rivendellrose | talking meme day 15 (Reply)

nenya_kanadka asked: "Writing fic: Do you prefer open or closed canons, and why?"

And the answer is... I've never really thought about this before. When I think about the things that I've done the most writing for, though, I come to the conclusion that I prefer open canon... but that my definition of open canon is almost always "I am currently watching this thing in an ongoing manner, or recently finished it" rather than necessarily "this thing is currently ongoing in the rest of the world."

By the time I started watching either of them, BSG and B5 were both closed canons. Same with Fringe (which, granted, I wrote much less of publicly, but

gaslightgallows will vouch for the fact that it made a very significant impact on our private writing during and after the time I watched it). But since I do my level best to avoid spoilers, I approached both of them as if they were open during the time that I watched them -- I came at everything new, and my thinking and writing about the shows changed as I experienced them.

I also don't see any point in writing fanfic about movies, generally -- the only times I've felt compelled to do so it's either been something very short (like the bit I wrote where Prime Spock met the Ninth Doctor) or something that expands from the ending of the movie, like the stuff I wrote for Hellboy II.

In a way, I definitely find it difficult to write for something that's coming out weekly, like Discovery. It's frustrating to know that if I see something, I might have to choose between writing something around it that very week or risking it getting passed by, dismissed, or totally changed by the next week. I'm generally pretty good at saying "this happens at thus-and-such-point-in-time" or "this happens before x" or even "xyz did not happen in the world of this fic," but sometimes there are revelations that just make a particular story idea feel pointless. That said, I like the input. I like not knowing for sure where the characters are going, and trying to guess, and the excitement that that adds to the writing process when sometimes I get something right, or even when I wind up going in a completely different than canon, but one I might find equally interesting.

When shows are over and canons are closed (again, typically this is when they're closed for me, as in when I hit the end of the series), I guess I often feel a bit more of a need to either wrap things up in a neat bow, deal with what the finale might not have, or go into a totally different direction. Once I'd seen everything B5 did with the Minbari, I felt comfortable taking them in my own directions, both in the past and in the future from the perspective of the canon. With BSG, I played a little bit with what I thought was wrong with the finale, then wrote a giant summation of Athena and Helo's relationship (including the other Sharons) that was, for me, pretty much my "This is what I'm here for." It was like a fandom dissertation. "Here, this is what I've been in this fandom to do." Following that, I think I played a little bit more and then moved on, because I felt like I'd said everything I needed to say.

I think what I'm coming around to is a sense of "closed" versus "open" canons that is different than the one people are usually talking about. I loved BSG, but the characters were brought to very distinct end-points at the end of the series, and there was nothing really left to do with them after that. Go back, fill in some gaps, maybe go forward a little bit, but... not much, because we know what comes after, too. There's almost no room to play, once you've seen the series to its end. Whereas in something like B5 or Star Trek, there's always more. There's always tomorrow, a year from now, what happens after this or that or the other thing. Those universes spin on, open-ended, out into infinity, and that leaves endless openings to write. I may feel like I've said everything I want to say about B5 (and right now I sort of do), but it's not because there isn't any room to write anymore, it's because I wrote 26 fics in the space of a number of years, and then spun most of the ideas I was really excited about from those into an original universe.

So... I guess I have a preference for open canons, but my definition of "open" may be different from what most people think of as it meaning.