"Did you put your name into the Goblet of Fire, Harry?" Dumbledore asked calmly. Film vs Books.
Book canon vs Movie canon is hard enough, adding fanfiction to the mix is just too much! But its important to remember that fan-fiction is its own culture that's possibly incompatible with canon (either book or movie, since both canons are different).
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An interesting approach to things is the Touhou games, where Zun himself follows Fanon as much as he's able. The core games don't have too much in the way of character development (they're all Japanese children stories that have been amped up into an over-the-top video game setting). But the fan-community has made up many stories about how various characters treat each other or think about each other, and its interesting to see a creator who goes all into "Fanon", rather than declaring themselves to be the one-true-canon.
And I think Zun is pretty open about this approach too. What the fan's believe is perhaps more important than what the author intended, at least in Zun's mindset.
True but also kinda sells the whole phenomenon short a bit. I think "arrangements" is the most common English language description.
Touhou doujin culture is pretty wonderful. I highly recommend attending Comiket if that's at all up your alley, and I'd personally love to make it to Reitaisai one day.
>Also noteworthy is the series of Darkover anthologies published by Marion Zimmer Bradley, beginning in 1980, consisting largely of fan fiction extended into her canon. These books led to a much talked about controversy. Bradley read something in a fan story that meshed well with a Darkover book she was currently writing, so she wrote the fan author, Jean Lamb, offering her "a sum and a dedication for all rights to the text." In a 1991 Usenet post, Jean continued, "I attempted at that point to _very politely_ negotiate a better deal. I was told that I had better take what I was offered, that much better authors than I had not been paid as much (we're talking a few hundred dollars here) and had gotten the same sort of 'credit' (this was in the summer of 1992)...a few months later I received a letter from Ms. Bradley's lawyer threatening me with a suit."[52] After Bradley's death, more information has come out supporting the fan's story.[53]
>The rumor, however, was that Bradley had a skirmish with a fan who claimed authorship of a book identical to one Bradley had published and accused Bradley of "stealing" the idea, and the resultant lawsuit cost Bradley a book. Either way, her attorney advised her against reading fan fiction of her work. Versions of this incident are credited by many to have led to a "zero tolerance" policy on the part of a number of other professional authors, including Andre Norton, and David Weber.
The only author/fan collaborative project I'm closely familiar with, Homestuck/Paradox Space/Homestuck 2.0, did not... entirely... dissolve into recriminations and lawsuits, but was not terribly profitable.
Probably not. Frantz Fanon is a really big name in some circles. I started the article thinking it was going to be about him too, and scanned the comments to find someone else who had the same false impression.
Haha, no, I read a lot of his work as a teenager as well as in college. I'm Algerian (Kabyle) and Fanon lived in my father's home city for a while. His work was very important in the decolonization movements and you'll encounter his writing all over classes in political economy, afro-am, marxism, etc.
The article goes straight for a big payoff by talking about the accepted canon of a fictional universe and drawing parallels to history. I don’t think the article reaches its goal here. If you are going to say “Captain Kirk is captain of the Enterprise”, it’s assumed that you’re making some kind of statement about canon, but if you say “Richard III was king of England”, it’s assumed you’re talking about the real historical person, unless you’re doing historiography.
I think in order to accept this conceit of the article you have to kind of take an extreme, Baudrillardian viewpoint on who Richard III is in the first place—you have to take the viewpoint that Richard III is a character, a cultural product in the same sense that Captain Kirk is a cultural product. Or you have to conflate different meanings of the word “canon”.
> you have to take the viewpoint that Richard III is a character, a cultural product in the same sense that Captain Kirk is a cultural product
The piece seems to be arguing that Richard III's motives, and specifically the circumstances around why he became king, are somewhat uncertain. As such, it feels that the popular historical narrative around what happened (treachery! usurpation!) is a cultural product without too much concrete evidence supporting it.
This feels reasonable to me. "We know facts X and Y", is true. "As such, Z is what we think explains X and Y" can be convincing, but is also inherently speculation.
> The piece seems to be arguing that Richard III's motives, and specifically the circumstances around why he became king, are somewhat uncertain.
Yes, but do you see how this question has a fundamentally different nature to it from the questions about Captain Kirk? The answer to “what were Richard III’s motives”, in some sense, is tied to some actual historical person, or our understanding of that person. We may find new historical evidence that sways our opinion one way or another, but that evidence either exists or it does not, it cannot be created.
Douglas Adams talks about these kinds of questions about fiction, like, “What kind of Apple Mac did Arthur Dent have?”
> So what you're doing if you ask me what sort of computer Arthur Dent had is 'please would you make up a story for me which has to do with what sort of computer Arthur had'.
> ...
> So you see the problem? "What kind of Apple Mac did Arthur Dent have?" is a completely unanswerable question.
