i love reading peoples' opinions on trigun but sometimes i will see an opinion that is so like. bewilderingly wrong it actually makes me doubt my own interpretation of the source material

stranger in a fannish land 2: the unpopular opinions

So there's a meme where people are weighing in on what they'd change about The Raven Cycle and it's like.... Many people in fandom really have no sense of what's 'good for the story', or the difference between your personal satisfaction or reaction and 'a good idea' for the plot. Like, I realize that some things are sad, or unfortunate to have happen. But like, just because it's unfortunate (for ex, a character-- say, Noah-- doesn't get a happy ending) doesn't mean it's better not done in fiction. Alternatively, just because you can imagine it, doesn't mean it's even remotely a good idea for the fictional situation and/or characters as they stand. I mean... anything *can* happen, but not everything *should* happen, given you're trying to justify it as a Good Idea in the first place.

Sure, Ronan could've been together with Gansey, or even Kavinsky before Adam. Why not? He also could've been kidnapped by a pedophile as a child, or he could've been hit by lightning and got grey hair, or he could've been born on Maui and never met Gansey. He simply could've died as a baby, etc etc. If you're actually talking about desirable outcomes or things helpful to the relationships between Gansey, Adam, Ronan and Blue, you have to limit these potentialities and look at what *ought* to happen to preserve their dynamic, though. So yeah, Ronan/Kavinsky would be especially destructive to every major relationship in the books, and any hope for growth Ronan has, and in that sense it's equivalent to Ronan being born in Hawaii or dying as a baby. But Ronan/Gansey is just differently destructive to the group dynamic as we know it, with the characters as we know them. It would mean Ronan isn't so romantic and innocent, either, so his whole characterization changes, or it means they're not simply best friends. I mean, you can't 'just' casually have a crush on your closest friend if you're a romantic. If you do, it's usually not something one quickly or easily gets over to move easily onto the next friend, whether that's Blue or Adam. Further, Gansey's power over Ronan would start being really questionable all of a sudden, to the point where you'd have to wonder if Kavinsky was right. Jealousy and weird unrequited feelings would probably threaten the boys' connection with Blue, and this would probably change both Gansey's and Ronan's relationship with Blue. Regardless, an actual canon attraction or relationship between Ronan and Gansey, or between Henry, Blue and Gansey, is not just a fun, sexy little detail you can easily insert at any time. Every choice has consequences like ripples in a pond. That's how life works, but more importantly, it's how fiction works. This is the very thing that fans seem particularly oblivious of.

In general, my point is that just because you have a preference for X thing, or you react in a negative way to Y plot point, it doesn't mean that said X is good and Y is bad. I dunno, I feel like I'm stating the obvious. These aren't super-deep thoughts, are they? I mean, it's actually really blatant that say, Noah had a great arc and/or served his purpose wonderfully in the books, and yet maybe 5 people out of 100 seem aware of this in Raven Cycle fandom. Almost every post complaining about TRK states Noah's resolution sucked 'cause he 'deserved better'. I'd understand if 6 year-olds said that sort of thing, because it takes a while to understand dead people don't get better, but otherwise, I don't see how ghosts deserve happiness. Like, they're already dead, basically. Noah started out dead, and this had a major purpose in that plot. And dead is dead, man. That's kinda the *point* of being dead. It's both permanent and unhappy. As far as being dwelled on afterwards, none of the events of the climax got dwelled on afterwards. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway, so the number one thing that drives me batty in fandom is people ignoring the entire idea of characterization or plot requirements in the story and assuming any old thing or headcanon that they wanted could actually somehow work. I dunno if these fans even think in terms of things 'working', though maybe I should be more optimistic. Like, for example, even agreeing it'd be great if Gansey also kissed/liked boys and was bisexual... why would he *randomly* kiss his friends? Who in the world does that outside pure romantic/sexual fantasies? Why not at least ask the question of 'why Gansey' first? Or why not demand Adam kiss random boys, 'cause at least he's confirmed to be bisexual in canon? Is there any other point except that everyone needs to be queer at all times? Even individual fanfics would usually at least try to make sense, rather than randomly putting in an assortment of happy headcanons. (Granted, I've seen fics that claim to incorporate an assortment of headcanons, but this isn't typical.) Who really wants books to be a collection of politically correct boxes checked, double checked and triple checked? Honestly.

