Fanfic, canon and headcanon
I ran across this question on Tumblr, but decided to answer it here rather than there, because of Tumblr's lack of interactivity/commenting, and I wanted to open it up for discussion.
If you write fanfic, do you try to make sure your characterization on points that aren’t defined in canon remain consistent from story to story, even if they aren’t in the same continuity? Or do you try different things out in different stories? (I don’t mean natural evolution of how you see a character, but consciously trying out different possibilities. To take a frivolous example, does Joe Character, who we never see drinking coffee in canon, always take his coffee the same way in all your stories?)
I think for me, it kind of depends.
I don't usually stick to the exact same sequence of events for pre-canon, post-canon, and in-between-canon stuff. For me, a lot of the fun of fanfic is exploring what-ifs. So, for example, my different post-Winter Soldier stories don't all take place in the same continuity; the one in which they're growing a garden on the Avengers tower is (probably) not the same reality in which Steve has to deal with a severely messed-up assassin sneaking into his apartment. In White Collar, I wrote several different versions of what happened to Neal and company after canon ended. Back in SGA, I vaguely recall writing multiple episode tags to several episodes, taking off in a different direction each time. I also don't usually have strong OTP inclinations, so I write different pairings. I wrote a couple of Peter/Neal and P/E/N fics, for example, which were definitely not meant to be in the same reality with each other or with the gen reality (realities) in which I write most of my stories. I wrote Rodney/Teyla in SGA and I also wrote John/Rodney (as well as a bucketload of gen) and none of these were meant to come into continuity conflict with each other.
I think what I particularly tend not to do is reference events from an unrelated story in a different one, or (if I can help it, anyway) carry specific non-canonical details from one to another. (Stories that are supposed to be in the same universe are obviously exceptions.) For example, let's say I needed to come up with a name for Neal's mother in one story -- I'll often try to use a different one if I write another story in which I need to refer to his mother by name (unless, of course, it's supposed to be in deliberate continuity with the other story). And the main reason is because I tend to feel a little uncomfortable with the sort of fanon that sweeps through a fandom and eclipses other options -- like the way that, say, MCU fandom has collectively decided that Natasha calls the Winter Soldier Yasha on the basis of NO CANON WHATSOEVER, and it turns up in fic after fic after fic. And I find myself feeling kind of weird about doing that in my own stories if it's something that hasn't been pinned down in canon yet, unless I have a compelling reason to do so. It's the same sort of "... but this is not canonical" squidgy feeling that I get with that overwhelming fanon stuff.
But! I also think that my different fanfic realities tend to wobble back and forth within a relatively limited set of options, if that makes any sense, and some things are completely non-canonical but don't really change much, if at all. For example, in MCU fandom, the way that I write Bucky post-TWS -- his particular set of psychological issues (touch aversion, consistently presenting social interaction issues, etc) -- isn't canonical at all, and it's not based on comics canon either, but it's basically consistent from story to story; I have a fairly indelible headcanon for the way that the whole thing affected him, and while the specific details of how he gets back to the Avengers and what happens afterward are different between stories, the underlying characterization is basically the same, even though we have little to go on from canon. Similarly, I realized the other day that I have a fairly strong headcanonical backstory for MCU Natasha, which is based on nothing whatsoever (except, I guess, pulling together the handful of hints we've gotten in canon) and is very different from her comics backstory, but if I ever do a story in which her backstory is discussed and dealt with, it'll probably be that one.
Incidentally, when I say "headcanon" I'm basically talking about things like that (and had always assumed that other people are too, until I started to realize that on Tumblr people often use it to mean "what-if") -- but for me, it's indelible bits of idiosyncratic personal characterization that aren't canonical, but are fundamentally worked into the warp and weft of the character. There are a lot of things I have no opinion about, and can therefore change freely from story to story. I don't have any strong feelings on whether Peter on White Collar is an only child, so I give him siblings in some stories but not in others. However, I do have a pretty solid feeling that he and Elizabeth don't have infertility issues, they just chose not to have kids and don't really plan on ever changing that, and while there is ZERO canon to support this, it's hovering in the back of my head when I write stuff dealing with their relationship. (I might deliberately choose to write a story in which that's not the case, but I'd be thinking AU when I wrote it.)