Whereas if we were talking about a real person like Richard III, the questions often have answers, even if we don’t know them. I don’t think that this is some detail to gloss over—if you want to make the case that the questions about real people have the same nature as questions about fictional people, then I think you would have to support that case very carefully. Like, if we are arguing along those lines, then we can talk about George Washington cutting down the cherry tree as fact, because George Washington’s relationship to an actual historical person is increasingly incidental.
I’m not saying that you can’t argue along those lines, just that this kind of argument doesn’t crop up by chance, and isn’t made by the article.
> This feels reasonable to me. "We know facts X and Y", is true. "As such, Z is what we think explains X and Y" can be convincing, but is also inherently speculation.
This is true for history, but fiction works differently.
I'd go a step further: the author's head canon is no more valid than yours or mine. In the article's case, J.K. Rowling's ideas about the characters that didn't make it into the books or movies are also just "fanon".
I've seen it play out repeatedly where some of the audience thinks one thing. The author says another. Other audience members use that to tell the first group that they're officially wrong. I reject that entire line of thinking.
I'd tend to say that the author's stated intentions matter more than whatever headcanons you or I might come up with, but not as much as the work itself. After all, unpublished intentions like that can always be changed later if the author has cause to publish something that would contradict them.
The author can (generally) be considered more correct than us about the details of their story, and what background elements exist that informed events but which weren't shown directly in-story.
This certainly doesn't mean that people writing fanfic, or just enjoying the work, can't go wild and change these things. I just feel it's worth knowing where you're departing from "official canon", rather than claiming that you must be right.
I almost feel like their stated intentions matter less. After all, they had every opportunity to say what they really meant. If they chose not to, then they must not have had strong feelings about it.
Suppose Rowling said in an interview that, oh yeah, BTW, Ron Weasley was actually descended from King Arthur. I'd argue that no, he's not. If he was, she should've said so when she had the chance to make it, well, canon. Now, if she wrote another Harry Potter universe where Ron's great^20th grandpa was Art, fine! She just hadn't gotten around to that part of the story yet, and now she has. It's now canon. But until then, it's just chit-chat.
For a real-world analogy, in American courts where 2 parties are arguing about how to interpret the words in a contract, judges tend to rule against the party who wrote the contract. After all, if their intention at the time they wrote it was the same as it was while they're debating in court, they should have phrased it that way.
The example you give of Ron being King Arthur's descendant is an extremely irrelevant fact, and so I'd be inclined to say "okay, sure, I'll accept that this is true, but so what?" if it was pronounced. It'd be canon or close-to-canon, but it has no actual use to explain or predict within the story. (Unless she'd said it before the series was done, I guess, in which case it'd have caused a bunch of speculation about whether Arthurian myth elements would suddenly become important.)
This would create a situation where there's a canon / near-canon fact about a character... that's extremely unlikely to come up. So unlikely that I suspect that the only reason it might have impacted any fan works at all is that there's almost a million Harry Potter stories on fanfiction.net, so there's probably at least a handful that have used "sole living descendant of King Arthur" as a plot point.
This gets back to my take that "X is canon" and "in my fan work Y is what's true instead" are not positions that're in conflict with each other. We can accept that the canon story has a bunch of canon background information that informs how it happened, but that's no reason not to change it if you want to tell a different story. Some not-stated-in-text background details do turn out to be deeply rooted in character motivations / setting functionality, and so are harder to rip out than others.
Now, on to some rambling about how a story and a contract are different, and the conservation of detail in stories...
A story that spells out absolutely everything about why the world is the way it is and exactly why every character does everything is probably not very well written. The author should give you enough details in story that you're willing to believe that there must be a perfectly good explanation for things, even if you've been not told it for any specific event.
It's equally valid, of course, for the author to have elaborately planned out the history and structure of their world in advance, or to just make up non-contradictory new facts whenever they need to use them. Just so long as the right vibe is given.
I'm generalizing a bit here, because exactly how true this is can be a matter of taste. I personally enjoy the sort of sci-fi/fantasy book that drops you in with weird words that you have to figure out from context and protagonists who won't consciously-explain anything that they already think of as "normal", so I'm clearly biased in one direction. (To give a popular recent example that doesn't go too hard on being weird, it takes a fair while in Brandon Sanderson's Way of Kings before you realize what the fuck is going on with "grass" and "hounds".)
> in which case it'd have caused a bunch of speculation about whether Arthurian myth elements would suddenly become important
Funny enough, in the recent Hogwarts Legacy game they have dozens of these little world puzzles called Merlin Trials, effectively actually tying Arthurian myth into the Harry Potter universe via Merlin, who was apparently a Slytherin?
But arguably the game is not canon to the books.
It's just funny because if Rowling HAD ever said something about a character being descended from King Arthur, it might have made a mention in the game.
