Tidra wrote...
I agree with your assessment that the way a person feels about a certain character is very much up to the individual. Such as others not seeing Snape as attractive...though in the interview you mentioned it seems like she is talking about physical looks.
However, I don't think she did that by accident at all. Snape's backstory and his conviction for taking care of Harry simply because of his pure undying love for Lily is pretty much why Snape is so attractive at his core, and none of that was by accident. I could delve deeper into that but I won't, because I RARELY believe J.K. Rowling does anything by accident.
Here is the
transcription of the JK Rowling interview from 2004 that I was thinking of:
Q: Also, will we see more of Snape?
A: You always see a lot of Snape, because he is a gift of a character. I hesitate to say that I love him. [Audience member: I do]. You do? This is a very worrying thing. Are you thinking about Alan Rickman or about Snape? [Laughter]. Isn’t this life, though?
Q: Apart from Harry, Snape is my favourite character because he is so complex and I just love him. Can he see the Thestrals, and if so, why? Also, is he a pureblood wizard?
A: Snape’s ancestry is hinted at. He was a Death Eater, so clearly he is no Muggleborn, because Muggleborns are not allowed to be Death Eaters, except in rare circumstances. You have some information about his ancestry there. He can see Thestrals, but in my imagination most of the older people at Hogwarts would be able to see them because, obviously, as you go through life you do lose people and understand what death is. But you must not forget that Snape was a Death Eater. He will have seen things that… Why do you love him? Why do people love Snape? I do not understand this. Again, it’s bad boy syndrome, isn’t it? It’s very depressing. [Laughter]. One of my best friends watched the film and she said, “You know who’s really attractive?” I said, “Who?” She said, “Lucius Malfoy!”
So yeah. She utterly, totally does not understand why we love Snape. This is a pretty persistent theme throughout all interviews where she mentions him. Another bit from 1999:
"Q: One of our internet correspondents wondered if Snape is going to fall in love.
A: (JKR laughs) Who on earth would want Snape in love with them? That’s a very horrible idea."
I've actually heard some of these interviews live... she's not being sarcastic. She legitimately cannot understand why people love Snape. All that hotness was a depressing accident! Arglebarglemargle! Then again, the Mass Effect people could not understand why human laydees would want to jump Garrus's bones, before he was an LI. This "making hot guys" thing is apparently not rocket surgery.
Tidra wrote...
Okay. So I'm just going to throw this out there as an example...but um...Star Wars has like 5 levels of canon. They have an entire group of people that are pretty much dedicated to making sure things stay in continuity with one another. The books that are being written now, and pretty much all the books detailing what happened after Star Wars came out could essentially be labeled as "fanfiction" that became "officiallylicensed". These books were not written by George Lucas, and Lucas is the higest level of canon. These books work because these authors remember the fundamental characteristics of all the characters they are writing about, and do not go off on tangents without consulting Lucas himself.
So I don't necessarily consider fanfiction as "ultimately" breaking the seal. Obviously it is not OFFICIAL canon, but
if you are going to be writing fanfiction then it damn well better fit in well enough that it could be considered canon by the way you clearly see the characters acting in game. Not what they "COULD" be thinking, or saying, or doing, but what you know they are most likely definitely thinking, doing, or saying based on their previous conversations with
you about what they were thinking, what you see hear them saying, and what you see them doing. That doesn't mean insignificant details can't be added in that you established based on what you already know, but that is what they are - Anders favorite food is an insignificant detail.Him going over and ****ing Fenris is not.
This is my problem with all this fanfiction. I feel like people take their interpretations way too far, to the point where they have basically just their own "feelings" to back up their reasoning for a pairing. I guess you can say it is 100% matter of opinion for what people consider OOC, but sometimes when you are reading something it's really not. You have even admitted several times in your own post that the pairing itself is unlikely. So I really do not understand why you want to defend it so much. If you like it, you like it. You don't have to defend liking it tome.
Part of my walls of text here are me figuring out my own thoughts on a subject. It's why I like arguing with the arguers here sometimes, and this has given me a substantial revelation regarding my personal relationship with fanfic.
For me, if it's officially licensed, it's canon. No license no canon. It's as simple as that. And yes, extremely rarely a fan-work will later be officially licensed and become a part of canon. That doesn't mean that any fan-work is more canon than any other fan work until it is licensed.