Also, my basic characterization is consistent from story to story. I think the way I conceptualize Neal as a character, or Peter, or Steve, is basically the same in every story I write with them, and it's as close as possible to how I see the character in canon, but of course filtered through my own perception and preferences. I guess the best way to put it (reflecting a discussion I had the other day with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
magibrain about this stuff) is that I have a construct of the character in my head, and I might run it through different scenarios, try on different options, see under what circumstances I can get it to fall in love with character A or B, but it's very firmly constructed and it doesn't really change a whole lot (though it evolves over time as new canon comes to light). I can set out to write a P/N fic and say "Well, what would I need to do to get Peter to have a relationship with Neal -- under what circumstances would he do that, what conditions need to be true in order for that to happen" but what I can't really do is just decide to make Peter be a person who, all other things being the same, would fall into a relationship with a person I don't normally see him having a relationship with. Even if I'm going to intentionally write Peter as a slightly different person -- as in, say, that Worldwalking fic in which Neal visits different realities and encounters different versions of both himself and Peter -- it's a matter of running his personal timeline backward, picking a point of divergence, and then setting him off down a different path that would make "my" Peter end up somewhere else in the present day. I can't really just say "Well, but what if Peter himself is fundamentally different" because it doesn't work that way. (For me.) I can't write a Peter that's not "my" Peter unless I also track back the course of changes to figure out how he got from "my" Peter to wherever he is now.
And I notice when I read fanfic that's tilted away from my mental character concept. It tends to read OOC to me, even if it's not necessarily OOC with regards to actual canon. I think the fandoms I stay in, or at least the ones I tend to read widely in, are those in which the prevailing characterizations are reasonably close to my mental ones -- which is actually why I skipped out of Highlander fandom so quickly, because the majority of fic was really far off where my mental concepts of the characters were, and it was terribly jarring and unpleasant. One of the factors that's making me slide quietly out of White Collar fandom is that I'm starting to feel that my mental character concepts have slipped off the canonical characterizations and I don't really know how to write the characters anymore. (I'm having this problem with Peter, especially; I feel like I've been writing him OOC all along, and I've been trying to reconcile my mental character construct with the canon character and getting frustrated.)
So yeah, long complicated answer to a relatively straightfoward question!
What about you?
If you write fanfic, do you try to make sure your characterization on points that aren’t defined in canon remain consistent from story to story, even if they aren’t in the same continuity? Or do you try different things out in different stories? (I don’t mean natural evolution of how you see a character, but consciously trying out different possibilities. To take a frivolous example, does Joe Character, who we never see drinking coffee in canon, always take his coffee the same way in all your stories?)
I think for me, it kind of depends.
I don't usually stick to the exact same sequence of events for pre-canon, post-canon, and in-between-canon stuff. For me, a lot of the fun of fanfic is exploring what-ifs. So, for example, my different post-Winter Soldier stories don't all take place in the same continuity; the one in which they're growing a garden on the Avengers tower is (probably) not the same reality in which Steve has to deal with a severely messed-up assassin sneaking into his apartment. In White Collar, I wrote several different versions of what happened to Neal and company after canon ended. Back in SGA, I vaguely recall writing multiple episode tags to several episodes, taking off in a different direction each time. I also don't usually have strong OTP inclinations, so I write different pairings. I wrote a couple of Peter/Neal and P/E/N fics, for example, which were definitely not meant to be in the same reality with each other or with the gen reality (realities) in which I write most of my stories. I wrote Rodney/Teyla in SGA and I also wrote John/Rodney (as well as a bucketload of gen) and none of these were meant to come into continuity conflict with each other.
I think what I particularly tend not to do is reference events from an unrelated story in a different one, or (if I can help it, anyway) carry specific non-canonical details from one to another. (Stories that are supposed to be in the same universe are obviously exceptions.) For example, let's say I needed to come up with a name for Neal's mother in one story -- I'll often try to use a different one if I write another story in which I need to refer to his mother by name (unless, of course, it's supposed to be in deliberate continuity with the other story). And the main reason is because I tend to feel a little uncomfortable with the sort of fanon that sweeps through a fandom and eclipses other options -- like the way that, say, MCU fandom has collectively decided that Natasha calls the Winter Soldier Yasha on the basis of NO CANON WHATSOEVER, and it turns up in fic after fic after fic. And I find myself feeling kind of weird about doing that in my own stories if it's something that hasn't been pinned down in canon yet, unless I have a compelling reason to do so. It's the same sort of "... but this is not canonical" squidgy feeling that I get with that overwhelming fanon stuff.
But! I also think that my different fanfic realities tend to wobble back and forth within a relatively limited set of options, if that makes any sense, and some things are completely non-canonical but don't really change much, if at all. For example, in MCU fandom, the way that I write Bucky post-TWS -- his particular set of psychological issues (touch aversion, consistently presenting social interaction issues, etc) -- isn't canonical at all, and it's not based on comics canon either, but it's basically consistent from story to story; I have a fairly indelible headcanon for the way that the whole thing affected him, and while the specific details of how he gets back to the Avengers and what happens afterward are different between stories, the underlying characterization is basically the same, even though we have little to go on from canon. Similarly, I realized the other day that I have a fairly strong headcanonical backstory for MCU Natasha, which is based on nothing whatsoever (except, I guess, pulling together the handful of hints we've gotten in canon) and is very different from her comics backstory, but if I ever do a story in which her backstory is discussed and dealt with, it'll probably be that one.
