the seasons for how they are together.
In between Justin going nuts with a gun and Brian getting his ball cut off, I mean.
So… what is your fandom, and what is your favorite time period in either canon or imagination?
The list of ways in which Glee's Blaine Anderson is absolutely nothing like Queer as Folk's Brian Kinney is a long one, and includes almost every personality trait, virtue, and fault I can think of.
There is, however, one major way in which they're alike, and it's this: Their most devoted fans are absolutely incapable of allowing the slightest fragment of blame to fall on either of them for anything they do, and are correspondingly prone to condemning the people who hurt them far out of proportion to any canonical evidence that either was actually hurt in the first place.
Queer as Folk example: Lindsay telling Brian to go to the White Party instead of staying for her wedding. Brian didn't want to go to the wedding. He said so forty or fifty thousand times, in graphic detail. When he finally relents and tells her he'll go, she also relents, and tells him to go to the White Party and have a great time.
Brian skips happily down the stairs to go dance and fuck, and the Brian-worshipping fandom promptly attacked Lindsay for cruelly rejecting Brian's apparently tender and fragile attempt at showing friendship -- a cruel rejection for which there is not one iota of supporting evidence in canon.
I am constantly seeing the same thing with Blaine. I can't remember exactly when I first noticed it, but it was particularly striking during "Big Brother," when the bootstrapping of explanations for everything wrong in Blaine's life was dazzling. And right now, of course, it's going on with the promos for the next episode, in which Brittany bans hair gel from the prom and tells Blaine, in typical ditzy fashion, that she doesn't like the way he looks.
You'd think Blaine was a puppy and Brittany had garotted him.
I suppose I could be wrong, but my guess is Blaine isn't going to give two moment's thought to what she said. Nor is it the first mean thing Brittany has said (she took Rachel down pretty hard a time or two, and she was frequently a "mean girl" in Season One).
What's more, Blaine himself was pretty nasty to Sam when Sam came back to New Directions, and he did more than make a context-less remark about someone's looks; he accused Sam of being a whore.
Now, I love Blaine and Brian a lot. I don't require that my real life friends and family be perfect before I love them, and I don't need my fictional characters to be perfect, either.
Apparently, however, some fans do. Because the mere suggestion that either of their guys even has a flaw, or that anyone might be justified or, at least, not be damned to the fires of hell, for anything bad they might have done to their heroes, sends them into such a frenzy of ret-conning and bootstrapping and sheer backstory-inventing that they often seem to have constructed an entire new character and show all their own -- and one that varies a great deal from the show the rest of us watch.
I mean, I saw some tortuous meta the other day about how Blaine needed his gel because of his PTSD from getting bashed at his school dance.
I seriously, seriously fault Glee for giving us what sounds like a severe gay-bashing in the backstory of a character and then doing jack shit with it. And I hope we do learn more about it, and it's not just some kind of random factoid to explain a ten second hesitation in accepting Kurt's prom invitation last year, and why he didn't like Kurt's kilt.
But as of this moment, we don't have anything in canon to suggest that Blaine needs to be handled with extra care around any sort of school dance, nor that Blaine is upset at the gel ban for any reason other than the sartorial. Even if we do end up being given that, there's also zero canonical evidence (so far) that Brittany knows about his past, nor that she meant anything rational by her gel ban, nor even what she meant about not liking the way he looks. I mean, she thinks Joe is a girl. Who knows that the world looks like to Brittany S. Pierce?
And even if it was mean, was it truly meaner than a dozen other things that have happened on Glee that didn't involve Blaine, about which these same fans had no opinion or reaction?
Anyway, just venting. I've never changed a Brianite's mind and I'm sure the Blainers will prove equally immune to my persuasive skills. But I still say Brian and Blaine don't need to be perfect to be loved, and they're not perfect, and the people in their lives are also not perfect, and don't need to be for Brian and Blaine to love them.
Or for us to love them all.
Is this true? Is there some way in which that's not just a load of homophobic cliched crap?
And just the other day, I stopped ranting long enough to really ask that question, seriously, not as a rant but as a genuine question without judgment.
Obviously many people DO prefer, or at least, very much enjoy, fiction that has traveled so far from canon in not just its plots and settings but in characterization that it is almost original fiction -- or really IS original fiction with a few canon names and traits thrown in, like the color of someone's hair.