This is one of those times where I typed out a response to the original post, and thought to myself: "I wonder if somebody has already said it better than me."
Imagine my amusement when it was said by somebody I know!
> I'd tend to say that the author's stated intentions matter more than whatever headcanons you or I might come up with, but not as much as the work itself. After all, unpublished intentions like that can always be changed later if the author has cause to publish something that would contradict them.
This runs headlong into the whole idea of textual criticism and the death of the author. If the author can have new ideas about a work which supersede someone else's head canon, they can undo a whole academic treatise with a magisterial wave of the hand, and that's unsupportable. Academia must be allowed to exist, which means the text stands alone.
More simply: The academic is working with a specific text, not a text and whatever random ancillary material the author crapped out years or decades later. Their thesis is, therefore, not invalidated by that paratext and superfluous commentary.
It's worth noting that this is a reinterpretation of Death of the Author. The original essay isn't about this sort of "what is canon?" question at all, it's about the subjective meaning and interpretation of a text. It's arguing that asking the author "what does it mean that the curtains are blue?" isn't the way to get a definitive answer.
To quote Barthes' essay: "all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin" -- i.e. the author's contribution is one part of the work, but what the reader is bringing to the work also matters when you're interpreting it. The author can't tell you how the work makes you feel.
It's totally valid to say "I think what the author said is canon is junk, and I'm going to ignore it", but that's not technically Death of the Author. :D
(This particular term being thrown around inaccurately is, perhaps, a pet peeve of mine.)
The work speaks for itself. Derivative works and ideas don't need official blessing to be interesting or meaningful. There's just this sort of need for consistency between works in the same 'universe' that I think is maybe not altogether needed, even though people tend to prefer it. Arthur C. Clarke's Odyssey series doesn't suffer for not making sense (which happened because our knowledge grew while he was writing) (but there's still the "different universes" interpretation).
Does Star Wars benefit from having a canon? Probably internally, so they can tell a consistent story across a vast sea of media. Knowing what is, and isn't "real" in the universe is probably helpful there. But as a fan? I can accept that the events of Truce at Bakura happened and didn't happen depending on what I'm reading or watching.
Online conversation about The Lord of the Rings is frankly impossible because there's always a cadre of folks who have read every shopping list Tolkien ever wrote and interpret it as gospel. I think this diminishes the work, because it shrinks it to the tiniest—possibly least interesting—interpretation. "What would have happened if Gandalf had kept the ring?" can be an interesting question, but as soon as the person starts saying "Um, no, because Tolkien said in a letter to my grandma..." the entire engine of thought grinds to a halt.
I think the concept of canon is very useful, because it's a consistent starting point for discussion. Exactly how strong and binding the canon needs to be can be debated, and varies depending on the situation.
The term largely descends from its use in Christian scriptural politics, where early church councils had to pick which documents were going to be considered true and the basis of their faith and which weren't. In this case, deciding on a canon of scriptures was important because it defined their religious teachings and what it meant to call yourself a Christian.
...but really, I come at it from a fan works perspective, and I just think it's useful to at least know how you're diverging from the shared understanding when you create something. Even your Truce at Bakura example relates to there being a Star Wars canon, it's just that we can accept that there's nested variants of it -- the original movies always holding primacy, and then either layering Legends or the Disney properties on top of it. Having no concept of a Star Wars canon at all would leave us with something like Star Wars: Visions, where "Star Wars" is more of a vibe that stories are inspired by than a setting that stories happen in.
I'd like to see a debate between Steve Bannon and actor Michael Shannon on books about tanning ... then it'd be Bannon v. Shannon on Tannin Fanon v. Canon.
Canon is a fake idea. The only canon is head canon, contradictions and ambiguities and omissions exist in every text and work.
Sherlock Holmes died at the base of the Reichenbach Falls, Luke's father was killed by Darth Vader (whose first name was Darth) and Bilbo's invisibility ring is just a neat magical trinket with no malevolent power or significance beyond what is immediately apparent. Odysseus was killed by his son, Telegonus. Hermione used the time turner to travel back into the past to make out with herself. Bellatrix Lestrange had a secret love child with Voldemort. Cleopatra was bitten by a poisonous asp.
> Genesis 4:25 And Adam knew his wife again; and she bare a son, and called his name Seth: For God, said she, hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew.
They had other children.
For the sun part, this probably refers to Genesis 1:3 "let there be light" and dividing day from night, and Genesis 1:16 "And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night" and often in between there's "morning and evening". The way this happens after the fourth day is with the sun and moon lights.
I wasn't there at the time, but I assume reality pre-day four was running prior to OpenGL 2.4 and was using global illumination, and then afterwards switched to RealEngine 4, probably. Just a guess.
Humans being created before and after animals likely refers to Genesis 1:26 and 2:19. That is a bit curious, agreed. The way I take it, since Genesis 2:4-29 happened after the 7th day, is something like "hold up, let's go back to those days when plants, animals, and humans were created, and get slightly more specific about it.
