On shipping and canon consistency
Nov. 10th, 2005 01:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snorkackcatcherThis ramble was inspired by one of After the Rain's posts on canon and non-canon shipping -- I intended to post a reply, but then it started to turn into some kind of mini-essay, so I reckoned I'd better post it here instead. So here's my 2p's worth (or 2d's worth, I suppose, when that phrase was coined!)
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a_t_rain's thought-provoking comments linked to above suggested that if you're going to go with a non-canon or canon-implausible ship such as Harry/Hermione or Remus/Sirius, you might as well go all the way and write an actual AU showing how that ship affects the characters and the storyline, because there's no reason for cutting strange ships a break when other canon-compliance problems get pounced on. That's a reasonable suggestion, and when it's applied to the kind of stories that just plain ignore the developments in the books, I'm very much in agreement. However ...
My feelings about the canon-consistency of shipping are actually kind of ambiguous. After all, the treat-shipping-like-any-other-canon-compliance-issue thing cuts both ways -- in writing a fanfic we tend to have to make up a lot of backstory for characters, and whatever choices are made for this backstory will naturally affect their personalities, and romantic interests can certainly be a valid part of that. Personalities are sufficiently complex that there's quite a lot of scope for variations without going hopelessly OOC -- it's on a different level to simple concrete things from the books such as Harry's hair colour or the incantation used to conjure a Patronus or the name of the Minister for Magic, which the writer either gets right (and earns approval) or gets wrong (and earns brickbats).
Now I really like Missing Moments and stories that mesh well with canon, and don't have all that much enthusiasm for (serious) stories that wilfully disregard the basic canon material, ship-related or not, although even then there is the obvious exception of stories started pre-book X but which are consistent with canon up to book X-1 (where X is usually HBP or OotP, rarely GoF, but even PoA once). But see, the thing is that very many important aspects of the Potterverse characters weren't set in stone before HBP, simply because they were purposely being left ambiguous or completely open as things to be developed in the plot of that book and Book 7. HBP solidified a lot of those aspects, but by no means all of them. That in many cases still leaves a lot of scope for taking the books as a starting point and heading off in odd directions, and those directions can include shipping just as easily as anything else.
On that particular aspect, well yes Ron/Hermione had had anvils dropping left right and centre, and Bill/Fleur was fairly obvious too despite only having a couple of offhand references, but the direction of pretty much everyone else's love life was uncertain enough that most pairings were possible at the end of OotP (given a bit of work on the part of a fanfic writer). Few of them would have had major structural implications for the story. In fact, even most Harry pairings were possible as of that point -- because Ginny, Luna, Susan, Anne Other, and no-one at all were all perfectly reasonable structural choices for Harry's future love interest. (Hermione wasn't, not really, but even she still rated odds as a very outside chance.) The hints, such as they were, left it wide open and would have allowed JKR to go in several different directions had they been what she was planning -- many of the clues were only obvious in retrospect. Even the possibility of a Harry/Cho reconciliation wasn't actually ruled out by OotP -- it was killed off in an interview (and buried in HBP). Harry/another male character would have been harder to achieve convincingly -- even for JKR -- but it could be done (provided of course the writer was actually willing to put in the spadework and explain why Harry only showed interest in girls rather than boys before).
Just as an example, a number of very keen Harmonians on the Dumbledore's Feint list (one of my favourite stories, regardless of the pairings) were, naturally enough, highly miffed about Harry/Ginny in HBP, and claimed that he suddenly started to notice her That Way out of nowhere, having shown no interest in her as more than a friend before. OK, I had to point out that in DF Harry suddenly started to notice Hermione in That Way in exactly the same fashion (something which the authoress, a smart person, acknowledges), but nevertheless, of course they were right -- he does do that, because that is precisely the point on which the HBP subplot hinges. [I don't think it's an unreasonable development -- hell, I've found it happening to me in Real Life before -- but of course if you're a follower of the Harmonian Way it just can't ever happen to Harry with Ginny. :) ] But anyway, yes you can certainly look back and see things that were foreshadowing for Harry/Ginny, but they couldn't ever have been clear and unambiguous (without the benefit of hindsight or very good guessing skills). Because if they had been, it couldn't have been a plot point.
Despite the large amount of raging teenage (and non-teenage) hormones in HBP, it still left lots of those possibilities open, albeit in many cases only slightly ajar. After all, JKR was willing to take even Ron and Hermione off in different romantic directions for the sake of the subplots, and didn't actually say that either they or Harry and Ginny were going to be together as of the end of the book itself. She's certainly confirmed in interviews that her intention always was to have both those pairings; so as it turned out, any apparent Harry/Ginny foreshadowing was in fact actual foreshadowing, and any apparent Harry/Someone Else foreshadowing was either unintentional, a red herring, or showing something else such as friendship. But that's from interviews; in the books all that isn't there, and the apparent foreshadowing is still there, still usable.