I've written dialogue for a major lore character in a game using an internationally licensed IP. Every sentence, hell, every
apostrophe I wrote had to be sent to a guy at the IP headquarters who would tweak a few things (or not) and send them back. If you are not going through that process, or if you do not have a similar official blessing, I do not care how accurate you think your characterization is: you are not canon. If I were to write more dialogue for that character in that IP now that I'm not working for the company, that dialogue I write now
would not be canon. It could be exactly as accurate and character-consistent as the stuff I wrote when my company had that license... still not canon, even though my work has been judged as accurate to canon in the past. Not any more canon than any other scrub sitting at their computer
This is a double-edged sword.
All-Star Batman and Robin is a horribly out-of-character book for my perception of Batman... but I can't declare it non-canon just because I hate it. Fortunately it's in the rather muddy world that is comics so I just wave it off as a universe I don't particularly like, but it's part of the horrible, hideous monster that is sometimes canon.
For me, fanfic isn't just about figuring out the most statistically likely result of a given situation and following that to its logical conclusion, because for me normal fiction isn't about that either. In fact, I pretty much hate it when normal fiction does that. It's one of the reasons I stopped watching anime: if I know that the two main characters are going to end up together, why bother with the next hundred episodes? Most of the time I don't, unless the characters are astonishingly compelling.
My favorite thing in fiction is when something totally unexpected happens, something that seems crazy at first but if I look at it another way, makes total sense. The thing is, one person's awesome plot twist can be another person's total shark jump. It's what I call the plausibility bubble: If your characters act too predictably, you lose people like me who want something unexpected. If your plots are too twisty and your narrators too unreliable, you lose people who are hoping for consistency.
I don't read fanfic with a different eye than I read normal fiction. Surely pointed out earlier that I keep using fic examples, and it's true. I do that because I see fic and canon as technical distinctions, useful primarily for taxonomy. Whether or not something is 'canon' has little bearing on whether or not I think it's any good. Example: the third season of Gargoyles, the horribly maligned and regrettable Gargoyles: the Goliath Chronicles. Greg Weisman left the show, and they produced some utterly unwatchable episodes without him. Canon? According to Disney, yes. Good? Nope.
I have a perfect analogy for why I like Fenders, but it is also a total spoiler for the Game of Thrones. Let's just say this: If you told me during A Clash of Kings that these two characters were going to be good friends, I would have thought you were a moron. Now I ship them with the fire of a thousand suns, and they both seem to really care about each other. This is the best thing. This is the reason I love these books: because Martin can have two characters who have every reason to absolutely loathe each other develop to the point where their affection for each other makes sense.
I think that is the fundamental disconnect I have with a lot of people in this thread. It seems to be the prevailing notion here that
only the licensed author has the right to make that kind of bold change to the characters. I understand that notion, I simply do not share it. Once I've decided to start reading a fanfic, that author is under exactly the same rules that a canon author would be under for me: give me any plot twist you like, but
sell it. It's up to each individual person to decide whether it's sold for them, in particular.
Anders is actually a fascinating example of this (see, I'm still on topic.) A decent amount of people feel like his canon plot transformation from Awakening to DA2 was not "sold," they do not "buy" it. Everybody here does, of course, but it didn't work for some people. They fell on the side of the plausibility bubble that prefers consistency and predictability. If you had me play Awakening and said "Ok, predict what will happen to Anders" I would not have said "He merges with Justice and becomes a crazy magical hobo who lives in the sewers and gets a huge crush on a random stranger at one point while he slowly descends into madness until he blows up a chantry." I'm pretty sure nobody
actually predicted that, but now that we know what happens, when we look back we can see why or how it makes sense. Some people can't, though... they look at the Awakening stuff and think "Ok, yeah there were some hints to the merger, but other aspects of this don't make sense blah blah blah that argument again blah blah ruined."
If you asked someone to write what was most likely to happen to Anders after Awakening, nobody but the DA team would have written DA2 Anders. It doesn't logically follow. It's a plot twist. If you asked someone to write what was most likely to happen between Anders and Fenris, they would not write Fenders. Of course they wouldn't! That would be insane.
But if I can let George RR Martin convince me that [Character #5] and [Character #3] can be close, I can let a random ficwriter convince me that Fenris and Anders can be friends or lovers or whatever. I don't give random fic writers any less freedom than I give canon authors.
I may be "doin' it wrong."
Modifié par CulturalGeekGirl, 07 août 2011 - 09:00 .
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