Some whiskey in that fantoddy?

[flemmings]

Advent Children gives me, yes again, the fantods. It's the colours, mostly, and the shimmery grey skies, *so* like the polluted sky of Tokyo in 105F July. (reminiscent shudder) Remember I saw it first without exposure to what luxetumbra calls the Lego people of FFVII in their brite primary colours, so there's no sense of a corrective happening. It's creepy, and the idea of writing fic about it is creepier still. (I'm not saying it isn't beautiful. But it's creepy. And full of sulky children, which to someone of my profession is not a plus.)

The anime is more to my tastes. But if FFVII in all its avatars looked like the anime, would it be as popular as it is?

I've now seen a background short's worth of Lego people, and my reaction is largely bwah-hah-hah-hah-hah! (Aerith's design especially scores high for painful and silly) followed by deep admiration for the djka who somehow derived recognizable people from those graphics. Perhaps not so difficult when you cut your teeth on the deformities of shounen manga but quite a feat from *my* POV.

However if I ever had any doubts about the batshittery of the gaming mullahs' 'You must play the whole game in its entirety before you can even think of writing fic for it'- which, on a parallel with manga fandom, I was willing to consider- it's been put to rest. Waste 24 hours of my life making robot-people shoot things so I can explore the character dynamics between one or two of them? Hell no. If Weiss and Eroica can run entirely on fanon, so can gaming. In fact gaming probably runs better on fanon, since so much of the canon is completely useless to the stories one wants to write. This fact is perfectly clear to the Japanese, who created the thing in the first place, but gaming in Japan is a pastime, not a religion.

Comments

[incandescens]

One could even argue that it's the cases (such as games, or Weiss) with the least useful canon that get the most useful fanon. Well, if one wanted to. :)

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Can't help feeling there's some connection here to those illustration books people put out with their beautiful, deeply resonant and utterly contextless groupings and expressions. They seem to mean so much- they hint at glorious things- but there's no structure or narrative to work with at all. The mind has to supply it holus-bolus. Games, and Weiss certainly, give you characters and pictures that ought to mean something-- and then, I suppose, politely step aside to let you project your own fantasies onto the thing without the inconveniences of, you know, plot or coherence or consistency...

[incandescens]

Indeed. And nobody to tell you that you've got it right or wrong. On the one hand, this can come up with very interesting constructions (style over substance?). On the other hand, is the structure necessary for a good story? (I'd argue yes, but . . .)

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Style over substance is what Japanese aesthetics are about, though the experts keep telling me that the style *is* the substance, which I've never quite got my head around. Maybe- the pretty pictures are enough, you don't need to provide an explanation or even a context for them. Look, enjoy, don't extrapolate.

Fic isn't like art, though poetry and vignettes may be. A story does rather need to be something more than impressions. And a fanfic in particular, being a derivative work, needs something solid to derive from. (Supposing we're catually talking about the same thing here...?)

[incandescens]

I would agree with you that fiction has to have some sort of structure, or -- well, or it's not fiction. It's something else. Fanfiction may borrow elements (even out of place or confusing elements) and make something constructive with them, but it has to have the building blocks to work with in the first place.

Devil's advocating

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

But as for building blocks-- doujinshi need no more than the look of the characters. The djka take it from there, often in totally unlikely ways. A purely print attempt to do the same thing leads you to-- well, WK and Eroica fandom. The characters don't talk like that and wouldn't talk like that but it's the confirmed belief of the fen that the characters *ought* to talk like that, even if they don't in canon. Thus canon exists to provide the look of the charas and a few superficial details: and the rest is fannish correction of a canon that's generally felt to be unsatisfying.

(But of course that's the source of bad!fic as well. The secret agents, hired killers, Gundam pilots or psychotic cannibals fail to be romantic mushballs in canon, yet certain fen believe they *ought* to be romantic mushballs cause they'd look so good being it: and that's what they write. Because the canon is unsatisfying to *them*.)

Re: Devil's advocating

[incandescens]

Now I'm cross-correlating this with roleplaying sourcebooks, where the players and the GM are _expected_ to take what they want and then work with it, and encouraged to adapt it to suit the particular needs of the campaign. Cross out some characters, alter others, make a third into a secret spy or hired killer or romantic mushball, all for the needs of the mutual story being created.

Of course, the authors of the sourcebooks have to keep to the big book of canon, but all the readers are encouraged to take what they want and run with it. (I'm always quite pleased when I hear that someone's actually kept something that I wrote more or less as it was.)