I posted this to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
fanficrants,
Mar. 24th, 2004 11:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynbut if y'all can answer the questions here, that's cool too.
I'm a big advocate of fanfiction as a way of filling in the blanks in a published author's work until such time as that author does so themselves. I mean, there's huge chunks of history and character development in nearly any fandom that just haven't been explored, and quite often they're stuff I want to know about. What happened during the Grindelwald years in the Potterverse, or how wizards travel long distances when most people would fall off a broom after six or seven hours and flying carpets are almost certainly illegal for trans-Atlantic travel. Who the women were that inspired the creation of the term 'shieldmaiden of Rohan', or the beliefs of the Rohirrim about the afterlife; they certainly seem to believe in one, since Theoden talks about joining his ancestors more than once. The Numenoreans don't even have that much belief; where did the Rohirrim get theirs? What are the people of Khand like in their land beyond Mordor? What did the rest of the Landsraad do in the time between Paul Atreides puttin' the stabby on Feyd-Rautha and the unwashed rabble of Arrakis overrunning the Known Worlds? (I mean, other than wet their pants.) What happens aboard the whaleboat Rachel after Ahab refuses to help? Things like that.
I also enjoy fanfiction as a way of filling in the blanks about a given character and his/her history, personality, etc. That's why I wrote 'Arches', or at least partly why I did so; I had a hard time believing anyone could get into Hogwarts if they were as genuinely stupid as Gregory Goyle seemed to be, and I had a feeling there might be more to him than the 'hur hur hurh, Gronk smash' we see in the books. He had to come from somewhere- he's got a name, he's got possessions, he's got parents even if they are Death Eaters. What about them? What are they like? Other people, too. What were Alatar and Pallando like? What does Kingsley Shacklebolt do when he's not taking off from normal Auror duties to zap kids for Dumbledore? Did Petrucchio really tame Katarina, or were the two of them secretly pulling the wool over everyone else's eyes for the sake of some really big wagers?
The problem is that there's a very fine line between filling in blanks and what the good folks atdeleterius and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pottersues have termed 'Pepper Jack Cheese'. That term comes from an author who was writing the mandatory Hogwarts Express scene and decided that Hermione was going to consider that cheese her personal favourite- because it was the author's favourite. Never mind the fact that Hermione is English and probably wouldn't have access to the stuff (I'm not sure it's sold outside the United States). She wanted to give Hermione a personalizing detail, so pepper jack cheese it was. There were other things thrust upon the character, too, but I've forgotten the rest. It wasn't much of a fic.
At what point does adding stuff to a character cross the line into presumption- treading on the original author's toes? And how far can you go into presumption before you outdo even that and get genuinely egregious? Supposing a character in your fic hasn't got a published or spoken first name in a setting where everyone has a first name and a last name. Does giving them one cross a line? If you give them one that sounds appropriate to the setting and the character, is that more acceptable? For example, we never see Madam Hooch's first name, although everyone else human seems to have two names in the Potterverse. One fanfic author I read named her 'Xiomara'. I personally consider this a nice touch, since Potterverse names tend to be a bit wacky and it sounds appropriate for someone like Hooch, but I don't know how other folks feel about it. What about giving relatives to someone whose history has never been written or spoken? Back in the first few seasons of X-Files we had almost no information on Assistant Director Skinner; one author (a member of the Walter Skinner Estrogen Brigade- ah, those were happy days) postulated a farm childhood and a number of brothers for him, and an ugly period after he returned from his service in Vietnam. She wrote awfully well, and while everybody in sight except Skinner was an OC, I don't remember anyone qualifying as a Mary Sue or any especially gratuitous nastiness. Yes, there was the time after 'Nam, but the only info we had on this guy's history was a paragraph or two where he told Mulder he signed up for the Marines on his eighteenth birthday and that 'I was no choirboy, I inhaled'. It seemed to her that such a reaction to the events of the war was entirely in keeping with real-world veterans' problems, so it was reasonable for the character. . .
Anyway. The reason I ask all this is because I'm about to start on a fanfic for a Lester Dent character (Lester Dent was the guy who gave the world Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze, in the days of the pulp magazines) who only ever had two stories written about him. At no point in either story did Dent give the guy's name- there wasn't even a nickname. Just a title- 'the Silver Corporal'. The fic I'm about to start is something in the way of an origin story, since Dent made it abundantly clear that the Corporal hailed from Wyoming and somehow wound up in the Northwest Mounted Police anyway. I was going to start with a scene where he crossed the border into Canada and someone stopped him. I don't think I can get around the inevitable question of 'what's your name, stranger?', and while it may be acceptable in Wyoming to say 'most folks jes' call me Mouse', I really don't think that he could get away with a statement like that at the bloody border crossing.
It's just that Dent had twelve thousand words in which he could have given the man's name, and at no point did he do so. He didn't even drop a hint of ethnicity, which would have at least pointed in the direction of a family name if nothing else. Is it presumptuous to give this fellow a full name, considering that his original author appears to have gone out of his way to avoid doing so? Can I get away with the trick they pulled several times on MacGyver? That is, something along the lines of "He murmured the name; the redcoat winced and said, "No wonder they call you Mouse!""? I'm not even sure I feel quite right about the 'Mouse' part, but cowhands don't usually come with titles, so I needed something to call him before he joined the NWMP. The man is described as quiet, unassuming, and very, very short (Dent uses words like 'wee' and 'elfin', for Pete's sake); 'Mouse' is about the nicest thing he could get called, really.
I don't want to trample on author intent. And I don't want to pepperjack the character, either. So I was wondering, and I hope one of y'all can clarify matters for me. Yeah, we're talking ultra-tiny fandom here (right now the entire population of Silver Corporal fandom can probably be counted on one hand), but it's a matter of respect for the original author. Any suggestions?
