Day 7
In your own space, share a favorite piece of original canon (a TV episode, a song, a favorite interview, a book, a scene from a movie, etc) and explain why you love it so much. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
Okay, I want to talk about a problematic fandom.
I’m not even sure if it’s one of my fandoms.
What I’m talking about is Diana Gabaldon’s “Outlander” series, now an acclaimed TV show.
I read the first book in 1997, long before there was any serious fandom for this series. I read this book in very particular personal circumstances, which is certainly a part of why it’s burned into my memory like that. But at the time the reading experience was also unparalleled for me in its brutality, passion, sensuality, and nitty-gritty realism. I was shocked and blown away. I honestly can’t remember another reading experience that was this visceral for me.
The “Outlander” series ended up being one of the things I share with my husband (like “Lord of the Rings” or “Harry Potter” or “Lisbeth Salander”). At some point I even wrote a little gapfiller for Yuletide.
I’m first and foremost a fix-it ficcer, so that was why I was and was not in “Outlander” fandom – there wasn’t really anything to fix. I may not have liked all twists and turns of the story, but there was nothing that really called to me to write or art for. But I (and my husband) still followed the series passionately. The richness of historical detail, the juxtaposition of our time and the past, wrapped in a seemingly endless series of doorstopper novels… what’s not to love?
But then this happened.
Since then I continued reading the series (mostly, at least – I still haven’t tackled the latest doorstopper because as an evil European I’m not really all that invested in the story of American independence), but my passion for the series was pretty much extinguished because the author was such a fucking asshole about fanfic.
When news got out about a TV show I was… “skeptical” is probably the politically correct term.
But because it’s one of the things my husband and I both really, really enjoyed reading, I ended up ordering the DVDs of the first season for Christmas after all.
And we were absolutely BLOWN away.
The actors are brilliant. The attention to detail and authenticity is fucking amazing. The way the show interprets and transforms canon is imaginative and creative and suitable. My concerns were very similar to my apprehension about “The Lord of the Rings” – I couldn’t imagine that anyone is capable of turning that into a movie, but Peter Jackson managed. And Ronald D. Moore and the cast and crew of the “Outlander” series managed, too. Holy hell.
But what does that mean for me as a fan?
To be honest, I don’t know.
Should anything in the series or TV show inspire me, could I get over the cruel and ignorant things the author said and wrote about fanfiction, even if she seems to have retracted some of her statements by now ?
Can I even call myself a “fan”at all, considering the circumstances?
To be perfectly honest, I don’t want to be the “fan” of someone who ever compared fanfiction to rape.
So here’s my dilemma: A series and a TV show I enjoy, a canon I deeply care about, but I don’t even want to be a fan of this canon, much less create for it.