Kaleidoscope

[truepenny]

I've figured out what it is that fascinates me about HP fanfiction. Bear with me; it takes some explaining.

As I've said, I like Rowling's work very much, and I admire her ability to create page-turners. Her books are effortless reading, and that is definitely a thing that takes skill. Also, considering the basic inanity of the world she's created and the silly things that happen, she can actually muster up very convincing angst when she needs to. The end of Goblet of Fire is a testament to her ability to make me (at least) care about these people, despite the fact that many of them have silly names, their magic system is entirely based on bad dog-Latin puns, and their world, much of the time, doesn't even make sense.

Her strong point is not in subtle characterization. I'm not saying, mind you, that she can't do characterization or that, given the world and the story she's chosen, the primary colors she paints her characters in are a bad thing. But she doesn't bother with subtlety, and she doesn't bother with development. Harry, Ron, and Hermione are dynamic characters, insofar as they are growing up (or, in Ron's case, refusing to grow up ... but that's a diatribe for a different post). But everybody else stays stuck right where they are. Snape remains exactly as schizo as he is at the very beginning of Philosopher's Stone--he must be evil because he behaves so dreadfully, but he's secretly good. He's never allowed to resolve the contradiction in his character. Draco remains the same immature, spiteful brat that he is the very first time we meet him in Madame Malkin's. Neville is doomed to be always forgetful, incompetent, and terrorized by Snape. And so on. This means that the books are populated by archetypes.

(Hang on. We're approaching the city limits of the point I'm trying to make.)

We have The Hero (Harry), The Villain (Voldemort, plus assorted sidekicks), The Antagonist (Draco), The Best Friend (Ron--and don't you get tired of Harry whining, "Ron's my best friend!" at all and sundry?), The Brain (Hermione), The Sadistic Teacher (Snape), The Benevolent Old Man (Dumbledore), The Good Teacher (Lupin--bring him back!), The Obligatory Family Issues (the Dursleys), The Funny But Pathetic Loser (Neville) ... I could go on, but I'll stop. Every character we've yet encountered can be fit neatly into a pigeonhole.

And this is why HP fanfic is so fascinating.

heres_luck and I were talking about Jossverse fanfic, particularly slash pairings that don't work for us, and I realized--and think I said at the time--that the reason they don't work is that Jossverse characters tend to be relentlessly three-dimensional. They have sexualities; on a Mutant Enemy show, you can know that if two characters of the same sex aren't getting it on, that's because (a) they aren't gay and/or (b) they really don't want to. Willow and Tara prove the one, and Buffy and Spike prove the other. If there's sexual attraction available, Mutant Enemy will use it.

Rowling's broad public-only characterization style (along with several other characteristics of her work that, again, I'm not going to get into here) means that there are more things we really don't know about these characters--if you think about them as real people--than things that we do. And because the characters are broadly-drawn archetypes, you can manage an astonishing range of behaviors and interactions without drifting out of character. Not that you can't commit gross and egregious fouls (particularly the Poor Ickle Drakie School of H/D), but people can and have created a kaleidoscope of different Harrys, different Dracos, different ways that these two archetypal figures can react and think and love.

So the Draco of Belong, the Draco of Underwater Light, the Draco of Lust over Pendle, the Draco of Contract ... they all come from the same template, and they are all believable as Draco (although they are all most definitely not Rowling's Draco), but they are all distinctly different people.

And that's what fascinates me about HP fanfic. It's something you genuinely cannot get in any other genre; the whole point about canon is that it's canon. But with fanfic, you just turn the kaleidoscope and a whole different pattern shifts into place. So there are endless variations on a theme, endless different examinations of the same story-telling components. It's like that Russian guy (help! can't remember his damn name!) and his taxonomy of fairytales. I look at all the variants on H/D, and I am amazed by how many different places stories can go from an identical starting point.

I'm a narrative junkie. That's what I love. And I love HP fanfiction precisely because it takes these predefined parameters and produces this endless proliferation of narratives out of it.

Comments

[hesychasm]

Yeah, you're totally hitting the nail on the head with this. I want to say more intelligent things in response, but am at work and just scrolling through LJ. But you've said it all anyway.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

You can get the same with endless retellings of out of copyright material like Homer, and like the Arthurian legends, and like the bible for that matter -- Lloyd Douglas The Robe is fanfic, it's a story within the cracks of the canonical. And I've read The Iliad done from Cassandra's POV, from Helen's POV, from Briseis's POV -- all women, I wonder why? The Arthurian retellings -- I'm thinking especially of Chretien de Troyes, who did a whole lot of this between the cracks stuff, using the canonical characters and moving within archetypes and telling new stories -- can sometimes get quite interesting.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

For me, there's a difference between retellings and the kind of extrapolation I'm talking about. In retellings, the facts of the story can't change--Troy has to fall, Guinevere has to betray Arthur with Lancelot. You can make those things happen for different reasons, in different ways, with different meanings, but you can't make them not happen. If you do, you're writing a different story, and the point of the retelling is lost.

The thing that's fascinating me is the way in which this handful of static elements can be put together to make different stories. The trouble with retellings, for me, is that I know how the story's going to end, and so there's always part of my mind that's bored. (Wading through The Mists of Avalon was like a penance for precisely that reason.) Some authors can do it cleverly enough to make me enjoy it--and I'm entirely addicted to retellings of fairy tales, (such as Emma Donoghue's splendid Kissing the Witch)--but mostly not.

Oh, I don't know. Perhaps I'm just being an idiot because I'm discontented with my own work.

[heresluck]

Of course, Kissing the Witch does change endings, or cuts away before the ending of a given story, and thus leaves characters/motives/actions/meanings in configurations quite different from the more familiar versions. The book relies on our knowledge of the "originals" (always an odd thing to say of folktales), but announces in the very first story that these versions may go off in quite different directions. In that sense, the book is much more like "different stories" than "retellings."

[papersky.livejournal.com]

But Chetien added things. He made up the whole Grail story. Wace added Lancelot, and Chretien added Percival. (MZB wrote some lovely stories set on Darkover, but her understanding of C.6 Britain was sadly lacking in so many areas just don't get me started.) But even in this past century, Gillian Bradshaw wrote a story called Down the Long Wind, in which the main plot, in the first two books anyway, is an entirely new story about Gwalchmai.

What I'm trying to say is that this is something some people do when they have a common universe of stories to play in that they're allowed to play in. It's historically a normal thing to do. It's what Euripides was doing, writing Women of Troy<./cite> writing in the cracks, using the characters, using story and background people knew to get an angle on telling something real and terrible. It just looks odd because we don't, culturally, do it a whole lot, because we, culturally, have copyright and artists making a living from their art, which is, historically, unusual.

P.S.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

The Myrmidons was Achilles/Patrokles slash...

[valancy.livejournal.com]

*nods* right there with you. I also am fascinated by how things are downplayed - there's this blood and death and horrible family abuse, but it feels downlplayed as 'oh, it's the Dursleys' or 'oh, it's the evil bad guy villain'. One of my favorite moments in a friend's fic was when Harry admits privately to being claustrophobic - all those years in the cupboard. It was so painful to read; makes you feel for a second the real horror of what his childhood must have been like.