Kitewithfish

My Phandom Renaissance

Mon, 15 Jul 2019 13:51:42 GMT

The Background

So, I don't normally think of myself as A Phan, aka, a devotee of Phantom of the Opera. Mostly because I fall in and out of the source material, and I don't really engage in the fandom at all. Except as a reader, it's mostly something I am dip in and out of.

I've read the original novel by Leroux, and listened to the Lloyd Weber recording, and seen the 2004 movie, and read at least two of the "sequel" novels (tho god only knows which ones the public library spat out at me for my request back in 2005!) (EDIT: It definitely seems like one was Susan Kay's 1990 novel, Phantom, and I almost certainly got that recommendation by reading Gevaisa's fics.)

But the thing was, the older I got, the less I liked the main drive of most of the fan works - pairing Erik and Christine together, assuming the events of the movie was your starting point, felt just... a bit weird? I don't judge anyone who likes it, and I've read a lot of fic trying to find an angle that would work for me. Because I see the relationship, and the attraction, and it still just somehow got to feel more and more like trying to fit Christine's experience into a box labeled "Romance" when a lot of it was a better fit for a box labeled "Horror." People are allowed to like what they like, and after a while, I found I wasn't liking Phantom well enough to find a settled place for the work in my heart. It's still compelling and interesting. But I just never feel quite comfortable with it.

The Turn

A while ago, tho, I got to see a truly wonderful amateur production by a small and casual group (staged in a living room!) that blew the top of my head off. The director for this performance was a woman, and the cast is largely women (including some playing male roles - my friend was an excellent M. Firmin. Their Phantom was a dude, and Asian.), and their Christine was a longtime member of the group - and they all agreed the tone for their production of the musical was that of a young singer being manipulated and threatened by a stalker. Their Christine was adamant about it - the star of the show is Christine, a young woman trying to handle her mysterious voice teacher murdering people, which is a big fucking deal.

Their production really helped me pull out the tensions I felt towards the Lloyd Weber musical - there's just a lot of push to see Erik's actions sympathetically in that musical, and some productions make the mistake of allowing Christine's experience of fear and confusion and mistrust to become sidelined to favor Erik's viewpoint. And I had a lot more interest in seeing the chemistry between Erik and Christine once I saw a production of the Lloyd Weber musical that actually made sure to center Christine as a person, making choices in a shitty situation that Erik put her in. That worked for me, in a way that the movie production of the musical just didn't.

This actually makes me want to see the stage version, which I wasn't sure I wanted to spend money on before I saw this incredibly great and low budget production.

This is all prologue.

The New Twist

Because I had a recent return to interest in Lloyd Weber's musical, I clicked on a certain video on Youtube on Saturday morning.

I am a big fan of Lyndsay Ellis, who has been doing film criticism vlogs since before Youtube existed. Ellis is smart and well educated and funny as shit. Also, she's a big Phan. She has a really fun series called "Loose Canon," and the Phantom episodes (two!) cover the history of the story before the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical and after. Both here: Before Broadway and After .

So, through Ellis , I discovered that there was a separate musical! From 1991, there was another musical, in a more operetta style, that adapted the story from the LeRoux's novel with a significantly more genteel Erik.

From Wikipedia - "Phantom is a musical with music and lyrics by Maury Yeston and a book by Arthur Kopit. Based on Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera, the musical was first presented in Houston, Texas in 1991. Although it has never appeared on Broadway and has been overshadowed by the success of the 1986 Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, Yeston and Kopit's Phantom has received over 1,000 productions." There are several productions on Youtube, filmed from various stage musicals. Obviously, it did not achieve the success of Lloyd Weber's musical, but it seems quite charming from what I'm able to find. (In tone, what I have seen feels bit like A Little Night Music - it's very European and choral and it feels like it wants to be in Paris in a particular time period.)

AND! There was a nonmusical production of the storyline of Yeston's Phantom made into a two-episode miniseries, starring Charles Dance as Erik. It's on Youtube (just google, I don't want to get any links taken down) but Charles Dance basically swans around in opera dress and a full face mask being snide about Carlotta and charming Christine and it's a delight. None of the music from the Yeston production makes it into this miniseries - the performances are all drawn from classic opera, including Faust, Norma, and a bunch of others as references that I didn't recognize. Christine is occasionally a bit thin in terms of character towards the beginning of the series, which I think is a reflection of her musical performance's work not being quite adapted properly to the all-dialogue miniseries, but she also clearly makes decisions and determinations on her own. Her involvement with Erik is unconventional, and he's definitely lying to her at the start, but at the end she's making choices on her own with the full information, and it's just.... it's nice! It's nice that I don't have to make excuses for Erik being stalkery! There so much less of that!