Some such fics are good, some bad -- just like canon-consistent fic. The discussion of why people read bad fiction is for another day, LOL, and is definitely not limited to fan fic! I'm not questioning that these stories are often well-written and interesting, I'm asking for readers to explain what it is about these types of stories that draws them in when they are reading FAN FICTION.
To me, the reason I don't enjoy them is because the exact reason I read fan fiction is to get a "hit" of what the canon was to me -- that's what I liked and that's why I'm a fan.
When something doesn't feel like canon to me, it stops being fan fiction, and thus, doesn't scratch my itch. The story might still be good, but at that point, I'd really just rather read a book.
But I saw someone the other day going on at length about why she likes fiction that takes canon as a starting off point and then goes absolutely anywhere -- outer space, the past, the future, fantasy, gender change, changing the sexual orientations or ethnicity or backstory of any and everyone. It's what excites her as a writer and a reader.
So I thought I'd come back here to LJ, where there are so many of you who are in multiple fandoms, and see what your thoughts are on extreme AU/OOC/"canon characters in name only" fic.
Please don't name any fics if you're going to bash them or say they suck. Lots of fics in all genres suck, and lots of fic in all genres are good. Please try to use GOOD fic if you need to give an example, and avoid putting any authors or fans down. Thanks so much!
Xie
ETA: One person said she thought I was referring to "slash" original fiction like Torquere Press etc. I'm not -- that never crossed my mind. By "original fiction" I mean everything from short stories to novels -- I mean all books and stories of all genres. What I'm saying is, if the choice is between reading fan fiction and any other kind of fiction that exists, why would someone read extreme AU/OOC,'canon characters in name only' fan fic PREFERENTIALLY, instead of picking up a book -- whether it's "Wuthering Heights" or "The Cat in the Hat" or a genre mystery or romance. Sorry for any confusion.
I just found that my post on 513, which I wrote almost two years ago, lost all its comments in the IJ comment eating glitch. There was some great discussion there. :(
It would make me very very happy if some of you, whether you commented there in the past or are just reading it now for the first time, might feel like discussing it.
Here's the link:
The great 513 debate
Thanks, my darlings!
I was reading a meta_roundup post by IJ's the_willow about "Watching the show in my head," in which she talked about dropping shows because TPTB take them in a direction she doesn't like.
This isn't an issue I have to deal with, for a number of reasons. One is, of course, I don't watch television. Another is that I have one fandom and one fandom only and am not looking for another. Yet another is, as I wrote about before, that I can't watch things in serialization because I'm too fragile... all the things that upset her and make her prefer the "show in her head" are so intolerable for me that I can't watch serial television at all.
But it goes beyond a "what if they ruin it?" issue for me. As a writer, I feel no pull to take an in-progress story, wrest it from its writers, and do something with it myself. I know there are many writers who feel very differently -- if not, there would have been no fan fiction written in our entire fandom history prior to the end of 2005, which is, as I'm sure everyone is incredibly grateful for, not the case.
Not to mention that writing porn for a bunch of women is one of the most lesbianic things I've ever done. But I digress. The point is, I discovered Queer as Folk, Brian and Justin, and my own inner
A while ago, many many weeks ago at an unspecified time in the past, I read a fic in which the author in his or her author's notes said something that conveyed, in his or her own words, that he or she was not really sure if the fic got the characters or setting or plot right, because he or she had not actually watched many episodes of the series.
Not long after that, but once again at an unspecified time, another writer made a statement in his or her fic that flatly contradicted something that happened on the show. In an ensuing discussion in the comments section, it was apparent that the author didn't know this, because she or he had not -- yes, you guessed it -- watched the whole series, or even as much as half of it.
Someone smart and funny posted a while ago in her LJ, and I can't recall if it was flocked nor do I have the patience required to go back 48656 pages in my flist and check, so we shall wait for her to our herself if she wishes, that fans who first saw the show on DVD after it finished airing often have a very different take on the characters and storyline than those "original fans" who watched it while it was still airing.
Someone asked in my comments section if I thought CowLip had "borrowed" some elements of the Xena/Gabrielle relationship deliberately, because there really are an extraordinary number of parallels. But no, I'm quite certain they didn't, because they didn't have to. That's because this isn't the Xena/Gabrielle story, and it's not the Brian/Justin story. It's not even the "reformed rake and the virgin" story. In fact, in some ways it's really not a romance story at all.