The origin story in the Bible is short on specifics, so it leads to a lot of interesting fan theories, and divides many of the staunchest fans. "These are literal days here" "no, these are phases, a day could be any length of time, the sun wasn't even there yet" and so on, as if that was the main point of the passages, when it isn't.
> God created the Sun on the first and fourth days.
To be pedantic, the creation of the first day was light and darkness. The fourth day was the things that emit light: the sun, stars, and moon. I mean, it's still somewhat weird because it seems like it's inventing effect before cause, but the sun is very clearly not being invented on the first day.
The more fun contradiction is that Jesus' genealogy from David is given twice... and both of them are completely different.
And ends in Joseph[0], who isn't the father, if you believe in the immaculate conception[1] (this is a catholic thing, and is not accepted among all denominations).
It's one of many many flaws that made me question my (protestant) religious upbringing.
> And ends in Joseph[0], who isn't the father, if you believe in the immaculate conception[1] (this is a catholic thing, and is not accepted among all denominations).
Uh...
> The Immaculate Conception is the belief that the Virgin Mary was free of original sin from the moment of her conception.
This reminds me about a couple of famous fics that each have their own fics inspired by them: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality [0], and The Arithmancer [1].
The first has it own wikipedia page and its from the creator of LessWrong. From Wikipedia:
> It adapts the story of Harry Potter to explain complex concepts in cognitive science, philosophy, and the scientific method.
I read it almost 10 years ago but remember it getting tiresome after a while, but it does teach a ton about logical thinking.
The second is a less famous fic where someone who must have at least a masters in mathematics wrote Hermione as using math to create her own spells, theories and gradually becoming better at magic as she turned into a better arithmancer, and everything is based in real world theory.
Harry Potter and the methods of rationality is so tainted by the author, his agenda and the weird cult that is less wrong, I cannot recommend it (I have read it).
A rather successful AI researcher with a large fanfiction very weirdly tied into his craft, and his own discussion board/pseudo-cult who believe that unless his qualifications for “friendly AI” are followed the world will end?
And here I thought “My Immortal” was the weirdest Harry Potter fanfiction.
The story is honestly a vehicle to convey a world view while borrowing plot from Harry Potter and Enders Game.
It is fun in the beginning, but it reeks of ayn rand and juvenile oversimplification of the world. This all might be ok, but the story is written with an agenda and its like reading scientology fiction or something.
> I read it almost 10 years ago but remember it getting tiresome after a while, but it does teach a ton about logical thinking.
I remember finding it interesting from a pedagogical perspective, because it starts out as a vehicle for "Harry gives lectures about 'rationalism' to anyone within 15 feet of him" scenes and quickly moves on to "Harry makes very poor choices and doesn't do any actual science", which although it does make for a better story also somewhat undermines the level of trust one can have in his teachings.
One thing that I've learned over the years is to cede possession of a storyline or character arc to the fans if they've come up with something better that they cherish. They will continue to build whether you like it or not. In original Minoan or Mycenaean mythology Pan was some terrifying deity that required sacrifices and complex rituals to halt his plagues and dearth of animals. Some fifteen hundred years and two regions later and he was a drunk goat man who liked to shag forest spirits in the dawn light while people cheered him on. Same with the King Arthur legend, where Sir Lancelot literally began as fan fiction who became a core part of the mythos during the shifts originally from heroic honour to stately honour to chivalric honour. In more recent years we've got Scooby-Doo, where Fred has gone from just being the guy who drives the van to being a romance oblivious himbo with a love of engineering but absolutely no skill in it thanks to over fifty years of parodies and copyright skirting fan references influencing the official works.
Fanon can and often will supersede canon, to the point where after a generation or two the fanon is woven into the canon. You will never stop this process, so you might as well make a fertile field for the audience's ideas to grow after you've harvested your story.
This is an interesting page: if you were a bit puzzled by the appearance (it breaks badly with NoScript in FF and admonishes you to enable JS or 'ActiveX'), look at the page source! It's so strange: it combines incredibly '90s-style table-based layout, iframes (!), with browser-snooping for IE, and yet has been regularly updated for the past few years. I couldn't figure out what generated it, and I think, looking at the inlined JS snippets, it may be hand written. (140,000 words of handwritten HTML? Sure, why not. Like eating an elephant - one bite at a time...) Further, you can poke at the domain in IA and see that it goes back to 2005, at least, which is a remarkable feat of longevity.
The author is very British, and in the discussions of Snape, she regularly references https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Nettleship (who Snape is a thinly-veiled fictionalization of), and appears to have known him personally and that's part of why she dissects Snape at such length. From the old-fashioned & eccentric site design, to popping up in 2005 with a fully-formed voice and enormous long-form projects, this is clearly no middle-schooler who just started reading HP. (Certainly not with all the nerdy investigations into botany & geology and British crime etc which she uses as backing for various claims - one of us one of us.) So who is this author?
