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silveradept[Welcome back to December Days. This year, thanks to a suggestion from alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover.]
The various canons of our fanwork experience fall into a couple of different categories: canons that have finished all of the various iterations they are going to go through, with no foreseeable plans to revisit those worlds, and canons that are ongoing and that can shift radically between episodes, depending on the content of whatever just came out.
For example, the first season of Steven Universe presents a particular view, and then the second season upends it, the third season pulls a table flip, the fourth season pulls the rug out from under the table, and the fifth season reveals a trapdoor that's always been underneath the table and the rug the whole time. And it's not done yet, so there's entirely the possibility that there's a whole alternate dimension in that trapdoor that we haven't seen the first glimpse of.
This poses an interesting question: At what point in the canon do you start creating fanworks? There's at least one argument of waiting until the whole thing is done so that you know what it will take to align a work to the canon (or give the canon the finger and hive off in another direction), but for ongoing series, especially ones that produce at the Steven Universe rate, that could mean entire decades going by without any works appearing as everyone waits for the whole thing to get done. And humans, again, are not very good at waiting.
Does the same argument apply to works that have completed their run? Do you need to have read/seen/experienced the entirety of the canon before going into fanworks? What if your canon is a soap opera that's been going on for fifty years? Or a police procedural of some sort that's gone on for sixteen seasons? Or a comic-book character started by a couple of Jewish guys at least 75 years ago? That's a lot of investment to put forward before creating any fanworks, and it might discourage someone from creating if they have to go through the whole thing first. Comics continuities are headache-inducing, especially...and a lot of the issues that exist might be rather expensive to find, since entire runs don't always make it to the trade paperback form where they have a bigger shot of existing later on in time.
Not to mention, the idea that you have to experience the whole thing before you can start smacks of the curatorial fandom, the kind that knows the things that make them killer on trivia nights, but also that tends to think the accumulation of canon and their various accoutrements is the highest form of fandom that a person can perform. It's not for nothing that the Comic Book Guy of The Simpsons is a recognizable archetype in many fans' lives. It's also unsurprising that Comic Book Guy is nearly-universally a negative stereotype of fandom because of his obsession with curation and minutiae.
Fanworks are generally inherently transformative in small and large ways. They take what's already been there and imagine new scenarios, tweak the characterizations, make textual what is subtextual, fix perceived and actual flaws, small and large, and otherwise change the thing into something that is better for the creator than what is already present in the canon. "If every pork chop were perfect, we wouldn't have hot dogs," is how the Steven Universe people put it, and we'll set aside all the things about how the sausage gets made in this particular point. If the canon were perfect, we'd have a lot fewer fanworks. If the canon were perfect, it would somehow manage to encompass everything that the fans of the show could think of. That's an impressive haul, and even more difficult to achieve the more fans a canon gets.
Which brings us back to the question posed in the subject. At what time during a work is it fair game for fanworks? I'm sure that there are some people who have all sorts of ideas from episode one, chapter one, or track one. Some of them will probably be squashed by what happens by the end of the work, but there's nothing inherently wrong with wanting to write from the beginning. How much of going before it's all done means the possibility of having your work ending up as alternate universe through no fault of your own? Is that a bad thing, necessarily? (Not really.) Is episode one a good place to start with, or do we want to say that a full season is best? Or watching the movie all the way through, or reading the book all the way through? The more canon that gets absorbed in, the fuller the development of the characters involved, and so you might get a better set of points for your Three-Point Characterization anchors. Or there might be a delightful idea waiting at the end that you have to get through the whole thing to develop fully.
A useful rule of thumb might be "if you've absorbed enough canon that an idea strikes, that's enough canon to do the work with." Tagging it appropriately might help ward off people who see a different character because they've seen more canon, or help them to figure out how you got from point A to point B based on how much of the source you've seen. And I know there are people who are entirely fascinated by (and might enjoy doing longitudinal studies of) the ways in which works change (or resist changes) as more of the canonical material gets released over time. More material produces more ideas and more possibilities, even as it prunes others away or requires a fanwork creator to provide a convenient excuse or handwave or alternate-universe transport device or methods. As with many of these posts, while it sounds like I have a definitive idea, I really don't, and I'm curious to hear what you have to say about how much is enough, if there ever is an enough.
alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover.]The various canons of our fanwork experience fall into a couple of different categories: canons that have finished all of the various iterations they are going to go through, with no foreseeable plans to revisit those worlds, and canons that are ongoing and that can shift radically between episodes, depending on the content of whatever just came out.