Yeston talked about his version of Erik being significantly less horrific - "The story could be somewhat changed.... [The Phantom] would be a Quasimodo character, an Elephant Man. Don't all of us feel, despite outward imperfections, that deep inside we're good? And that is a character you cry for.

And while I have yet to have a chance to actually read thru the libretto, and I'm still working on finding a performance of Yeston's Phantom that I can watch (other than Youtube, which does have a couple), I'm just feeling interested and excited for this adaptation of the novel in a way I haven't for a while. I have not found any fic yet, because of course I haven't. But I'm just feeling engaged and energetic about these characters in a new way, and I just wanted to get out there and share that New Fandom Energy.

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Relationship to Canon: Shot out of one!

Wed, 06 Feb 2019 19:34:16 GMT

So, over on Pillowfort, SakuraNoMiko had a great post about reading fic without being involved in the canon that I responded to, and I'm posting my response over here because I really enjoyed the process of thinking about it and would love more of people's thoughts!

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Quick note: I have no idea how to format html beyond the basics, so there are parts of this that are formatting in keeping with the post on Pillowfort and I am leaving them for now. Let me know if it's showing up wonky for you!
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SakuraNoMiko wrote:

That said--has anyone gotten really into a fic without knowing the canon? Read fic before seeing the actual show? I'm curious if it influenced your opinion of the show when you finally saw it.

I have actually read a lot of fic without knowing the canon!

So, I can actually date nearly precisely when I decided that, not only could I read fic beyond the part of the canon I already knew, I could read fic with no intention of ever learning the canon! I lay the credit on this post from 2006. - https://thefourthvine.livejournal.com/63288.html

Allow me to steal a quote from that post by theFourthVine:

"[Me and TV] is never going to be a pairing of legend, unless the legend involves a lot of headaches, stupid questions, avoidance, and humiliating misunderstandings.

But I was learning that most major fandoms were TV shows. I felt - well, hampered. But in November 2003, I clicked on Out of Whack. Some careful reading later, I learned a great truth: fan fiction can be canon-optional. Later, I learned that I am actually much more likely to enjoy reading the fan fiction if I don't know the canon when I start, and TV fandoms became my happy home. "

See, this seems really obvious to me now, but the reality of the situation was, I really did need someone to give me permission to treat fandom as a worthy effort in and of itself, without having to have a relationship with the canon beforehand.

Which I was really happy to find out! Because I had a lot of fic writers that I loved who were writing in fandoms that I didn't have access to because they were TV series from before the era of automatic DVD releases - The Sentinel, Due South, etc. And while I've seen a few episodes each from each of these shows, and I can see some of the appeal of the original canon, it's just been so long and I'm so divorced from the standards of normal at the time, that I'm fine with just giving up on the canon and enjoying the fic for what it is.

SakuraNoMiko wrote:

A possibly secondary question: of course, fanfiction wouldn't exist without some sort of canon source, but do you think it's necessary to know the canon to fully enjoy a fic? Like, do you think a fic should be able to stand on it's own, or is that kind of stupid idea, given that fic is made to be alongside canon? What about AUs that have very little to do with canon? Fics where people are acting out-of-character?

Somewhat obviously, I'm going to land on "Nope, you don't need the canon to love the fandom!" Good writing is worth it, even if you are going to miss some of the context or you have to check in with a fandom primer to get. Good writing is an experience worth having, even if you end up not knowing the exact lines between canon and fanon. And like you mentioned, you can pick up a lot of canon just from being in the community.

In some ways, reading without canon does mean that you are more vulnerable to getting confused about the facts of the canon - like you mentioned in watching Supernatural, you'd picked up that demons were really common, well before that became true in canon. I've definitely picked up some elements of Transformers fic and assumed it was canon, only to read stuff that made it clear, whoops, that's just one author's headcanon! Or a common fanon that not everyone agrees with!

One tactic I have used for getting familiarity with fandoms I know I am never going to connect with canon - I read a lot of meta! Episode summaries, or primers, or Youtube videos talking about the show - they are all usually very explicit about what's canon, and you can pick up the main facts about things. On tumblr, meta posts took a lot of that role!