> Degree in biology and folklore; programmer, shop owner, secretary on newspaper. Worked at National Health Service (NHS) / Studied at University of Edinburgh / Lives in Slamannan: 2016–present
>
> I’ve set up a page from which to do Tarot readings. I'm going to try to raise enough money from Tarot to get driving lessons, as a driving licence would hugely improve my chances of finding a job, even at my age.
>
> I’ve been many things in my time, including a programmer for the NHS, the Publicity Officer of the Raoul Wallenberg Committee in London, secretary to the Defence Desk at The Daily Telegraph, the owner and manager of a small Celtic/pagan witchy shop and a professional maker of wargame figures (although the firm I was working for, Jacobite Miniatures, went bust after I’d made them one figure).
>
> I’m a practising witch and Tarot reader with a degree in Biological Science (the best clairvoyant I know has a PhD in cell-surface chemistry), and I seem to have become the go-to person on Quora for explaining evolution to Creationists. I’ve been active in British SF and fantasy fandom since 1981 and writing fanfiction (nowadays mainly Harry Potter-based, under the netnicks whitehound and Borolin) since about 1985. I’ve won a couple of quite prestigious awards for poetry and am currently working on a book about my father’s adoptive family - especially his mother, who started out as Ethel Maud Shirran, a shorthand typist in Edinburgh in 1922, and finished up as the Kazini Elisa Maria Dorgi Khangsarpa of Sikkim. You can read all about it, and my fanfiction, at 3ws dot whitehound dot co dot uk
>
> Owing to the death in 2018 of my mother, whose carer I was, and the fact that I’ve been either a carer or a self-employed shop-owner since 2001, I’ve been left struggling to make money from freelance work, since I am so close to retirement age that it’s not worth anyone’s trouble to re-train me (not to mention spending most of 2019 with cataracts, and most of 2020 with Long COVID)...
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 99.7 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdoD2147Fik
"Did you put your name into the Goblet of Fire, Harry?" Dumbledore asked calmly. Film vs Books.
Book canon vs Movie canon is hard enough, adding fanfiction to the mix is just too much! But its important to remember that fan-fiction is its own culture that's possibly incompatible with canon (either book or movie, since both canons are different).
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An interesting approach to things is the Touhou games, where Zun himself follows Fanon as much as he's able. The core games don't have too much in the way of character development (they're all Japanese children stories that have been amped up into an over-the-top video game setting). But the fan-community has made up many stories about how various characters treat each other or think about each other, and its interesting to see a creator who goes all into "Fanon", rather than declaring themselves to be the one-true-canon.
And I think Zun is pretty open about this approach too. What the fan's believe is perhaps more important than what the author intended, at least in Zun's mindset.
> remixes
True but also kinda sells the whole phenomenon short a bit. I think "arrangements" is the most common English language description.
Touhou doujin culture is pretty wonderful. I highly recommend attending Comiket if that's at all up your alley, and I'd personally love to make it to Reitaisai one day.
Some examples:
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/picture-this & https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/for-your-eyes-only-a-tale-of-th...
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0915M7T61
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOxarwd3eTs
https://store.steampowered.com/app/872670/SCP_5K/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_issues_with_fan_fiction#...
>Also noteworthy is the series of Darkover anthologies published by Marion Zimmer Bradley, beginning in 1980, consisting largely of fan fiction extended into her canon. These books led to a much talked about controversy. Bradley read something in a fan story that meshed well with a Darkover book she was currently writing, so she wrote the fan author, Jean Lamb, offering her "a sum and a dedication for all rights to the text." In a 1991 Usenet post, Jean continued, "I attempted at that point to _very politely_ negotiate a better deal. I was told that I had better take what I was offered, that much better authors than I had not been paid as much (we're talking a few hundred dollars here) and had gotten the same sort of 'credit' (this was in the summer of 1992)...a few months later I received a letter from Ms. Bradley's lawyer threatening me with a suit."[52] After Bradley's death, more information has come out supporting the fan's story.[53]
>The rumor, however, was that Bradley had a skirmish with a fan who claimed authorship of a book identical to one Bradley had published and accused Bradley of "stealing" the idea, and the resultant lawsuit cost Bradley a book. Either way, her attorney advised her against reading fan fiction of her work. Versions of this incident are credited by many to have led to a "zero tolerance" policy on the part of a number of other professional authors, including Andre Norton, and David Weber.