For example, the first season of Steven Universe presents a particular view, and then the second season upends it, the third season pulls a table flip, the fourth season pulls the rug out from under the table, and the fifth season reveals a trapdoor that's always been underneath the table and the rug the whole time. And it's not done yet, so there's entirely the possibility that there's a whole alternate dimension in that trapdoor that we haven't seen the first glimpse of.
This poses an interesting question: At what point in the canon do you start creating fanworks? There's at least one argument of waiting until the whole thing is done so that you know what it will take to align a work to the canon (or give the canon the finger and hive off in another direction), but for ongoing series, especially ones that produce at the Steven Universe rate, that could mean entire decades going by without any works appearing as everyone waits for the whole thing to get done. And humans, again, are not very good at waiting.
Does the same argument apply to works that have completed their run? Do you need to have read/seen/experienced the entirety of the canon before going into fanworks? What if your canon is a soap opera that's been going on for fifty years? Or a police procedural of some sort that's gone on for sixteen seasons? Or a comic-book character started by a couple of Jewish guys at least 75 years ago? That's a lot of investment to put forward before creating any fanworks, and it might discourage someone from creating if they have to go through the whole thing first. Comics continuities are headache-inducing, especially...and a lot of the issues that exist might be rather expensive to find, since entire runs don't always make it to the trade paperback form where they have a bigger shot of existing later on in time.
Not to mention, the idea that you have to experience the whole thing before you can start smacks of the curatorial fandom, the kind that knows the things that make them killer on trivia nights, but also that tends to think the accumulation of canon and their various accoutrements is the highest form of fandom that a person can perform. It's not for nothing that the Comic Book Guy of The Simpsons is a recognizable archetype in many fans' lives. It's also unsurprising that Comic Book Guy is nearly-universally a negative stereotype of fandom because of his obsession with curation and minutiae.
Fanworks are generally inherently transformative in small and large ways. They take what's already been there and imagine new scenarios, tweak the characterizations, make textual what is subtextual, fix perceived and actual flaws, small and large, and otherwise change the thing into something that is better for the creator than what is already present in the canon. "If every pork chop were perfect, we wouldn't have hot dogs," is how the Steven Universe people put it, and we'll set aside all the things about how the sausage gets made in this particular point. If the canon were perfect, we'd have a lot fewer fanworks. If the canon were perfect, it would somehow manage to encompass everything that the fans of the show could think of. That's an impressive haul, and even more difficult to achieve the more fans a canon gets.
Which brings us back to the question posed in the subject. At what time during a work is it fair game for fanworks? I'm sure that there are some people who have all sorts of ideas from episode one, chapter one, or track one. Some of them will probably be squashed by what happens by the end of the work, but there's nothing inherently wrong with wanting to write from the beginning. How much of going before it's all done means the possibility of having your work ending up as alternate universe through no fault of your own? Is that a bad thing, necessarily? (Not really.) Is episode one a good place to start with, or do we want to say that a full season is best? Or watching the movie all the way through, or reading the book all the way through? The more canon that gets absorbed in, the fuller the development of the characters involved, and so you might get a better set of points for your Three-Point Characterization anchors. Or there might be a delightful idea waiting at the end that you have to get through the whole thing to develop fully.
A useful rule of thumb might be "if you've absorbed enough canon that an idea strikes, that's enough canon to do the work with." Tagging it appropriately might help ward off people who see a different character because they've seen more canon, or help them to figure out how you got from point A to point B based on how much of the source you've seen. And I know there are people who are entirely fascinated by (and might enjoy doing longitudinal studies of) the ways in which works change (or resist changes) as more of the canonical material gets released over time. More material produces more ideas and more possibilities, even as it prunes others away or requires a fanwork creator to provide a convenient excuse or handwave or alternate-universe transport device or methods. As with many of these posts, while it sounds like I have a definitive idea, I really don't, and I'm curious to hear what you have to say about how much is enough, if there ever is an enough.