Incidentally, when I say "headcanon" I'm basically talking about things like that (and had always assumed that other people are too, until I started to realize that on Tumblr people often use it to mean "what-if") -- but for me, it's indelible bits of idiosyncratic personal characterization that aren't canonical, but are fundamentally worked into the warp and weft of the character. There are a lot of things I have no opinion about, and can therefore change freely from story to story. I don't have any strong feelings on whether Peter on White Collar is an only child, so I give him siblings in some stories but not in others. However, I do have a pretty solid feeling that he and Elizabeth don't have infertility issues, they just chose not to have kids and don't really plan on ever changing that, and while there is ZERO canon to support this, it's hovering in the back of my head when I write stuff dealing with their relationship. (I might deliberately choose to write a story in which that's not the case, but I'd be thinking AU when I wrote it.)
Also, my basic characterization is consistent from story to story. I think the way I conceptualize Neal as a character, or Peter, or Steve, is basically the same in every story I write with them, and it's as close as possible to how I see the character in canon, but of course filtered through my own perception and preferences. I guess the best way to put it (reflecting a discussion I had the other day with
magibrain about this stuff) is that I have a construct of the character in my head, and I might run it through different scenarios, try on different options, see under what circumstances I can get it to fall in love with character A or B, but it's very firmly constructed and it doesn't really change a whole lot (though it evolves over time as new canon comes to light). I can set out to write a P/N fic and say "Well, what would I need to do to get Peter to have a relationship with Neal -- under what circumstances would he do that, what conditions need to be true in order for that to happen" but what I can't really do is just decide to make Peter be a person who, all other things being the same, would fall into a relationship with a person I don't normally see him having a relationship with. Even if I'm going to intentionally write Peter as a slightly different person -- as in, say, that Worldwalking fic in which Neal visits different realities and encounters different versions of both himself and Peter -- it's a matter of running his personal timeline backward, picking a point of divergence, and then setting him off down a different path that would make "my" Peter end up somewhere else in the present day. I can't really just say "Well, but what if Peter himself is fundamentally different" because it doesn't work that way. (For me.) I can't write a Peter that's not "my" Peter unless I also track back the course of changes to figure out how he got from "my" Peter to wherever he is now.And I notice when I read fanfic that's tilted away from my mental character concept. It tends to read OOC to me, even if it's not necessarily OOC with regards to actual canon. I think the fandoms I stay in, or at least the ones I tend to read widely in, are those in which the prevailing characterizations are reasonably close to my mental ones -- which is actually why I skipped out of Highlander fandom so quickly, because the majority of fic was really far off where my mental concepts of the characters were, and it was terribly jarring and unpleasant. One of the factors that's making me slide quietly out of White Collar fandom is that I'm starting to feel that my mental character concepts have slipped off the canonical characterizations and I don't really know how to write the characters anymore. (I'm having this problem with Peter, especially; I feel like I've been writing him OOC all along, and I've been trying to reconcile my mental character construct with the canon character and getting frustrated.)
So yeah, long complicated answer to a relatively straightfoward question!
What about you?
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I would initially have said that I didn't at all, because I thought that fanfic was all about what-ifs for me -- until I got to thinking about it, and realized that actually, that's not true at all; the details vary, but within a fairly narrow set of options.
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Yuletide length is about all I can produce without doing that, and I'll usually have to have a reason like Yuletide or some other exchange to make me bother. XD Writing is such hard work! I can't be bothered for so little reward.
And by the time they've become real people . . . that's who they are, and I know them like that. So unless there's a huge divergent point AU going on, that's who they are, and even if there is an AU, if the divergence is after what canon presents us with, they're still that other person I know except if this other thing had happened.
So the entirely-for-fun ST:AOS!AU has a very different Bucky and Steve (because they were effectively raised as fraternal twins, as Trekverse has much better options when it comes to oops-babies that you don't want but don't want to abort for whatever reason . . . ), but if I were to write an AU where Steve never got the serum, it'd be my same Steve except if that had happened to him instead of canon.
If that makes sense.