The only author/fan collaborative project I'm closely familiar with, Homestuck/Paradox Space/Homestuck 2.0, did not... entirely... dissolve into recriminations and lawsuits, but was not terribly profitable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frantz_Fanon
I think in order to accept this conceit of the article you have to kind of take an extreme, Baudrillardian viewpoint on who Richard III is in the first place—you have to take the viewpoint that Richard III is a character, a cultural product in the same sense that Captain Kirk is a cultural product. Or you have to conflate different meanings of the word “canon”.
The piece seems to be arguing that Richard III's motives, and specifically the circumstances around why he became king, are somewhat uncertain. As such, it feels that the popular historical narrative around what happened (treachery! usurpation!) is a cultural product without too much concrete evidence supporting it.
This feels reasonable to me. "We know facts X and Y", is true. "As such, Z is what we think explains X and Y" can be convincing, but is also inherently speculation.
Yes, but do you see how this question has a fundamentally different nature to it from the questions about Captain Kirk? The answer to “what were Richard III’s motives”, in some sense, is tied to some actual historical person, or our understanding of that person. We may find new historical evidence that sways our opinion one way or another, but that evidence either exists or it does not, it cannot be created.
Douglas Adams talks about these kinds of questions about fiction, like, “What kind of Apple Mac did Arthur Dent have?”
https://douglasadams.com/cgi-bin/mboard/info/dnathread.cgi?1...
> So what you're doing if you ask me what sort of computer Arthur Dent had is 'please would you make up a story for me which has to do with what sort of computer Arthur had'.
> ...
> So you see the problem? "What kind of Apple Mac did Arthur Dent have?" is a completely unanswerable question.
Whereas if we were talking about a real person like Richard III, the questions often have answers, even if we don’t know them. I don’t think that this is some detail to gloss over—if you want to make the case that the questions about real people have the same nature as questions about fictional people, then I think you would have to support that case very carefully. Like, if we are arguing along those lines, then we can talk about George Washington cutting down the cherry tree as fact, because George Washington’s relationship to an actual historical person is increasingly incidental.
I’m not saying that you can’t argue along those lines, just that this kind of argument doesn’t crop up by chance, and isn’t made by the article.
> This feels reasonable to me. "We know facts X and Y", is true. "As such, Z is what we think explains X and Y" can be convincing, but is also inherently speculation.
This is true for history, but fiction works differently.
I've seen it play out repeatedly where some of the audience thinks one thing. The author says another. Other audience members use that to tell the first group that they're officially wrong. I reject that entire line of thinking.
The author can (generally) be considered more correct than us about the details of their story, and what background elements exist that informed events but which weren't shown directly in-story.
This certainly doesn't mean that people writing fanfic, or just enjoying the work, can't go wild and change these things. I just feel it's worth knowing where you're departing from "official canon", rather than claiming that you must be right.
Suppose Rowling said in an interview that, oh yeah, BTW, Ron Weasley was actually descended from King Arthur. I'd argue that no, he's not. If he was, she should've said so when she had the chance to make it, well, canon. Now, if she wrote another Harry Potter universe where Ron's great^20th grandpa was Art, fine! She just hadn't gotten around to that part of the story yet, and now she has. It's now canon. But until then, it's just chit-chat.
For a real-world analogy, in American courts where 2 parties are arguing about how to interpret the words in a contract, judges tend to rule against the party who wrote the contract. After all, if their intention at the time they wrote it was the same as it was while they're debating in court, they should have phrased it that way.
This would create a situation where there's a canon / near-canon fact about a character... that's extremely unlikely to come up. So unlikely that I suspect that the only reason it might have impacted any fan works at all is that there's almost a million Harry Potter stories on fanfiction.net, so there's probably at least a handful that have used "sole living descendant of King Arthur" as a plot point.
This gets back to my take that "X is canon" and "in my fan work Y is what's true instead" are not positions that're in conflict with each other. We can accept that the canon story has a bunch of canon background information that informs how it happened, but that's no reason not to change it if you want to tell a different story. Some not-stated-in-text background details do turn out to be deeply rooted in character motivations / setting functionality, and so are harder to rip out than others.
Now, on to some rambling about how a story and a contract are different, and the conservation of detail in stories...
A story that spells out absolutely everything about why the world is the way it is and exactly why every character does everything is probably not very well written. The author should give you enough details in story that you're willing to believe that there must be a perfectly good explanation for things, even if you've been not told it for any specific event.
It's equally valid, of course, for the author to have elaborately planned out the history and structure of their world in advance, or to just make up non-contradictory new facts whenever they need to use them. Just so long as the right vibe is given.
I'm generalizing a bit here, because exactly how true this is can be a matter of taste. I personally enjoy the sort of sci-fi/fantasy book that drops you in with weird words that you have to figure out from context and protagonists who won't consciously-explain anything that they already think of as "normal", so I'm clearly biased in one direction. (To give a popular recent example that doesn't go too hard on being weird, it takes a fair while in Brandon Sanderson's Way of Kings before you realize what the fuck is going on with "grass" and "hounds".)