To be fair, therefore, it wouldn't be unreasonable for a fanficcer to treat the interview statements as non-canon for the sake of (say) getting Harry and Hermione together. It would certainly be better if they acknowledged JKR's vision for the characters, and treated that as an important part of their personality. That would still leave them a lot of scope to have events move in such a way as to shift the pairings -- provided only that they didn't simply ignore where things actually were at the end of HBP, but started from that new baseline and worked with it.
Also relevant, it seems to me, is that there are two distinct levels of foreshadowing -- what for the sake of nomenclature I'll call character foreshadowing and structural foreshadowing (apologies for not knowing correct literary terms here). Character foreshadowing would be something like Ron getting jealous of Krum, or Hermione of Fleur -- it relates to the feelings of the characters themselves, considered as 'real people', and exists within their world. It's usually quite obvious. Structural foreshadowing would be something like Ginny seeing Harry for the first time at Platform Nine and Three Quarters, or Harry rescuing her from the Chamber -- as far as the characters themselves are concerned it has no particular romantic implications for them at the time inside their world, but on a meta-level, for the readers, it gets them thinking in terms of how the author might be setting them up as a suitable match for later. That meta-level usually isn't obvious or unambiguous, for the reasons above -- and I can't see why a fanfic writer shouldn't feel free to happily ignore it for that very reason.
(On a side note, I would rather like shippers -- especially in this context Harry/Ginny shippers because their ship has worked out in canon -- not to treat structural foreshadowing stuff in the early books as character foreshadowing stuff. I can't say I'm happy with the idea that, for example, the end of CoS should be considered a Harry/Ginny romantic episode for the characters themselves at the time. He's twelve, she's eleven. Do you really want to go there?)
Anyway, what I'm saying (with great verbosity) is that given all this ambiguity, fanfic writers really do have a lot of leeway to mess with JKR's vision for the characters, insofar as we even know what that is, without drawing flak for actual OOCness on the basis of the text of the books themselves. So if for example you want to pair Remus and Sirius (to take the other ship with the most scarily intense supporters out there), yup, you can do it, and you can even do it in a canon-compliant way. It's not easy -- for all the reasons that have been expounded upon at length on anti-Wolfstar threads -- but it is just about possible, provided you don't want the relationship to be a sweet and fluffy and practically Harmonian Twoo Wub from their schooldays onwards. (If you do, you might want to get out your handy pocket dictionary and look up the word 'delusional'. Just saying.) It's one of the more difficult ones to do, because you don't get to project it into the post-HBP future and so have no choice but to wrap it around existing canon, and because putting these two together actually does fuzz with the HP storyline structurally, to an extent -- but it can be done, and you don't actually have to go the whole hog and make it completely AU.
Finally, of course this doesn't apply solely to shipping -- most of the other things you might want to do work much the same way. If you wanted Draco to be a redeemed character for your post-OotP fic, or alternatively have him become a Death Eater zealot, either could have been done with pre-HBP canon, and either still could with post-HBP canon. Pre-HBP the second would have been easier to mesh with the books; post-HBP the first extreme seems more doable (although somewhere in the middle would be more plausible). That's the kind of thing I mean -- the deliberate ambiguity gives JKR opportunities to suggest the story might go either way, so fanfic writers get yet more opportunities to piggyback and take liberties.
But all that is another and wider topic, and I have waffled on here far too much already.
a_t_rain's thought-provoking comments linked to above suggested that if you're going to go with a non-canon or canon-implausible ship such as Harry/Hermione or Remus/Sirius, you might as well go all the way and write an actual AU showing how that ship affects the characters and the storyline, because there's no reason for cutting strange ships a break when other canon-compliance problems get pounced on. That's a reasonable suggestion, and when it's applied to the kind of stories that just plain ignore the developments in the books, I'm very much in agreement. However ...My feelings about the canon-consistency of shipping are actually kind of ambiguous. After all, the treat-shipping-like-any-other-canon-compliance-issue thing cuts both ways -- in writing a fanfic we tend to have to make up a lot of backstory for characters, and whatever choices are made for this backstory will naturally affect their personalities, and romantic interests can certainly be a valid part of that. Personalities are sufficiently complex that there's quite a lot of scope for variations without going hopelessly OOC -- it's on a different level to simple concrete things from the books such as Harry's hair colour or the incantation used to conjure a Patronus or the name of the Minister for Magic, which the writer either gets right (and earns approval) or gets wrong (and earns brickbats).
