laila
22 March 2011 @ 11:06 pm
We're Not Happy Until You're Not Happy  
I just started a four-week work placement (all the hassle and stress of a job, except you get paid in luncheon vouchers and travel expenses and that's about it), so this may be a little less coherent and/or well-sourced than usual. But in the face of a relatively recent development in the fandom, there's yet another thing I want to weigh in on.

Some canon defies all fannish attempts to categorize it.

You can be as big a stickler for chronology as you like. If your fandom's canon is basically nuts, it won't actually thank you for it.

Transformers does this. Doctor Who does it. Star Wars is baffling and Star Trek got so confused that it's given up completely and started from zero. Boy howdy do Marvel and DC do it. And, though it's only splashing in the baby pool of bewilderment rather than floating forlornly in the Gulf of Complete Incomprehension watching the distant ships, for my sins Weiss Kreuz does it too.

Which is why I'm a little baffled by Weiss Kreuz fandom's sudden desire - very, very late in the game, too - to try and make the series make sense. Up until now, it's been widely accepted that - while it's possible to pin certain events down - the bigger picture doesn't so much form a nice, neat chronological panorama as it does a demented Cubistic mess. Sure, individual details are discernible, some more so than others, but trying to make sense of it as a whole is so very nearly impossible that rather than try and break your brain on exactly how it all comes together, it's better to accept that things just work like that over here . Best to just sit back and enjoy the madness.

If you're going to make sense of this show to write about it some cherrypicking is inevitable - and, just to make matters more awkward, not all cherrypicking was born equal. But thinking that an officially-sanctioned cherrypicker's take is any more right than... well, than anyone else's out there is, to me, a rather naive view.

Fair play to Marine Entertainment, they definitely did their best. But... well, Weiss Kreuz.

Sure it's nice to have an official view on these things, but official views can be wrong - just ask, well, any member of one of the fandoms floating out there in the Gulf. They - or at least the ones with low blood pressure who occasionally see the light of day - will probably tell you that when that happens, the best thing you can do is just nod, smile and carry on working with what works for you. Because while it might be possible to come up with One True Version of Events, chances are half the fandom will take one look at it and immediately decide it doesn't make any sense. The choices at that point are skyrocketing blood pressure as you attempt to point out why the rest of the fandom is wrong, dammit, or letting it go. Because, when it comes down to it, raising the debaters' blood pressure is pretty much all these debates are good for.

Nobody's going to thank you for telling them to toss a piece of canon they happened to rather enjoy out of the window in the name of greater accuracy. They're not going to thank you for insisting that they go with a version of events that, to their eyes, makes a nonsense out of what's actually up there on page or screen. And they're not going to thank you for telling them to ignore a timeline that, if you ask them, works. Some people like working from databooks, some people like drawing their own conclusions from the original story and backing them up with that. Neither group is doing anything wrong.

Neither group is necessarily knee-deep in canon denial by default. They're just working with what works for them.

Sometimes in fandoms with wildly inconsistent canons, people will have different opinions. And as long as they're not totally making things up or clutching at threads of logic that only make sense if you totally ignore the rest of the tapestry, that's okay too.
 
 
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