Funny enough, in the recent Hogwarts Legacy game they have dozens of these little world puzzles called Merlin Trials, effectively actually tying Arthurian myth into the Harry Potter universe via Merlin, who was apparently a Slytherin?
But arguably the game is not canon to the books.
It's just funny because if Rowling HAD ever said something about a character being descended from King Arthur, it might have made a mention in the game.
Mixed media canons can become very convoluted.
You’re telling me. Especially when works directly contradict each other despite being in the same timeline.
Imagine my amusement when it was said by somebody I know!
This runs headlong into the whole idea of textual criticism and the death of the author. If the author can have new ideas about a work which supersede someone else's head canon, they can undo a whole academic treatise with a magisterial wave of the hand, and that's unsupportable. Academia must be allowed to exist, which means the text stands alone.
More simply: The academic is working with a specific text, not a text and whatever random ancillary material the author crapped out years or decades later. Their thesis is, therefore, not invalidated by that paratext and superfluous commentary.
To quote Barthes' essay: "all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin" -- i.e. the author's contribution is one part of the work, but what the reader is bringing to the work also matters when you're interpreting it. The author can't tell you how the work makes you feel.
It's totally valid to say "I think what the author said is canon is junk, and I'm going to ignore it", but that's not technically Death of the Author. :D
(This particular term being thrown around inaccurately is, perhaps, a pet peeve of mine.)
The work speaks for itself. Derivative works and ideas don't need official blessing to be interesting or meaningful. There's just this sort of need for consistency between works in the same 'universe' that I think is maybe not altogether needed, even though people tend to prefer it. Arthur C. Clarke's Odyssey series doesn't suffer for not making sense (which happened because our knowledge grew while he was writing) (but there's still the "different universes" interpretation).
Does Star Wars benefit from having a canon? Probably internally, so they can tell a consistent story across a vast sea of media. Knowing what is, and isn't "real" in the universe is probably helpful there. But as a fan? I can accept that the events of Truce at Bakura happened and didn't happen depending on what I'm reading or watching.
Online conversation about The Lord of the Rings is frankly impossible because there's always a cadre of folks who have read every shopping list Tolkien ever wrote and interpret it as gospel. I think this diminishes the work, because it shrinks it to the tiniest—possibly least interesting—interpretation. "What would have happened if Gandalf had kept the ring?" can be an interesting question, but as soon as the person starts saying "Um, no, because Tolkien said in a letter to my grandma..." the entire engine of thought grinds to a halt.
The term largely descends from its use in Christian scriptural politics, where early church councils had to pick which documents were going to be considered true and the basis of their faith and which weren't. In this case, deciding on a canon of scriptures was important because it defined their religious teachings and what it meant to call yourself a Christian.
...but really, I come at it from a fan works perspective, and I just think it's useful to at least know how you're diverging from the shared understanding when you create something. Even your Truce at Bakura example relates to there being a Star Wars canon, it's just that we can accept that there's nested variants of it -- the original movies always holding primacy, and then either layering Legends or the Disney properties on top of it. Having no concept of a Star Wars canon at all would leave us with something like Star Wars: Visions, where "Star Wars" is more of a vibe that stories are inspired by than a setting that stories happen in.
Sherlock Holmes died at the base of the Reichenbach Falls, Luke's father was killed by Darth Vader (whose first name was Darth) and Bilbo's invisibility ring is just a neat magical trinket with no malevolent power or significance beyond what is immediately apparent. Odysseus was killed by his son, Telegonus. Hermione used the time turner to travel back into the past to make out with herself. Bellatrix Lestrange had a secret love child with Voldemort. Cleopatra was bitten by a poisonous asp.
Humans were created both before and after animals.
God created the Sun on the first and fourth days.
People fanwank their way out of these to have a book free of contradictions, but fanwank isn't scripture.
They had other children.
For the sun part, this probably refers to Genesis 1:3 "let there be light" and dividing day from night, and Genesis 1:16 "And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night" and often in between there's "morning and evening". The way this happens after the fourth day is with the sun and moon lights.
I wasn't there at the time, but I assume reality pre-day four was running prior to OpenGL 2.4 and was using global illumination, and then afterwards switched to RealEngine 4, probably. Just a guess.
Humans being created before and after animals likely refers to Genesis 1:26 and 2:19. That is a bit curious, agreed. The way I take it, since Genesis 2:4-29 happened after the 7th day, is something like "hold up, let's go back to those days when plants, animals, and humans were created, and get slightly more specific about it.
The origin story in the Bible is short on specifics, so it leads to a lot of interesting fan theories, and divides many of the staunchest fans. "These are literal days here" "no, these are phases, a day could be any length of time, the sun wasn't even there yet" and so on, as if that was the main point of the passages, when it isn't.