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With fanfic I tend to have a strong impression of who the characters are now, at least the versions of them in my head -- how they'd act under any given circumstances, what they'd say, what they'd do -- but not a definitive idea of how they got here (beyond what's in canon) or an indelible sequence of events that takes place before or after canon (in the sense that it's so definitive I couldn't write different versions). It's not a total blank slate -- I used the example of my post-TWS Bucky being characterized very similarly in everything I write, even though the exact sequence of post-canon events (where he goes, how he gets back on Steve's radar, etc) varies between stories ... but there's definitely a certain version of post-WS Bucky that's "my" Bucky and tends not to vary a whole lot in what I write. So there's that, or things like my absolute resistance to the idea of everyone living full-time at the Avengers tower (as opposed to coming and going with apartments at the tower but other lives elsewhere) -- but not, say, a certain sequence of post-canon events that always has to happen in the same order.
I think for me this might be something that's developed over time as a sort of defense mechanism in large open-canon fandoms, or maybe just a feature of me tending to stay in fandoms longer than I used to, because in my earliest fandoms, while I don't actually remember now if I thought of it as indelibly canonical or not, I tended to write just one big, long, definitive post-canon fic and then move on. But now I tend to hang out in a fandom for awhile and write a bunch of different stories with the characters, so maybe I developed, over time, the ability to hold multiple conflicting versions of their past/future in my head without having it feel like a conflict. I don't think I've always done that -- but then, in the past I'd say whatever I wanted to say with a particular fandom/cast and then move on to a new one, whereas now the characters seem to move in on a semi-permanent basis and just STAY.
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~ nodding with empathy and sympathy (and enduring love of HL that may or may not match yours, but to my regret never yet matches the fandom's at large, either) ~
On reflection, I see that I always write Forever Knight's Nick with the same mortal family background, because it seems the most historically feasible in compliance with canon after a fair quantity of research (for me, he's always a younger son of Duke Henry I, The Warrior, of Brabant) ... but I'm willing to change that the day a canon-compliant story occurs to me requiring Nick to have been the oldest or only son. :-) Similarly Fleur's marriage, Natalie's relationship to the Luces, Nick's friendship with Feliks... I see that I do have some assumptions in place, in those canonical interstices, until new canon-compliant ideas come along.
But what is rock-solid consistent is my idea of in-character and out-of-character. With some leeway for perspectives, development and canonical inconsistencies, out-of-character makes me feel that a fanfic story is a waste of time... if not actually an attack on the canon I love.
If I perceive a character as defined by her courage, or her intelligence, or her love, and a fanfic story defines her by her cowardice, or her stupidity, or her hate... no, that's nowhere I want to go.
(I bumped into a Sailor Moon story yesterday, in my Saturday-morning cartoon fanfic wallow, in which Darien not only hates Serena, he selfishly uses another character to deal with his hate for Serena. I don't know if you know that universe at all, but... it's so OOC that I felt almost injured by it, like I needed to wash up and wait to heal. The story offered a rationale for this -- the author wasn't unaware that this was OOC -- and in some ways that almost made it worse, if that makes any sense. As audience, the author and I are allowed to hate Serena if we want to; as her destined consort throughout time, space and reality, Darien ... could hate her, okay, in the privacy of his own tortured soul, all right, but... crassly using others? No. That's the step too far for this character.)
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YESSSS, I think this is very much how it works for me, too! In many cases, with characters I write a lot or think about a lot, I have preferred versions of the characters' backstories and ships and what was going on with them between the events of canon, but I can also change it up for stories that require me to do so. Characterization is really solid, though, and doesn't change much if at all; if I need a character to behave differently for a particular plot reason, I have to actually run back through their timeline and find a point of divergence and figure out how "my" character would've gotten to that different place. And some changes are simply a bridge too far -- there is no way THAT character would ever do that thing, not in my head anyway.
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Likewise, I often change things from story to story, not least being the pairing, but other things as well!
Homestuck fandom is great for this, because, hey; fifty shades of alien genitalia: go! Fanon has provided a particularly common setup (well, two), but I love finding, or creating, stories that provide a different one! I've currently got works in progress with at least three different answers to "what have trolls got in their pants," because I don't want to unquestioningly accept the most popular fanon as my own headcanon.
In a similar vein, I really love getting to try out different ideas with regard to alien cultural worldbuilding and biology. We see very little, in canon, of Alternia, so I really enjoy being able to make up many different concepts of life there!
Some things do get, ahem, stuck. :D I'm pretty sure I don't have a single Homestuck story wherein troll "females" have breasts, even if it doesn't come up within the story. (This is technically a contradiction of canon... but it's a necessary one.) Ditto drones on Alternia not being mechanical. Certain aspects of seadweller physiology are constants, as well, even if (again) they don't come up in a particular story. Etc.
