Juggling the original to have my reply make more sense, and couch story
follows...
Now, if you don't feel this way, that's absolutely fine. But if you're
saying that any comments of this sort should disappear, then I have to
disagree with you. I don't see any reason why you can't either ignore
such a response when you get it, or prevent them with an author's note
in your fic saying that you're not interested in this kind of feedback.
Sorry, my bad. I should have been more clear; I meant that I didn't want
the kind of response where someone says 'Well, Ranma-chan's hair is
really black in the manga illustrations so you're off canon and this
just turned me off from your fic and you're a bad writer.' People who
take it so badly that they refuse to treat the fic fairly in the rest of
the C+C, since they got biased right out of the door. That's really
inexcusable, and believe me, I've had a lot of C+C very similar to that.
Way I see it, if you're going to comment on the canon-ness of the story,
it should be presented as just one aspect of the whole of the
commentary. It's good to know (and can be ignored if the author
disagrees) but it's also a single facet in something that needs to be
robust to be of greater use to an author.
Now the first paragraph:
Stefan, I respect your position, but you seem to be assuming that "one
size fits all." Some of us *do* want to hear comments on whether our
fics fit the canon or not. The way I see it, I'm writing *fan*fiction,
not just fiction. and I want to keep my story world as close as possible
to the creator's *except* where there's a good reason not to. If that
means getting rid of a couch (or adding a line in the fic to indicate
that the couch is a recent acquisition), that's fine with me; and
personally, if someone was willing to talk to me about one of my fics
for hours, I think I'd be quite flattered. :)
Okay, in the vein of one size fits all (and since I've actually gotten a
few personal replies of 'You've gotta be kidding me, a couch brought
that on? Yo, what up with that?') I'll anecdote away on why the one size
that fits ME is the opposite of this... ^_^;
The story's Ranma 1/2: The Ends, and you can find the couch in there. I
wrote the story one weekend and posted it up to the FFML/RAAC, then
showed it to a good friend of mine. Unfortunately, like I poised above,
he got stuck on the couch.
The passage is as follows:
"Oohhh, Nabiki!" Akane grumbled. "Fine! RANMA! How would
YOU end the story?"
Both girls turned to look at the noble martial artist,
currently busy draped across the couch to watch the final episode
of Maison Ikokku.
"Hrm?" he asked, looking up.
It felt like a natural position for him, since he wasn't paying a lot of
attention to them and slacking off a bit. Loungin' around made sense.
The couch in question gets mentioned once and never again, and the story
carries on with some interesting metafanfiction themes from there (at
least, I hope they're interesting. ^_^;).
But my friend was so offended that I'd put a couch in the tendo living
room that he actually wanted me to post a corrected version with no
couch... an entirely new version just because of the couch, a single
line, a single word for that matter in a story that was decidedly NOT
about furniture, didn't care about the furniture and was trying to
express something much more important about writing in general... but my
friend refused to go any further into the story or pay attention to the
actual reason I wrote it, because I broke canon. That's the kind of bias
I was mentioning earlier, taken to new extremes.
Well, I don't have the floorplans of every building in every anime (or
manga or whatever) I fanfic, and I don't plan to memorize details that
aren't important to me, so I declined the offer to revise my work.
...well, technically I fudged and claimed I'd post it, because he was
and IS still a good friend and we'd argued for four hours already over
this. ^_^; He's a great guy aside from a bit of a bizarre obsession with
canon accuracy, honestly.
(Oddly, no complaints were raised that Ranma was watching the last
episode of Maison Ikkoku...)
I've gotten other blather in e-mail, particularly for Slayers Starboard,
about how my views on the characters or little details of the magic
system are wrong and the one e-mailing is right. Often the ones
e-mailing have conflicting views on what is 'right', too. I've given up
trying to worry about being Right; I only worry about being a Writer.
The way I see it, if you can't get past the couch, get out of the
kitchen. ...or something like that. Helps filter out intolerant readers
at any rate.
You may disagree, and that's really quite fine with me since everybody
gets to hold their own opinions (about writing OR canon), but I
personally adopt a Could Care Less policy about fiddly bits of canon
that aren't important to my story or get in the way of its telling.
-2f