Don't Spoil It For Yourselves!

This is not a rant by any means, but a bit of musing on the phenomena of canon, fanfic, character orientation, and bears, oh my! Also, this discussion deals with slashfic only; I read a comparatively small amount of hetfic, so I'm not bothering with it here.

I'll start by confessing that I've never understood the OTP phenomenon. Certainly I favor some pairings over others, but I've never precluded the existence of, say, Mulder/Skinner just because I adore Mulder/Krycek. But unlike a lot of what I've seen in many of my fandoms, I don't wish that any of my favorite pairings will eventually become canon. In fact, I usually hope with all my might that they never will.

I hear a lot of 'Snape's so bitchy and meticulous, he must be gay!' or 'If it wasn't for teh Eval Publishahs, Gojyou and Hakkai would be so doing it!' or 'I wish Matsushita would just say that Hisoka and Tsuzuki are a couple!'-esque comments from various comms and mailing lists. It drives me a teensy bit batshit, because I think that most of the people expressing such sentiments would actually be quite disappointed in the event that Snape or Hakkai or Roy Mustang really did turn out to be canonically gay.

If the fun of reading and writing pairing fanfic is participating in fennish speculation, then adding a canon partner, or even sexual orientation, to a given character removes a lot of the wiggle room. And it's the wiggle room that makes relationship fic so compelling. Think about it - there's a reason why there's a whole lot more Saiyuki and HP fanfic than there is for FAKE or for any other series with established gay relationships: there's simply more room to imagine how Character A and Character B ended up in love/bed/whatever together, room that would disappear if the author gave fen an official version.

Of course people read slashfic for teh hawt mansex, but people also read slashfic for the Jane Austin aspect - in other words, how does Fanfic Author A think these characters would get together? So everytime I hear someone say, "Remus and Sirius are soooo canon and I wish JKR would just say it already!" I can't help but think, 'No you don't,' because we ficcers would suddenly have the One True Canon Account of how Remus and Sirius became a couple, and there goes any room for speculation. Half the fun of Remus/Sirius fanfic is that I can read fifteen Remus/Sirius stories and, because there is no canon relationship, each story is equally likely. If R/S were suddenly to become an explict couple within canon, I would enjoy R/S fanfic a little less, because in the back of my head I'd know that that's not how they really got together. Perhaps this wouldn't be a problem for some ficcers, but as a canon slave, I like for the possibilites to remain open.

Likewise, canon verification that Tsuzuki and Hisoka are bonking every night would take some of the fun out of Tsuzuki/Tatsumi or Tsuzuki/Watari fiction. Again, this isn't to say that I wouldn't be able to enjoy Tsuzuki/Tatsumi fic if T/T wasn't the 'official' pairing, but I like being able to switch between my favorite pairings and 'how they got together' scenarios to suit my moods. Furthermore, the fact that there aren't any canon couples in YnM means that I don't have to wade through a bunch of exposition in every Tsuzuki/Tatsumi fic explaining why Tsuzuki's decided to abandon Hisoka for Tatsumi, because without any official pairings, the T/T authors don't feel obligated to explain why they're breaking up the canon couple.

I don't mean to say that canon relationships invalidate non-canon pairing fics, or that the world would end if my favorite characters suddenly acquired explicit sexual orientations in canon, but I can't help but think that the ratio of non-canon relationship fic to canon relationship fic says something about the fics' creators and consumers; namely, that the possibility of a relationship between specific characters is more intriguing than the actual relationship would be. So the next time you find yourself wishing that JKR really would just write canon Snarry and get it over with, stop and think about if you really do mean it. It might not be as cool as the way your fifty favorite fanfics have already done it.

これで以上でうす。