Now I really like Missing Moments and stories that mesh well with canon, and don't have all that much enthusiasm for (serious) stories that wilfully disregard the basic canon material, ship-related or not, although even then there is the obvious exception of stories started pre-book X but which are consistent with canon up to book X-1 (where X is usually HBP or OotP, rarely GoF, but even PoA once). But see, the thing is that very many important aspects of the Potterverse characters weren't set in stone before HBP, simply because they were purposely being left ambiguous or completely open as things to be developed in the plot of that book and Book 7. HBP solidified a lot of those aspects, but by no means all of them. That in many cases still leaves a lot of scope for taking the books as a starting point and heading off in odd directions, and those directions can include shipping just as easily as anything else.
On that particular aspect, well yes Ron/Hermione had had anvils dropping left right and centre, and Bill/Fleur was fairly obvious too despite only having a couple of offhand references, but the direction of pretty much everyone else's love life was uncertain enough that most pairings were possible at the end of OotP (given a bit of work on the part of a fanfic writer). Few of them would have had major structural implications for the story. In fact, even most Harry pairings were possible as of that point -- because Ginny, Luna, Susan, Anne Other, and no-one at all were all perfectly reasonable structural choices for Harry's future love interest. (Hermione wasn't, not really, but even she still rated odds as a very outside chance.) The hints, such as they were, left it wide open and would have allowed JKR to go in several different directions had they been what she was planning -- many of the clues were only obvious in retrospect. Even the possibility of a Harry/Cho reconciliation wasn't actually ruled out by OotP -- it was killed off in an interview (and buried in HBP). Harry/another male character would have been harder to achieve convincingly -- even for JKR -- but it could be done (provided of course the writer was actually willing to put in the spadework and explain why Harry only showed interest in girls rather than boys before).
Just as an example, a number of very keen Harmonians on the Dumbledore's Feint list (one of my favourite stories, regardless of the pairings) were, naturally enough, highly miffed about Harry/Ginny in HBP, and claimed that he suddenly started to notice her That Way out of nowhere, having shown no interest in her as more than a friend before. OK, I had to point out that in DF Harry suddenly started to notice Hermione in That Way in exactly the same fashion (something which the authoress, a smart person, acknowledges), but nevertheless, of course they were right -- he does do that, because that is precisely the point on which the HBP subplot hinges. [I don't think it's an unreasonable development -- hell, I've found it happening to me in Real Life before -- but of course if you're a follower of the Harmonian Way it just can't ever happen to Harry with Ginny. :) ] But anyway, yes you can certainly look back and see things that were foreshadowing for Harry/Ginny, but they couldn't ever have been clear and unambiguous (without the benefit of hindsight or very good guessing skills). Because if they had been, it couldn't have been a plot point.
Despite the large amount of raging teenage (and non-teenage) hormones in HBP, it still left lots of those possibilities open, albeit in many cases only slightly ajar. After all, JKR was willing to take even Ron and Hermione off in different romantic directions for the sake of the subplots, and didn't actually say that either they or Harry and Ginny were going to be together as of the end of the book itself. She's certainly confirmed in interviews that her intention always was to have both those pairings; so as it turned out, any apparent Harry/Ginny foreshadowing was in fact actual foreshadowing, and any apparent Harry/Someone Else foreshadowing was either unintentional, a red herring, or showing something else such as friendship. But that's from interviews; in the books all that isn't there, and the apparent foreshadowing is still there, still usable.
To be fair, therefore, it wouldn't be unreasonable for a fanficcer to treat the interview statements as non-canon for the sake of (say) getting Harry and Hermione together. It would certainly be better if they acknowledged JKR's vision for the characters, and treated that as an important part of their personality. That would still leave them a lot of scope to have events move in such a way as to shift the pairings -- provided only that they didn't simply ignore where things actually were at the end of HBP, but started from that new baseline and worked with it.
Also relevant, it seems to me, is that there are two distinct levels of foreshadowing -- what for the sake of nomenclature I'll call character foreshadowing and structural foreshadowing (apologies for not knowing correct literary terms here). Character foreshadowing would be something like Ron getting jealous of Krum, or Hermione of Fleur -- it relates to the feelings of the characters themselves, considered as 'real people', and exists within their world. It's usually quite obvious. Structural foreshadowing would be something like Ginny seeing Harry for the first time at Platform Nine and Three Quarters, or Harry rescuing her from the Chamber -- as far as the characters themselves are concerned it has no particular romantic implications for them at the time inside their world, but on a meta-level, for the readers, it gets them thinking in terms of how the author might be setting them up as a suitable match for later. That meta-level usually isn't obvious or unambiguous, for the reasons above -- and I can't see why a fanfic writer shouldn't feel free to happily ignore it for that very reason.