What really drives me nuts is not really the fact that people want these counterproductive things to be canon, because surely the heart wants what it wants. It's the misunderstanding of the way fiction works, and consequently that these posts blame the writer(s) for their so-called failure in delivering what makes no sense in the first place. Like, some critiques are valid, obviously, even though I don't think the characterization of either Ronan or Adam (as it stands) easily transfers onto a POC character. Their background would need to change to some degree (particularly Ronan's, being Irish as a matter of characterization), so essentially it'd be a different character (though Blue is different). Anyway, so one can certainly critique that, as well as the pros and cons of labelling Adam bisexual more explicitly and so on. But stuff like randomly bi Gansey or happy Noah are just headcanons and pure wish-fulfillment. And my issue is that fandom doesn't draw any kind of serious line between these two kinds of 'critiques', in part because they often use the same lingo. It's literally like no one is aware that say, polyamory isn't really even in the same box as racial and sexual diversity representation, so Stiefvater had no responsibility to include Sarchengsey. Just because you care about that headcanon and/or real life issue doesn't make it a *social justice* responsibility that needs addressing in the media. I would think that's obvious, but it definitely isn't.

I think the underlying problem in my relating to fandom these days is that I don't... 'read' characters any particular way. Like, I may have interpretations about what happened and guesses as to what will happen, as well as hopes, but I don't just *decide* things. I never personally decide to read a character as gay, trans, ace, or a POC (let alone polyamorous), unless they're stated or super-heavily implied as being intended as any or all of the above. That is not a thing that happens to me. Of course, 'implied' kinda means that canon can get fuzzy to me, which is certainly true. Usually I'm just aware 'this is fuzzy'; maybe it's that even if I do go further, I don't fill in blanks with personal experience on any conscious level that I've ever noticed. It's not that I'm (that much of) a canon absolutist; I'm just unlikely (and indeed almost incapable of) making leaps that aren't ultimately suggested by the text. I'm also definitely irritated by many people who *do* make such leaps in a preachy, pushy, in-your-face way, like canon is irrelevant and fanon is the Only Truth needed (and if you disagree, you're the problem). If it's subtle but still intentionally textual, I'll (eventually) see it. If it's not textual... I probably won't. I don't read against the grain, basically.

It wouldn't be so bad (my mental dissonance in fandom, I mean) if not for the pushy holier-than-thou posts about the Truthiness of things which are absolutely Not Canon, which are always at the back oh my mind. So I guess I can overreact to some innocent wish-fulfillment stuff sometimes. I don't mean Truthiness like those (wanky and unfortunate) old debates about canon Johnlock or even (apparently) whether Victuuri is canon. That's actually less weird 'cause at least I can see people genuinely reading the text differently in that case, for whatever reason. Like yeah, I mean, I think denying Victuuri is canon is ridiculous and I haven't even watched Yuri on Ice. But at least those people seem to have some sort of reasoning as to *why* they think Victuuri doesn't exist, even if it's bad or homophobic reasoning. What really frustrates me the most is the growing fandom trend of people who wilfully ignore canon and the very idea of interpretive/headcanon plausibility without even acknowledging there's a deeper disagreement.

Like, we're talkin' the level of the folks who go beyond 'let's racebend Ronan Lynch' (ok, sure!), through the valley of 'you better racebend him or you're Problematic' (um, are you sure? I think I'm going to go with 'strongly disagree') and into the shadow of 'Ronan Lynch *is* black, and if you *deny* it you're Problematic'. I know it's all fun, games and headcanons, but when you're trying to get other people to replace their idea of canon with your headcanon, or trying to justify it in general, eventually it becomes all too easy to forget you'd ever even noticed that, say, Ronan is white while reading the books. And in fact, many people seem genuinely confused about that aspect of canon reality at this point, which is kind of terrifying to me. I value my ability to process the text correctly, pay attention to basic facts and, well, perceive objective reality in general. And yes, white Ronan Lynch is objective canon reality. You can certainly mess with it in fanworks (that's what fanworks are for!), but it remains canon, and no headcanon is morally superior enough to canon to *have* to be the preferable choice, let alone actually *replacing* it. In fact, the very idea that the more morally superior thing is somehow more 'correct' on a literal level is... Problematic. At least, to me. Not least because I think that although we do definitely need more representation, fellow fans cannot have a responsibility to invent it where it doesn't exist. Ability is not *responsibility*.