I'm a big advocate of fanfiction as a way of filling in the blanks in a published author's work until such time as that author does so themselves. I mean, there's huge chunks of history and character development in nearly any fandom that just haven't been explored, and quite often they're stuff I want to know about. What happened during the Grindelwald years in the Potterverse, or how wizards travel long distances when most people would fall off a broom after six or seven hours and flying carpets are almost certainly illegal for trans-Atlantic travel. Who the women were that inspired the creation of the term 'shieldmaiden of Rohan', or the beliefs of the Rohirrim about the afterlife; they certainly seem to believe in one, since Theoden talks about joining his ancestors more than once. The Numenoreans don't even have that much belief; where did the Rohirrim get theirs? What are the people of Khand like in their land beyond Mordor? What did the rest of the Landsraad do in the time between Paul Atreides puttin' the stabby on Feyd-Rautha and the unwashed rabble of Arrakis overrunning the Known Worlds? (I mean, other than wet their pants.) What happens aboard the whaleboat Rachel after Ahab refuses to help? Things like that.
I also enjoy fanfiction as a way of filling in the blanks about a given character and his/her history, personality, etc. That's why I wrote 'Arches', or at least partly why I did so; I had a hard time believing anyone could get into Hogwarts if they were as genuinely stupid as Gregory Goyle seemed to be, and I had a feeling there might be more to him than the 'hur hur hurh, Gronk smash' we see in the books. He had to come from somewhere- he's got a name, he's got possessions, he's got parents even if they are Death Eaters. What about them? What are they like? Other people, too. What were Alatar and Pallando like? What does Kingsley Shacklebolt do when he's not taking off from normal Auror duties to zap kids for Dumbledore? Did Petrucchio really tame Katarina, or were the two of them secretly pulling the wool over everyone else's eyes for the sake of some really big wagers?
The problem is that there's a very fine line between filling in blanks and what the good folks at
deleterius and pottersues have termed 'Pepper Jack Cheese'. That term comes from an author who was writing the mandatory Hogwarts Express scene and decided that Hermione was going to consider that cheese her personal favourite- because it was the author's favourite. Never mind the fact that Hermione is English and probably wouldn't have access to the stuff (I'm not sure it's sold outside the United States). She wanted to give Hermione a personalizing detail, so pepper jack cheese it was. There were other things thrust upon the character, too, but I've forgotten the rest. It wasn't much of a fic.At what point does adding stuff to a character cross the line into presumption- treading on the original author's toes? And how far can you go into presumption before you outdo even that and get genuinely egregious? Supposing a character in your fic hasn't got a published or spoken first name in a setting where everyone has a first name and a last name. Does giving them one cross a line? If you give them one that sounds appropriate to the setting and the character, is that more acceptable? For example, we never see Madam Hooch's first name, although everyone else human seems to have two names in the Potterverse. One fanfic author I read named her 'Xiomara'. I personally consider this a nice touch, since Potterverse names tend to be a bit wacky and it sounds appropriate for someone like Hooch, but I don't know how other folks feel about it. What about giving relatives to someone whose history has never been written or spoken? Back in the first few seasons of X-Files we had almost no information on Assistant Director Skinner; one author (a member of the Walter Skinner Estrogen Brigade- ah, those were happy days) postulated a farm childhood and a number of brothers for him, and an ugly period after he returned from his service in Vietnam. She wrote awfully well, and while everybody in sight except Skinner was an OC, I don't remember anyone qualifying as a Mary Sue or any especially gratuitous nastiness. Yes, there was the time after 'Nam, but the only info we had on this guy's history was a paragraph or two where he told Mulder he signed up for the Marines on his eighteenth birthday and that 'I was no choirboy, I inhaled'. It seemed to her that such a reaction to the events of the war was entirely in keeping with real-world veterans' problems, so it was reasonable for the character. . .
Anyway. The reason I ask all this is because I'm about to start on a fanfic for a Lester Dent character (Lester Dent was the guy who gave the world Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze, in the days of the pulp magazines) who only ever had two stories written about him. At no point in either story did Dent give the guy's name- there wasn't even a nickname. Just a title- 'the Silver Corporal'. The fic I'm about to start is something in the way of an origin story, since Dent made it abundantly clear that the Corporal hailed from Wyoming and somehow wound up in the Northwest Mounted Police anyway. I was going to start with a scene where he crossed the border into Canada and someone stopped him. I don't think I can get around the inevitable question of 'what's your name, stranger?', and while it may be acceptable in Wyoming to say 'most folks jes' call me Mouse', I really don't think that he could get away with a statement like that at the bloody border crossing.
It's just that Dent had twelve thousand words in which he could have given the man's name, and at no point did he do so. He didn't even drop a hint of ethnicity, which would have at least pointed in the direction of a family name if nothing else. Is it presumptuous to give this fellow a full name, considering that his original author appears to have gone out of his way to avoid doing so? Can I get away with the trick they pulled several times on MacGyver? That is, something along the lines of "He murmured the name; the redcoat winced and said, "No wonder they call you Mouse!""? I'm not even sure I feel quite right about the 'Mouse' part, but cowhands don't usually come with titles, so I needed something to call him before he joined the NWMP. The man is described as quiet, unassuming, and very, very short (Dent uses words like 'wee' and 'elfin', for Pete's sake); 'Mouse' is about the nicest thing he could get called, really.
I don't want to trample on author intent. And I don't want to pepperjack the character, either. So I was wondering, and I hope one of y'all can clarify matters for me. Yeah, we're talking ultra-tiny fandom here (right now the entire population of Silver Corporal fandom can probably be counted on one hand), but it's a matter of respect for the original author. Any suggestions?