(On a side note, I would rather like shippers -- especially in this context Harry/Ginny shippers because their ship has worked out in canon -- not to treat structural foreshadowing stuff in the early books as character foreshadowing stuff. I can't say I'm happy with the idea that, for example, the end of CoS should be considered a Harry/Ginny romantic episode for the characters themselves at the time. He's twelve, she's eleven. Do you really want to go there?)
Anyway, what I'm saying (with great verbosity) is that given all this ambiguity, fanfic writers really do have a lot of leeway to mess with JKR's vision for the characters, insofar as we even know what that is, without drawing flak for actual OOCness on the basis of the text of the books themselves. So if for example you want to pair Remus and Sirius (to take the other ship with the most scarily intense supporters out there), yup, you can do it, and you can even do it in a canon-compliant way. It's not easy -- for all the reasons that have been expounded upon at length on anti-Wolfstar threads -- but it is just about possible, provided you don't want the relationship to be a sweet and fluffy and practically Harmonian Twoo Wub from their schooldays onwards. (If you do, you might want to get out your handy pocket dictionary and look up the word 'delusional'. Just saying.) It's one of the more difficult ones to do, because you don't get to project it into the post-HBP future and so have no choice but to wrap it around existing canon, and because putting these two together actually does fuzz with the HP storyline structurally, to an extent -- but it can be done, and you don't actually have to go the whole hog and make it completely AU.
Finally, of course this doesn't apply solely to shipping -- most of the other things you might want to do work much the same way. If you wanted Draco to be a redeemed character for your post-OotP fic, or alternatively have him become a Death Eater zealot, either could have been done with pre-HBP canon, and either still could with post-HBP canon. Pre-HBP the second would have been easier to mesh with the books; post-HBP the first extreme seems more doable (although somewhere in the middle would be more plausible). That's the kind of thing I mean -- the deliberate ambiguity gives JKR opportunities to suggest the story might go either way, so fanfic writers get yet more opportunities to piggyback and take liberties.
But all that is another and wider topic, and I have waffled on here far too much already.
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no subject
Date: 2005-11-10 01:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-11 04:36 pm (UTC)Oh certainly, understood and agreed. It was an interesting point you made -- because people don't always think about how small changes affect things. When it's done well, it can be excellent -- I remember one very intriguing (albeit unevenly written and still WIP) Niffled fic called The Troll in which Ron finds himself in a OotP-era AU where he and Harry never went to rescue Hermione from the troll, and thus never made friends with her; and in the AU she's a unpleasant, friendless Percy-type prefect and a member of the Inquisitorial Squad, among other big changes.
My point was more that if you're going to project forwards, or work with non-solidified pairings, you do have a lot more scope. (Or more precisely, did have before HBP -- that gave so many answers it closed off a lot of avenues both ship-related and not, and took the story off in a rather unexpected direction.)
no subject
Date: 2005-11-11 09:29 am (UTC)You've got a point, just as After the Rain has a point. It's perfectly OK to take JKR's hints in a direction she is highly unlikely ever to have thought of. I think the reason Wolfstar shippers and Harmonians are getting so much flak is because, rather than giving themselves licence to ship what they want, which is fine, there is a vocal minority who simply insist that canon is WRONG.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-11 01:37 pm (UTC)Hey, I do, but you knew that already. And thanks.
I think the reason Wolfstar shippers and Harmonians are getting so much flak is because, rather than giving themselves licence to ship what they want, which is fine, there is a vocal minority who simply insist that canon is WRONG.
Absolutely. Mind you, before HBP came out I'd have said that neither Remus/Sirius nor Remus/Tonks had ever crossed JKR's mind (and did, come to think of it). So I'm prepared to shrug at people who say "no, no, JKR's really going to reveal Remus/Sirius in book 7, you wait and see" (or whatever) -- that's rather silly, but it's fair enough. As you say, it's the people who say that (reasonable) canon pairings are Just Plain Wrong that irritate. JKR would have to reveal something really bizarre in Book 7 for that to be a fair argument (Lily/Giant Squid?)
no subject
Date: 2005-11-13 10:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-14 12:51 pm (UTC)