The five deadly sins of transformative fandom:
- Treating popular fanon regarding a character as authoritative, and getting angry at people whose feelings toward that character are informed by the version who appears in the actual text
- Conflating “it’s possible to construct this particular narrative from elements present in the text” with “this is the narrative the text in fact presents“
- Dismissing criticism of a particular aspect of the text on the grounds that you can imagine some hypothetical context in which the cited elements wouldn’t be problematic
- Elevating a particular body of fan-work above the source material, and acting like anybody whose fandom doesn’t take the former into account is missing the point
- Getting so immersed in a deep subtextual reading that you reflexively assume anyone who has an issue with the explicit text of the source material is engaging in bad faith
In response to certain recurring themes in the notes, I feel I should clarify that none of these issues depend in any way on one’s stance regarding the canon-versus-fanon debate. They’re still problems even if you place non-commercial fan work on absolutely equal footing with commercially published fiction and don’t acknowledge the existence of canon per se.
Leaving the notion of “canon” aside, the creation of fan-work is properly understood as a process of adaptation. What’s going on when you create that coffee shop AU is not fundamentally different from what happens when a book is made into a movie, or when a comic becomes a cartoon series. The key understanding is that adaptations don’t reach back in time to subsume or invalidate the source material they’re based on, nor are those who engage with that source material under any obligation to consider, or even acknowledge, any subsequent adaptations.
To draw a parallel, suppose you had a particular criticism of how the character of Dracula is depicted in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the 1897 novel. If I were to come to you and say “no, this criticism isn’t valid because it makes assertions about the character which are not true of Gary Oldman’s performance in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the 1992 film”, I suspect we can all agree that in this scenario, I’d be full of shit, right?
Well, it doesn’t become less full of shit when the adaptation being cited is non-commercial or fan created.
“adaptations don’t reach back in time to subsume or invalidate the source material they’re based on, nor are those who engage with that source material under any obligation to consider, or even acknowledge, any subsequent adaptations.”