The venerable roots of fanon

[branchandroot]

It's common for textual purists to disparage fanon, and I have certainly done that before. But it struck me, today, that fanon is, in it's own way, a venerable institution and deserves recognition for its tenacity, if not its precision.

Consider, for example, Gensis. Specifically, consider Eden, and the go-round with the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The serpent incites rebellion (by, I might note, telling nothing but the truth) and all parties get a really raw deal out of it, including labor pains, limblessness, and species enmity. There is not a scrap of textual indication that Satan or Lucifer, or any incarnation of the Devil at all, is present in any way.

The idea that the serpent was the Devil is fanon.

It's an extrapolation with no direct textual basis, running, I suspect, via Milton and the Romantics, and their various promethean reading of the Devil and a misconstrual of the name Lucifer (lightbringer being, as best I recall, a psalmic reference to Lucifer being as to Christ as Venus the Morning Star is to the Sun--herald or forerunner of light) whereby the fruit of knowledge is elided with the light of fire.

Not even going into the difference between the figures of Satan and Lucifer, though Satan's original role of Jehovah's Prosecutor General does connect to the idea of temptation and form another cross connection to the actions of the serpent.

The thing is, this is what people do. This is what people do with any text at all. They read it and take from it bits that make the most sense and extrapolate those bits into whatever form has the most meaning and accessibility to them. There's nothing heinously evil about this activity.

It's only when fanon becomes the basis for attempted textual explication that the perpetrator needs to be whacked one.

Comments

[naanima.livejournal.com]

Exactly. I don't see how people manage to link the snake with the Devil. It is all interpretation and generalisation of a concept that people put under one umbrella term. A physical manifestation does not equate one being. As for the Lucifer and Satan, I'm not that knowledgeable in the latter but I do enough of the former that when people call him the Devil and put him half man and hlaf goat form that I get tetchy.

As for Milton and the Romanatics. ARGH! The only thing I took from them was some bad poetry and a 38 hour stretch of doing a 11000+ words essay that came down to me living on four litres of coffee and oreos, and trying to pretend that I was being objective. Well, at least I passed the unit -_-;;;

[liliascrescens.livejournal.com]

^o^ I like to blame pretty much everything on Milton, myself. (Though I actually like PL quite a lot--no small thing, considering that I'm much more into novels than poetry, generally speaking.)

When it comes to fanon, the thing I reproach myself for most is following it blindly without asking where these tropes are coming from--even when I knew some of the prevalent GW characterizations weren't what I had seen in the series, I didn't even consider whether they were sprouting from doujinshi, or some canon source I hadn't seen yet (the manga, e.g.), or some random person's random thoughts. Not that there's some hierarchy to the origins of fanon, or anything. It's just interesting to me now to trace the way certain ideas can spread, and what affects people's willingness to run with someone else's interpretation.

[solitude1056.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes: "Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk." Henry Jenkins, from Textual Poachers: Media Fans and Participatory Culture. I suppose in some ways, the fanonization of religion happens in part when you don't have a specific canon basis (like when the Jews were carted off to Babylon) or when the majority of the people are disenfranchised from the original source. Which, if you think about it, does fit how many English-speaker writers do feel that way about the source material, if it's not in their own language.

Oh, and don't get me started about the ridiculousness of trying to link Eve/Mary/and the woman clothed in blue with twelve stars. Metaphor, people, metaphor, do NOT use this as a basis for arguing Mary is the mediatrix! *froths at the mouth*

Err, was I raving?

[moumusu.livejournal.com]

I always thought Gundam Wing was nothing but the fanon. That's the part I liked anyway, because the show was a mess.

That made me think about Duo. I liked him, and I got to see him more in fanon. I say go for whatever satisfies.

[ladycrysiana.livejournal.com]

My entire knowledge of GW and YYH was from fic. Of course, I never ficced for the series, either. Something interesting is that typical fanon for at least part of the FMA fandom is that Roy really likes coffee. (Or, as people are more likely to say it, Roy/Coffee OTP.)