Basically, while transformative readings and headcanons are a great outlet and a fundamental part of fandom, it's not the *responsibility* of other character fans or fellow shippers to follow them or even support them. To me, that's really basic stuff that's long made fandom function on a fundamental level (on par with 'ship what you like'), and the fact that it often seems the majority of Tumblr fandom disagrees is making participation near-intolerable, at least in The Raven Cycle (the most extreme examples of this type of wank are concentrated in book fandoms, it seems, 'cause I think actors are more 'real' to people visually). It should just always be unnecessary to even say that if you don't want to slash, or racebend, or even ship outside of the canon sandbox (or you want to sometimes but not others), there's *nothing* wrong with that, as long as you accept that others won't have the same preferences. I really can't believe I feel I even have to say so, but I know I do. There's nothing wrong with preferring or enjoying canon as is. That's the basic level of the meaning of being fannish, surely. You like the thing you like! Liking it the way it is in canon cannot be considered the *inferior* way of liking it. So yeah, the mental dissonance can get very, *very* intense for me.

Essentially, good characters (especially ones I care about at all) and their core emotional responses and frameworks are real to me: Ronan is an individual. He's white, he's Irish-American, he's a Southern boy, he's got blue eyes. He's also angry, depressed, idealistic, loyal. Sherlock is an individual. He's also a white male, he's a Londoner, he's got dark curly hair, a low voice and many chins. And he's analytical, sensitive but interpersonally oblivious in some ways, obsessed with John, jealous of Mycroft, etc. You *can* certainly change most of this in a fic, but this doesn't mean you *should*, certainly without acknowledging the broad-ranging consequences. In a good and IC fanfic, you would have to acknowledge that those core traits are still the basic starting points, part of the definition of the character. Basically, as anyone who knows me will know, I've got an unholy obsession with ICness, even/especially in the context of fanon pairings, settings or situations like AUs. The characters and their core motivations are simply not fungible or interchangeable to me. This isn't really a failure of imagination ('why can't you just imagine whatever?' you say), but rather about seeing an imaginary person *so* vividly in my mind they they become effectively real.

In a way, this sounds similar enough to what people say happens with various projections and headcanons, but the process actually seems rather different, 'cause I pay attention to the text and not just my reactions to it. I love to imagine, to build upon the possibilities of the canon world, of course. I just... have to have a foundation. I can't imagine being *any* kind of fan without paying close attention outside of myself and caring about what I find there, in the text. Fanon and canon have to be separated for *either* to have true meaning.

In any case, in a broader sense, I do think I understand what happens to the people who get hung up on their headcanons and start insisting on them. My imagination is always something that starts out broad and open and ends up cast in stone, once I feel I've figured out what the relevant 'truth' is, in context. I can certainly settle on an interpretation and get pretty hardline about it, which happened to a large extent with my ideas about canon Johnlock (though I was always aware what's opinion and what's fact, I became very certain about my reading and I definitely got pretty easily frustrated by people who ignored the 'obvious'). That's why I separated a close reading or interpretation like canon Johnlock and even Victuuri from something like racebending Ronan Lynch, though. That's not a plausible reading or interpretation; rather, it's a simple denial and substitution of canon (which, as I've said, I never do). Telling me that doing it would be morally preferable doesn't really help (to say the least), although the process of how people get to this point *is* familiar to me.

I can and *do* often enjoy AUs or graphics where there's a new context for the character (say, edits where Ronan is Korean or Mexican-Irish have been cool). Not all AUs are created equal to me, though, 'cause not all AUs or fanon scenarios work with the characters' core traits, as written. Sometimes, though, fanon ships (a form of an AU) do work on the level of potential, like the Road Not Travelled By. You can sometimes imagine the canon arc splitting off at some crucial point, so it bends but doesn't break. This can be complicated stuff, but it's how I intuitively think of it. Generally, I'd need a sense of broader changes to who they are as a result of a new life history, but that's still an agreed-upon suspension of disbelief. Consequences, in other words.