In other words: yes to long and complicated answers to short questions! :D
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I think that Brightknightie's above comment absolutely nailed how it works for me, which is that I tend to have preferred versions of backstory/alien physiology details/whatever, but can change it up for stories in which the plot requires it to be something different (or just because I'd like to play with something different for awhile). Admittedly sometimes it's just because I'm frustrated with the prevailing fanon and want to write something different, since I'm a bit of a contrary jerk at heart. :D
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I tend to have preferred versions of backstory/alien physiology details/whatever, but can change it up for stories in which the plot requires it to be something different
I'm... not quite that settled, but I feel you on the second part. (I frequently don't have a single "preferred" version! ...Unless that was meant to be "I have versions, plural, either/any of which I prefer over other versions, for any given detail"? Curse you, English grammar. I bet atevi don't ever have this problem.)
since I'm a bit of a contrary jerk at heart
Haha, yes, this is me. :D But honestly, fandom! Whyyyyy are you not grasping all that potential with both hands?! (Just to use troll junk as a handy example: there's an entire swath of fandom out there who writes them as having junk identical to humans! I don't even hang out in that section of fandom, because I would say something contrary and jerk-y. Bad enough that apparently the ones who are open to the idea of aliens having alien genitalia have decided that "bone bulge" equals "completely boneless tentacle"; that's just kind of funny/headdesk-ish from a semantic standpoint, but to completely refuse the entire field of possibilities? Wow. Why are you even in this fandom, folks?)
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I'm pretty much a seat-of-the-pants writer; no AUs* (so far), and I stick very close to head-cannon because I simply can't see them any other way. (Jim & Blair = very close friends, through thick and thin, in each others' corner come what may.) But I write slice-of-life fic, and they don't get pushed to anything close to those extremes.
I have actually referenced another of my stories in a couple of fics, but they're "blink-and-you'll-miss-them" throwaway comments, so no actual knowledge of the other story is needed. I guess I see all my stories in the same timeline, occurring in the "cracks" between episodes.
*I'd like to do AUs - or crossovers - but, so far, the muse hasn't cooperated. But I can just imagine Rodney's horror at having to interact with Blair -- as energetic as he is, but in a field so soft it's "squishy".
BTW, I've been meaning to PM you. Did you see this post where your story "The Killing Frost" was recced? (It's on my list -- someday when I have extended time with no schoolwork pressing.)
.
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I seem to have a general fandom trajectory where I start out very close to my most-canonically-plausible headcanon versions of the characters, and then branch out a bit and start trying more what-ifs as things go along. Some fandoms seem to want to be AU'd more than others for me. (I wrote SO MANY AUs in both White Collar and SGA ... but I'm not really that interested in doing AUs at all in MCU fandom, for whatever reason.)
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Of course, it's a different situation with characters who are much more open to interpretation, like Kate Moreau. I could write her differently in each story, but I don't. If she comes across as different from story to story, it's only me developing my opinions on her.
I will change stuff like sexual orientation and kinky vs. vanilla if the story calls for it, sometimes. I have default headcanons for these things, but I can be open to altering them. How much that changes everything else depends on the characters. For instance, my default headcanon for Peter is that he's essentially vanilla. He's also someone who sees himself as "normal." If I were to write him as kinky, I would be writing him as having a non-mainstream sexuality that's frequently characterized as "abnormal." Even if that never made it into the story itself (I might figure that Peter's already done the the work on that before the story starts), I would still keep it in mind.
One of the factors that's making me slide quietly out of White Collar fandom is that I'm starting to feel that my mental character concepts have slipped off the canonical characterizations and I don't really know how to write the characters anymore.
If you want to (only if you want to!), I'd be interested in hearing more about this sometimes. It's not that I want to convince you to write in a fandom you're not feeling, I just having this sort of "talk meta to me" thing.
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*nodnod* I think this is pretty similar to how I work, too! What you describe here sounds very much like what I do. I have a sort of preferred/base headcanon for a lot of this stuff, but I'm open to changing it and/or trying something different for a story. However, the way that it plays out -- the way that the character reacts to it, the way that it influences their interactions with people around them -- depends upon my basic ideas about their characterization/personality, which tends not to change.
So, for example, my basic Peter is straight, fundamentally Elizabethosexual, and (like yours) pretty much vanilla. That's, I guess, my default Peter and the one that feels the most canonical to me. However, I can write him as bisexual; I can write him in love with Neal instead of Elizabeth; I expect I could write him kinky although I've never tried. I can apparently write him as an australopithecine, a medieval monk, or a dog. /o\ But any of those things are still filtered through the fundamental Peterishness in my head. I don't have any terribly hardcore headcanon about Peter's family (beyond his dad being canonically still alive and a blue-collar guy), so I can give him a sister or multiple siblings or none, I can have his mom be alive or not, but the way he relates to having siblings or being an only child, the way it influences him in the present day, is Peter-ish and different from how Neal would react to the same altered circumstance.
