Adapted from a Conversation with wisdomeagle

[alixtii]

The concept of canon whoredom requires, if not a single privileged meaning (which the authorial intent people of course have, or at least claim to have), then a set of privileged meanings which exclude a set of other meanings. One can see me working towards this in some of my earlier meta in which I try to perform a conceptual analysis of what makes something AU. Making Tara a robot doesn't make a fic AU, because we don't know she isn't, but...

...but what? If you take it far enough, there really isn't anything that can't be reconciled with canon with enough fanwanking, even if it seems like a fairly straightfoward objective claim like what was written on Buffy's tombstone (which is itself an interesting case, as the existence of Buffy's tombstone, while "clearly canon," is itself hard to reconcile with the events of "Bargaining" and is thus in need of fanwanking). The text becomes radically manipulatable, and there are no privileged meanings--which is pretty much where I am now. A Wittgensteinian response would probably be to recognize that within a group of socially positioned readers, certain meanings would emerge as more central than others, in the way that a microwave oven is less "oven"-y than a toaster oven, but would resist the notion that we could ever systematize that spectrum, since to do so would require a position outside of language. That is, to the Wittgensteinian, what is important is that it "feels right," which is I think what we go for in fanfic over and above technical accuracy. So we end up with an approach that actually privileges fanon over canon.

I do think that the impulse, which I manifested as a baby fan, to delineate a set of acceptable meanings is a gendered one, especially insofar as it seeks to ally the gendered subject with a system of Authority (sometimes a system of clearly imaginary authority--do the producers of our shows really care if we accept X as canon?) against the violator. These issues have been brought up in fandebate, but the best example might have been that guy in fanficrants who claimed that all the people who were writing SPN/BtVS should a) use comics canon, b) use the "right" interpretation of canon, in which Willow's level of power in comparison to that which they've seen in the Winchester's universe was X. Bargining in and telling the women how to write their stories. Not to mention how it fits into the fanboy stereotype of knowing all of the exact technical specs of the Enterprise. All the focus on facts and dates and measurements, and relatively little on character--my (previously-held) notion of canon-whoredom/AU-ness just sort of shrugged and swept that into a separate category of OOCness, which was too fuzzy to sharply delineate, and then ignored it.

Comments

[alias_sqbr]

I think you have a bit of a false dichotomy: I tend to be fairly picky about technical details and incredibly picky about character consistency. Basically my suspension of disbelief tends to be pretty shaky, and I need a fair amount of continuity (wth both characters and setting) to engage with the material. This also means I pretty much no interest in AUs that aren't of the "what if we changed this one detail" variety.