Twisted Tuesdays, The Weekly Zym Options

[zymurgy]

Tuesday, July 25th, 2006

The Importance of Being G.

J.K Rowling has long since abandoned the idea that her books are for kids. Ron Weasley has ceased merely saying things “he wouldn’t if his mother were there,” and gets his French into solid print. Draco is no longer content with a mere sneer, but gets some rather brutish action in this last book. And of course, Voldemort is no longer a vague and shadowy presence.

However, Project Ferret retains its policy of child-friendly stories and posts. We may not be by kids, but we are definitely proud of being for kids. Kids with a capital K.

Now, you might ask why this is so. “JK said that in her story! Why can’t I say it?”

Because, as much as Harry Potter may have spiraled into dark times and despair, we should hope that the kids who read it have not. The point of FanFiction, as I see it, is to expand, elaborate, and sometimes straight out change what was given to us by the author.

Canon, in other words, is seen as “raw material.” Even as it is worshiped, like a lump of gold, it simply isn’t pretty enough for a smith. We’ve got to play with it, twist it around, and make something new.

And boy does JK give us a wealth to work with! We have characters, a setting, a premise, and even a time period worked out for us in advance. Simply put, the only thing a Fanfic author has to do is mix and match, adding originals as he sees fit.

That being so, why choose to use what we have, which can be put to a million uses, to write a story inappropriate for children? JK has already done that; hundreds of Fanfic authors have already done that. Why not have a bit of fun in the other direction?

None of this, of course, is to say that we should present only the happiness of Harry’s world. Clean fic is not necessarily happy, simplistic, or easy. All of Half-Blood Prince, for instance, could have been rewritten, portraying the same events, but in a way more accessible to the young – it would still be HBP, just from a different angle.

There is a place for serious fic here, for sad fic, and even for certain situations that aren’t to be avoided as canon stands. However, I don’t think there’s a place for so-called “adult” fic.

Why, after all, do we write and read fanfiction? Simply because we don’t want the story to be over – we don’t accept ‘that’s all she wrote,’ for an answer. As much as we understand that Sirius flew backwards through a veil and died, we still want to know more, to see more, to have another view.

And why have that view be one where he swears like a sailor, drowns his sorrows in fire whiskey, or commits a bloody and brutal murder of Peter Pettigrew?

Of all the angles available, the least chosen seems to be that of the first floor window we started from. And it simply isn’t fair to those of us (loosely termed ‘kids,’) who are still there, to have all the fic over our heads and beyond our reach. The stories, dangled just out of our reach, with teasing summaries or teasers, make us understandably upset.

Why couldn’t that author write the really cool story, (where Ron gets kidnapped by Death Eaters and has to escape on his own, without magic, but turns out he’s really Remus in Pollyjuice, while Harry believes he’s actually Draco because he misunderstood something he overheard in a dark corridor while he was hiding from Filch, and there’s a Basilisk who wears sunglasses so that it won’t petrify people, and Neville turns out to be a member of Arborists Anonymous… ) so that we could read it? Honestly!

Finally, the importance of being K is a question of numbers. It is better to have something that everybody can read, rather than something a few, however few they may be, cannot.





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[zymurgy]

Not a Tuesday, July 26th, 07
Reasons Why I Am In No Hurry To Read The Last Book

The Fandom has gone rather insane lately, what with all the last-book parties and frantic reading and finally the bereft wailing and flailing about who got offed who didn’t and the “Why? JK, WHY!?” shouts at the news of who got together with whom and so on and on.

I haven’t joined in this. I haven’t bought the book, dropped out of discussion threads a while ago (the serious ones, anyway) and decided to ignore the fury for a while.

My reasons for this are multiple. First the easy reasons.

1) I like to read at a rather slower, sedate pace than the current feeding frenzy type that seems to be going on. Or, rather, seems to have happened since just about everybody is finished reading yet. Since I wasn’t going to be done at the same time as everybody else, I thought, I might as well start when I wanted to and not when everybody else was.

2) Waiting until later dispenses with crushing lines and running about and “oh, sweet Merlin and Circe, there’s only six copies left and twelve people,” type of panic. And, hey, once somebody has read it that gets miffed enough about somebody dying or the wrong ship suddenly being cannon I can probably get the book at a fabulous discount. (Zym=Student.)

3) I have never been a particular fan of the canon anyway. Excepting for Book Three. And, even for that one I am more in love with the idea of what Book Three COULD HAVE BEEN if she’d been a bit more on the ball than what Book Three actually WAS. So sue me, I’m a bad fan. The only reason I read subsequent books was a mixture of a) wanting to know what I’d guessed right about, and b) needing to know new canon for the fanfic world. Currently, I’m finishing one great and epic (so my friends tell me) fanfic, which only follows ‘canon’ until OOTP. Therefore, I’d much rather finish said great and epic (or so they tell me) fanfic before I read the last one and get all bummed out about the fact that she has either (and most probably) gone and messed up every chance of said great and epic (…) fanfic being remotely canon, or b (less likely, but a ray of hope remains) gone ahead and done a good deal of what I have with the result that I look like a cheap hack or a prophet or something.

4) I am, I’m afraid, not a very good fan. In fact, I’m probably not even worthy of the title of ‘fan’ considering the fact that (as I’ve probably mentioned overmuch) that I consider JK’s work not something to be emulated or admired or worshiped, but rather as raw material. I’m therefore much more a fan of the fandom than I have ever been of her. And, frankly, I’m far more worried about what Sam or some of the people here at PF do with the characters, than what she does. I’ve also gotten so used to the flexible, fairy-chess mindset needed to survive as a fanfic lover that no one ending will ever be THE ending for me. If JK kills a character, so what? I can find a myriad fanfics where he’s still alive and possibly even better portrayed than JK ever managed. If JK doesn’t kill somebody I think ought to go? I can find just as many where he either offs it, or, perhaps better, never existed. GO FANFICTION!

5) I suppose I am also lazy.






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