If you want to (only if you want to!), I'd be interested in hearing more about this sometimes. It's not that I want to convince you to write in a fandom you're not feeling, I just having this sort of "talk meta to me" thing.
I don't mind talking about it; I just don't know how effectively I can talk about it, because I'm still figuring it out myself. I'll address that in another comment since I need to contemplate it a bit.
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It is kinda complicated, though, because for one thing, I think I've gotten a little bored with the kind of fic I've been writing for WC over the last couple of years and have started to crave more emotionally complex stuff. I think that's why I started doing so many AUs in WC, especially AUs with a darker tone and ones that didn't end happily, and it's also one reason why I latched onto MCU fandom so hard, because there's a lot of potential for dealing with emotional damage and ambiguous relationships and so forth. Not that you can't do it in White Collar, obviously, but for me at least, it's somewhat harder to switch gears in a fandom I'm already in than to jump on the potential for new sorts of stories in a brand-new fandom.
But beyond that ... my ability to write Peter and his relationship with Neal kind of ... broke. And this is a big problem, considering that that's the lynchpin of my fannish relationship with the show -- not that there isn't other great stuff to explore, or other appealing things about the show (lots of them!) but if I can't write Peter, or Peter and Neal ... that pretty much guts my ability to do fanfic for the show.
I think what it came down to is that over the course of seasons four and five, my characterizations veered farther and farther off where the majority of the fandom seemed to be, and it seemed to me that it made a whole lot more sense to assume that I'm just wrong than to assume that half the people in the fandom are completely delusional. XD ... well, okay, I think they actually ARE delusional about Elizabeth, or at least that there's a whole lot of fannish misogyny going on with fandom's inability to allow Elizabeth her own space to be angry and to have opinions, but with Peter, I think there actually is something legitimate they're reacting to there. Don't get me wrong, I still think they're over reacting, but I also had to face up to the fact that I've been writing an extremely sanitized, rose-colored-glasses version of Peter all these years, and I no longer trust my own impressions of Peter because I'm simply too fond of the character to see him rationally.
Ironically I think I'm a lot better at writing Neal than Peter, because I'm less knee-jerk defensive of him. Not that I dislike Neal at all (I really love him!) but I find it interesting to explore his flaws as well as his virtues. Peter ... I think over the years I developed this tendency to so thoroughly reject fandom's exaggeration of his flaws that I kind of stopped writing his flaws at all, it's terribly frustrating to go back through canon and be forced to recognize that, especially in season one, the fandom really is right about him. He's a jerk to Neal most of the time, and he's steeped in unrecognized privilege and deals with it BADLY, and it's just horrendously frustrating because I used to adore this character so much and god damn it, this stupid fandom is right, he's kind of a douche. /o\
(The actor is still a total sweetie, though. There's always that.)
And he and Neal are just fundamentally broken -- I mean, even if I am coming down harder on Peter right now than I really ought to be (MY FAVORITE FANDOM BOYFRIEND BROKE UP WITH ME, THE BASTARD XDDD), I haven't really had a positive view of Peter and Neal's relationship since early season four, and what I want more than anything else is for both of them to realize they're absolutely horrible for each other and go be happy somewhere else. ... I swear I will forgive the show for EVERYTHING if the last scene is Neal taking off with no intention of ever going back to New York. The fandom would hate it, I know, but I can't really see them ever not bringing each other misery. Ironically this actually is the sort of complicated emotional tangle I want to write about right now, except for the double-barreled problem of being too frustrated with Peter to write him, and having this part of me that is so used to writing h/c fluff with these characters that trying to write darker, more emotionally ambiguous fic with them just makes me sad, aaaaghhhh.
I did actually plot out a fairly long post-season-five fic that I think would be genuinely interesting to write, but it's also kind of "let's take all canon's loose ends and dump them on the characters' heads in a giant avalanche of unhappy shit" and ... I mean, it starts with Elizabeth falling in love with someone else in DC, and just keeps going steadily downhill from there. Granted, if I can pull that fic out of its emotional tailspin, I think it might actually be pretty good; right now, though, it's sort of a depressive miseryfest punishing the characters for all their mistakes over the last couple of seasons, which is ... not fun.
So .... yeah. That. /o\ Also, another thing making me wary of writing White Collar in my present state of mind regarding the show/fandom is that basically THIS EXACT THING happened to me in Stargate Atlantis fandom towards the end -- fandom was dead set on pointing out my favorite character was a total dick, I went back and rewatched earlier seasons and was like, wow, they're right, this sucks; and then I wrote a lot of really miserable fic in which everyone was awful to each other, which tainted my last year or so in the fandom pretty thoroughly and burned me so badly on the show that I still don't enjoy rewatching it 5 years later. So ... while it's not that I think the fandom's wrong, I don't really want to wallow in my unhappier emotions regarding White Collar because I'm afraid that years in the future, it'll be all I can remember about the show. But at the same time, I really hate feeling this way about a show I used to love, and I know that I'm fixating on the bad stuff while ignoring the good stuff; I'd like to stop that, but I don't really seem to have a middle setting on White Collar right now. I really would like to find the middle somehow, where I'm no longer as rose-colored-glasses about the show as I used to be, but not dead-set on its flaws either; I just don't know how.
