A Fanfic Rant

Edit: This post is occasioned by amand_r's rant confession on her own livejournal and the comments thereon.

I do not believe in canon. Not in the "there is no god" sense, but in the "it's more of a guideline than a rule," sense. Yes, without the efforts of the creators, there'd be no Buffy the Vampire Slayer for fans to write about. No Highlander, no X-Files, no Angel, no Stargate: SG-1, etc. That doesn't mean that everything they create is wonderful. As beccadg noted in the comments, even the creators disavow some of the canon they create, and they change the backstory sometimes.

Why shouldn't fanfic writers do the same?

X-Files was swell for a while. Three, maybe four seasons. But I stopped paying attention when it became clear to me that Chris Carter did not have a master chart of the conspiracy on the wall in his office. He was making it up as he went, and the shape of the conspiracy Fox Mulder was trying to unravel changed from week to week to suit the needs of this week's story. Which meant that the 'arc' stories were, in fact, nothing of the kind. I continued watching X-Files for a while longer, but only the non-arc MOTW (monster of the week) episodes. And at that, I gave up on the show completely two or three seasons before it lurched to a halt.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer ended after Season Four in my universe. The introduction of Dawn was a cry for help, a confession of creative bankruptcy, and a harbinger of doom. The Emperor's New Clothes. A big, steaming pile dumped rudely in the middle of hte living room carpet. Need I go on, or has my distaste for Dawn and all that follows been adequately expressed? I know that there are many fans who loved the last three seasons of Buffy, and some who think it was never better. To them, I say Are you mad? Whatever floats your boat, I guess. But I feel no obligation to let that stuff infect fanfic I write (or read).

Angel lasted only two seasons. My feelings about Connor's addition to the show are almost identical to my feelings about Dawn on BtVS. What the hell was Joss's sudden fetish for magical teenage siblings/offspring? Or, in this case, for the sparkless, cliched Joanie loves Chachi Cordy loves Angel stuff? For God's sake, people, if anyone was smart enough and self-aware enough to know how bad an idea that was, it was Cordelia. Even if--and it's a big if--she fell for Angel, she's smart enough to bury that self-destructive longing under a heavy layer of self-preservation. Then there was Cordy n' Connor, ever-increasing cast bloat, and... No. Two seasons, tops.

Highlander ran only four and a half seasons. There was no Ahriman arc. Richie is alive and well and living on the banks of the River Denial. And this isn't only about Richie. The Ahriman storyline butchered four and a half years of carefully written shades of gray, a "talmudic discussion with swords" as someone put it once (of right, wrong, good and evil, and how to make hard choices in an imperfect world) and replaced it with a silly black and white morality play wherein Eeevil (in the form of a demon) was defeated by a Long-Prophesied Hero (tm) employing the awesome power of Tai Chi meditation. Argh.

There've been some good fanfic stories written that took these canon events as, well, canon and made the stories work. I won't deny that. But fanfic is all about taking the basics of someone else's stories and running with them. Different characters, alternate endings, crossovers. There's no reason to be bound by any particular point of canon, and especially not the most egregiously dumb parts.

What do you think it means, doctor?

I've noticed a new trend in my anxiety dreams of late.

For many years now* my subconscious has expressed my anxiety thru dreams about college. Dreams in which I suddenly realize that I had a class on my schedule that I'd forgotten about (or sometimes had never known about), and now I was failing it. Dreams in which I had a class I needed to attend, but I didn't know where on the campus it could be found. Dreams in which I found my class, but I didn't have any of the textbooks and had done none of the reading.

Lately, though, my dreams have involved leaving college. Realizing that I'm supposed to move out now but I haven't packed, and I can't possibly take everything. Or I don't know where I'm supposed to move to.

And, on a lighter note, sometimes my dreams are just plain nuts. I was having a dream the other night in which I was on an island with several other people. We were arguing discussing who would be most appropriate to the various roles on Gilligan's Island and/or who would get voted off the island first. It all made sense at the time, of course.

At some point, however, one of the women present was obviously feeling quite jealous of many of the other women. She was also feeling quite superhuman, apparently, because I suddenly realized that most of the women in the group (which now numbered in the hundreds) were missing. A moment's scrutiny revealed that all of the women still present were definitely less attractive than the jealous woman.

Then I realized where all the missing women were. Jealous Gal (tm), displaying superhuman strength and speed on a par with Superman, had seized them one by one and flung them skyward like so many dolls, had flung them so high they could no longer be seen. Only now they were all falling earthward again (with not a single cry for help or scream among them, oddly).

Yes, it was about to be raining gorgeous women. But not, alas, in a good way. I couldn't catch all of them. In fact, I could only catch one. But I did catch one. The others all plummeted to the ground in a remarkably un-gruesome way, given the situation. The woman I caught was, of course, the woman Jealous Gal most disliked.

This fact was brought to Jealous Gal's attention by one of the women who had not been flung high into the air, who turned to stare at us, and then applauded my heroism in a slow and insulting fashion, thereby drawing Jealous Gal's baleful gaze in our direction.

This, naturally, led her to attack me and a classic comic book brawl ensued. Fortunately this dream did not lead me to wake my wife as I twitched in my sleep with the force of my efforts to flatten my opponent (as I did a few nights earlier).