To be pedantic, the creation of the first day was light and darkness. The fourth day was the things that emit light: the sun, stars, and moon. I mean, it's still somewhat weird because it seems like it's inventing effect before cause, but the sun is very clearly not being invented on the first day.
The more fun contradiction is that Jesus' genealogy from David is given twice... and both of them are completely different.
It's one of many many flaws that made me question my (protestant) religious upbringing.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealogy_of_Jesus
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immaculate_Conception
Uh...
> The Immaculate Conception is the belief that the Virgin Mary was free of original sin from the moment of her conception.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_virginity_of_Mary
The first has it own wikipedia page and its from the creator of LessWrong. From Wikipedia: > It adapts the story of Harry Potter to explain complex concepts in cognitive science, philosophy, and the scientific method.
I read it almost 10 years ago but remember it getting tiresome after a while, but it does teach a ton about logical thinking.
The second is a less famous fic where someone who must have at least a masters in mathematics wrote Hermione as using math to create her own spells, theories and gradually becoming better at magic as she turned into a better arithmancer, and everything is based in real world theory.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_o... [1] https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10070079/1/The-Arithmancer
Presumably the "cult": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LessWrong
Or maybe they mean specifically the subgroup of people on LessWrong who believe the creation of AGI would be the end of the world.
And here I thought “My Immortal” was the weirdest Harry Potter fanfiction.
Thanks for the links!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35064303
"The Real-Life Consequences of Silicon Valley’s AI Obsession
Sam Bankman-Fried made effective altruism a punchline, but its philosophy of maximum do-gooding masks a thriving culture of predatory behavior."
Why not?
It is fun in the beginning, but it reeks of ayn rand and juvenile oversimplification of the world. This all might be ok, but the story is written with an agenda and its like reading scientology fiction or something.
I'd recommend just reading Enders Game instead.
I remember finding it interesting from a pedagogical perspective, because it starts out as a vehicle for "Harry gives lectures about 'rationalism' to anyone within 15 feet of him" scenes and quickly moves on to "Harry makes very poor choices and doesn't do any actual science", which although it does make for a better story also somewhat undermines the level of trust one can have in his teachings.
Fanon can and often will supersede canon, to the point where after a generation or two the fanon is woven into the canon. You will never stop this process, so you might as well make a fertile field for the audience's ideas to grow after you've harvested your story.
The author is very British, and in the discussions of Snape, she regularly references https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Nettleship (who Snape is a thinly-veiled fictionalization of), and appears to have known him personally and that's part of why she dissects Snape at such length. From the old-fashioned & eccentric site design, to popping up in 2005 with a fully-formed voice and enormous long-form projects, this is clearly no middle-schooler who just started reading HP. (Certainly not with all the nerdy investigations into botany & geology and British crime etc which she uses as backing for various claims - one of us one of us.) So who is this author?
They are https://www.quora.com/profile/Claire-Jordan-10 wherein she links an entirely separate anti-Creationist blog http://www.imaginarymongoose.co.uk/blog/ (boy does that bring back memories of the '00s) and describes herself as
> Degree in biology and folklore; programmer, shop owner, secretary on newspaper. Worked at National Health Service (NHS) / Studied at University of Edinburgh / Lives in Slamannan: 2016–present > > I’ve set up a page from which to do Tarot readings. I'm going to try to raise enough money from Tarot to get driving lessons, as a driving licence would hugely improve my chances of finding a job, even at my age. > > I’ve been many things in my time, including a programmer for the NHS, the Publicity Officer of the Raoul Wallenberg Committee in London, secretary to the Defence Desk at The Daily Telegraph, the owner and manager of a small Celtic/pagan witchy shop and a professional maker of wargame figures (although the firm I was working for, Jacobite Miniatures, went bust after I’d made them one figure). > > I’m a practising witch and Tarot reader with a degree in Biological Science (the best clairvoyant I know has a PhD in cell-surface chemistry), and I seem to have become the go-to person on Quora for explaining evolution to Creationists. I’ve been active in British SF and fantasy fandom since 1981 and writing fanfiction (nowadays mainly Harry Potter-based, under the netnicks whitehound and Borolin) since about 1985. I’ve won a couple of quite prestigious awards for poetry and am currently working on a book about my father’s adoptive family - especially his mother, who started out as Ethel Maud Shirran, a shorthand typist in Edinburgh in 1922, and finished up as the Kazini Elisa Maria Dorgi Khangsarpa of Sikkim. You can read all about it, and my fanfiction, at 3ws dot whitehound dot co dot uk > > Owing to the death in 2018 of my mother, whose carer I was, and the fact that I’ve been either a carer or a self-employed shop-owner since 2001, I’ve been left struggling to make money from freelance work, since I am so close to retirement age that it’s not worth anyone’s trouble to re-train me (not to mention spending most of 2019 with cataracts, and most of 2020 with Long COVID)...