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and it seemed to me that it made a whole lot more sense to assume that I'm just wrong than to assume that half the people in the fandom are completely delusional.
Hah, I never assume that. But I'm actually in a similar place. When I rewatch the early seasons especially, yes, I do notice what you do. But I feel like the tyrant!Peter that fandom latches onto isn't actually more accurate than a rose colored glasses view of him. It's just wrong in a different way. (And I think if we view characterization as a continuum, with "perfectly IC" in the center and "saint" and "tyrannical bastard" as opposite extremes, your work has always been much closer to center than fandom's view.)
But what this really makes me long for is fic and meta that deals honestly with Peter's flaws without making him out to be a horrible person. Because Peter does have flaws, and I think they're interesting ones. He operates on sort of an assumption that the world is fair, which I think both combines with and feeds into his institutional privilege. He's very attached to his own worldview, and it leads him to assume that he always knows best. I don't think he tries to be a jerk to Neal, he just doesn't think about the difference in their power. Which doesn't make it okay, but it flows naturally from his other flaws.
But I also think that Peter gets better throughout the series. He slowly comes to realize that the world isn't as neat as he's wanted to believe. His flaws are not gone by S5, and you can see Neal beginning to bristle against Peter's unthinking privilege, but he's better.
I don't know, I think Peter's an interesting, flawed character, and I wish fandom did more the complexity of his character. Er, I'm not saying it has to be you. But, yeah, I think Peter can be a good person, and still have a lot of unexamined flaws. I mean, I think Neal is a good person, so I'm willing to give as much to Peter.
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Yeah, I think that's actually kind of what I'd like to do -- at least what the more rational part of me would like to do! I have a certain reluctance right now to put fic like that out there in the fandom, because, given that I used to get a fair number of Peter-hating comments on fic that was extremely Peter-positive, I can only imagine the reaction that I'd get if I go writing fic that puts him genuinely in the wrong, and I don't really want to deal with it. But I think there is a lot of interesting story scope to explore there -- especially in the way that Peter and Neal's individual flaws, blind spots, and unexamined areas of privilege (because Neal definitely has 'em too!) reflect off each other and cause them to hurt each other without really meaning to.
There actually is a lot of that in the second "season" of the Psychic Neal AU, I guess -- not that the odds are terribly great that it'll get written now (unless I get an unexpected surge of inspiration) but the second season always was about knocking Peter's certainties out from under him and shooting him down. (Somewhat literally, since he eventually gets killed off in nearly all versions of that AU, but at least he goes out on the right side, more or less ....)
But anyway, yeah, I don't think you're wrong that Peter does grow and learn in the course of the show. (Quite possibly more than Neal does; it doesn't seem that the show is ultimately about Neal learning to go straight at all, but more about Peter figuring out that Neal's never going to, and reconciling himself to that.) And I do think there are a lot of interesting fictional places to take that -- like you said, there's a whole lot of middle ground between "saint" and "tyrant", both of which are about equally canonical, which is to say not at all. I'm genuinely unsure where I might want to take that, since most of my unfinished stories right now are either the sort of bland h/c stuff that I used to write in the fandom, or massively depressing stories like the one I alluded to above. (I still kinda want to finish the one I started writing between seasons four and five, in which Peter goes to prison permanently and Neal gets a new handler, but it's really not the world's happiest story ...)
But there are still a lot of areas to explore with these characters that I haven't done yet.
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I think there's tons of untapped potential in fic that paints neither Peter or Neal as "the bad one," but examines how both of their flaws and strengths and how all that influences the way they relate to each other.
Um, I feel like I should tell you that the psychic Neal series is honestly in my top five favorite fanfics of all time. It's amazing how many of my buttons it presses, and how much it gives exactly what I want in scifi story. I've reread it so many times. And even without the second season, there are enough words of it that I can consider myself seriously spoiled. (But you know, if you ever get back to brainstorming about it, and you want to hash it with someone... Not that I want to pressure you! Just throwing it out there.)
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But, about the Psychic Neal AU - thank you so much. :) I really appreciate it, and I think that after I finish my avengersfest fic (which is what I SHOULD be working on, aargh) I just may take you up on the brainstorming offer! Because it does seem like a shame to have so much future stuff for the AU floating around in my head and never get to use it. I have a lot of future ideas for the 'verse that are quite dark, though; I hope that I wouldn't take it to places that would make you like it less.
