InsaneJournal

Further Opining on Issues of Canon

If there’s one thing that Corner and the DCU conspired to teach me, it was that canon really doesn’t matter. I’m still trying to decide whether that’s a good thing or not.

See, I was reading some more responses to Moffat’s latest Doctor Who run, and the following line slapped me in the face:

I find RTD brilliant in his own right; he’s written my favorite eps of the series and he’s got a great gift for characterization and dialogue. He’s pretty weak with plot, though, which is a major flaw in this sort of scifi writing, and I’d like to see him return to more character-focused drama like Queer as Folk. Or else he can come write for SGA, since plot is hardly their selling point anyway!

Quoted From: xparrot: Who-ing it up

Some more background: About six months or so ago now I was sitting in the foodcourt at Woden with my mum, talking about me-as-a-writer. One of the things mum said to me was that she thought I had a strong grasp of dialogue and characterisation. I thought about it, and after a few self-involved moments agreed that she was probably correct. My grasp of plot has always been tenuous at best; to me, the plot is something that happens in the background to give the characters something to react to. It’s not a ‘thing’ in and of itself. The reason I love Terry Pratchett is because I adore his characters; think they have depth and nuance and feel alive to me. The reason I can’t stand J.K. Rowling is because I loathe hers; think they’re thin, flimsy and unreal.

Corner really hammered this home for me. The plot there is about characterisation; it’s all about Loki’s identity crisis. Chainbreaker is more directly plot-driven but you can blame randomredux for that one; anything that moves the story is probably his. That was the other thing working with randomredux taught me; he’s scoped the plotlines for Urban Mythica out to a degree that just makes my jaw drop. Corner’s plot is pretty much: “Book One: Loki fights Baldr, meets Sigmund, has identity crisis, possibly with end-of-the-world. Book Two: Loki fights Ed. Ed is or is not Odin. Book Three: Profit!” The chain of set-pieces is there, but the filler tends to change every time I think about it. The canon is mutable, in other words (which causes all sorts of fun with Chainbreaker, let me assure you); the point is more about the characters’ experiences than the actual events that happen.

And when I read fanfic, it’s the same deal. I like some plot, but only inasmuch as it gives the characters something to rail against. One of my favourite fic series right now is The Identical Series (and I will link this as soon as I get home, honest). It’s very plot heavy, but the plot itself isn’t what makes the fic worth reading. Actually, the plot is kinda, well… silly. Which isn’t to denigrate the fic at all (like I said, I think the damn thing’s brilliant), only to say that the premise — Lionel clones Lex’s more-eviller replacement, disinherits real Lex — has been done so often that it was old in the Silver Age.¹ The thing that makes this fic great is the characterisation.

I think this is probably where my extremely high tolerance for off-canon, AU² and crackfic comes from. So long as you can write my characters in a way I can believe in, I don’t care how crackish or clich

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