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I'm a fluffy little bunny, really, who likes happy endings and good things happening to my favorite characters. But I'm a fluffy little bunny with complexity!
And now I think I have to reread.
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(I also DO have a possible road map to a happy ending! I'm just not sure if it'd feel like a cop-out to actually go there. But anyway, yeah, I would love to have a sounding board for ideas; I just need to get my avengersfest fic squared away first! I REALLY DID NOT MEAN TO SPEND TODAY WRITING WEREWOLF AU, AARGH.)
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And the possibility of more White Collar werewolves as well. :D
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I take this a step farther than you described here, too: I do this sometimes in original works based on fairy tales or myths. For instance, there are a lot of things in Norse myth that are unclear or contradictory, and I treat it almost like fanfic: each original verse has a different set of answers. In fact, for me, the answers define the verse: e.g., JRverse is defined by who Loki's children are and how he relates to them in that verse, and he's not going to have exactly that set of children or relate to all of them exactly that way in any other verse.
Which is funny, because I don't really have fanfic verses that way unless they're AUs (usually the sort where one event happened differently and things snowballed), and in that case, the point of divergence is what, for me, defines the verse.
Which is why I feel weird claiming that any of my original Norseverses or fairy tale verses are AUs of each other.
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Anyway, back to the original post... I think I oddly manage to avoid having to deal with this question at all, because if Joe Character never drinks coffee in canon but does in my fic, he probably only takes it with tons of cream and sugar in one fic - not because I change the way he takes his coffee from fic to fic, but because Joe Character never has coffee again in another fic of mine. I tend to write variety. I don't write about Joe Character enough, even though he's one of my faves, because I have so many different faves and so after I finish a Joe-character centric fic, I move onto a different side of the fandom where if Joe appears, it's in a minor supporting role where the main character has no clue how Joe takes his coffee, it's not relevant for my new fic. Or worse, I jump to a whole new fandom. I've written fics for over 10 fandoms and counting. The only times I've written more than one fic for a fandom, characters don't - or barely - overlap between fics.
That being said, I think I am the type of person to keep my headcanon stuff consistent, including fanon stuff that I accept. In Glee, I accept that Finn's mom is a nurse because everyone in the fanfiction world seems to write her that way, and that Blaine's parents aren't that great/that loving, because of the same reason. I think if I name a character who doesn't have a name in canon, I probably will become attached enough to that name choice, which was hard to come up with, that I'll keep the name in future fics if I ever chose to write about the character again. If I decide that Joe Character has the type of "personality" to like his coffee to be really sweet, who can't stand black coffee, who's grown up being made fun of by his best friend for drinking coffee that is more cream than coffee, or whatever, then I think I'll have trouble changing that in a future fic. It becomes in my head that only one way is "in character" and matches canon correctly enough. Even those small details end up mattering a lot to me, and I feel like it'd be tough to shift gears. It'd be tough to look at Joe character and think it's fine in one story for him to pour the whole sugar bowl into his coffee and in the next to drink it black. I'd feel like a bad author if I did that and idk. I feel like when coffee first comes up, I have to decide which way he's gonna take it in every fic I ever potentially write including Joe.
Part of that is that I don't delve into AU territory much. I might write a future fic or a snapshot of the past but I try to base it fully on canon. My characters are supposed to be consistent from story to story and I don't *do* the "What if his mother had died when he was 3 instead of 33" type of fics. I don't do the "what if he was different in this specific way" fics. I don't even shift canon sexual orientations in my fics 99.9% of the time.
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Awww man, the whole White Collar fandom thing with Peter is SO frustrating, because Peter's my favorite character but a lot of the fandom hates him, and it's soured ME on him a lot more than I'd like. I think I'd be so much happier with the show if I'd never gotten so involved in the fandom. :P My general plan with the sixth season is to ignore the fandom as much as possible and try to just kind of do my own thing off in the corner. Hopefully that'll work out ...
Anyway, these are interesting thoughts; thank you for sharing them! :D Especially the next-to-last paragraph, because I am this way with original characters in a very strict kind of way (obviously I'm the arbiter of canon there, I guess, so being consistent is important!) but not so much with fanfic characters. And yet, the more I write a character the more I start to reach a kind of consensus headcanon on them -- I guess it's not so much specifically deciding "Joe takes his coffee black" as "Joe, now that I've gotten to know him better, seems to be a no-nonsense kind of guy who doesn't mess around putting stuff in his coffee" and end up with characterization that's consistent(ish) between stories in that sort of way ... if that makes any sense.