To be fair, when I think about the fandoms I read in without knowing the canon fully, I usually have a barrier to the canon that prevents me from engaging with it. For The Eagle fandom, I have seen the film, but I can't get my hands on the original books by Rosemary Sutcliffe, so I rely on fandom to flesh out the details from the books. For DueSouth, The Sentinel, and X-Files, those are all TV shows that are pretty time intensive, and for a while they were difficult to get access to (unless you invested in your own copies of the DVD's) - since the time and money involved were a high barrier, I formed an attachment that was mostly free of canon. Transformers and some other continuing comics series - I like comics but I find continuing series hard to follow outside of collections, and often difficult to find without buying for myself.

And then there are the fandoms where I was engaged with the canon, and then, welp, to quote Nick Fury: I recognize the council has made a decision, but given that it’s a stupid-ass decision, I’ve elected to ignore it. Some fandoms, I will read the fic, and I will love them from afar, but holy shit I am not doing that to myself again. So, Once Upon A Time, I'll read some of the fic about the characters I love, but I am never ever going to watch another episode.

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Meta On Venom and Pronouns and Aliens

Tue, 11 Dec 2018 19:02:34 GMT

There is some ongoing 'new fandom weirdness' going on in Venom fic, in which writers who come from the comics tend to fall into using language common to the comics, and people got into fandom from the movie using that language.

This can lead to some confusion, particularly around how to talk respectfully about a character who is literally a goo alien from a species that does not have gender and reproduces by budding.

Since this can have some overlap with the ongoing cultural discussion about how be respectful and kind when you want to talk to and about trans and nonbinary people, it's worth laying out why there's some differences going on, and where they come from.

The comics address this by calling the symbiote, 'the symbiote' or 'the Venom symbiote,' and using it/its/itself language for the symbiote. In the comics, only the combo of symbiote+host = Venom, and the name Venom is applied to any host the symbiote takes. Specifically, people who know and love the symbiote use 'symbiote' and 'it/itself' language in a positive, non harmful setting, and this is largely taking place in the context of the symbiote being an alien creature with different cultural norms

The movie took a different approach: the symbiote's name is Venom from the first discussion, and the movie uses he/him/himself. (Specifically, the symbiote makes an introduction using the name Venom to another character personally, and other characters call the symbiote alone Venom and use he/him language when they consider the symbiote sentient, but other characters who are not nice use “it”; and don't know the symbiote's name.) The line “We are Venom” is said towards the end of the movie, but it's not quite clear if what that shift means.

So, fic writers are using both of these modalities, both supported by canon, AND some people are also using different ways to talk about the symbiote that are drawn from some existing etiquette about how to talk about trans and nb people who don't have a traditional gender (like, sometimes using 'they/them/themselves’) language.

So there is a lot going on in Venom fandom about this, I so far have not seen any grossness or antitrans sentiment going around (tho, hi, it's the internet, I'm sure there's some out there), and I hope this helps explain where folks are coming from.

For myself, I got used to the conventions of the comics, but I've been reading a lot of fic about the movie, so I'm playing fast and loose.I do tend to use 'it' or 'they' with the symbiote by itself, because that's what the comics do and that's what I'm used to doing with nb characters. I basically never use the name Venom for just the symbiote unless I am comment on a fic where the author has used that convention; - it can cause too much confusion to try and insist on different language, and I'm not convinced it really adds much to push for it. “He” for the symbiote alone seems just weird and wrong to me, but it's also common in the comics for people to address Venom (when the symbiote and host are 'suited up) by the host's gender, so it's coming from nowhere. There is a basis for a lot of these choices.

It's a developing fandom and I'm not sure where the consensus is going to land, if indeed it ever does.

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Buffy plot bunny- Royal AU

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 20:45:13 GMT

So, once upon a time in a fairly modern alternate universe,
Into every generation is born a slayer, one girl in all the world, the chosen one, who will lead her kingdom in to peace and prosperity with the dueling powers of the Californians kingdoms.

Regent Giles, sent from the Council on Kingship, is the appointed tutor and steward of the small kingdom of Summerlands, ruling justly while also preparing Her Royal Highness Buffy of the House of Summers, princess and lady of battle, to be a just ruler and queen. Raised in a normal household and illegitimate, Buffy didn't know her father until he died without an heir, leaving her as the last in the line of Summers and stuck in a life she does't want. She enters the court to meet Count Alexander of Harris, the bumbling son of a defunct noble family with pretensions to lost grandeur and power, and Lady Willow, the daughter of a recently established noble family (one of the first Jewish families appointed to nobility by the late king) and a powerful witch in her own right, tho she could stand to get out of the house more rather than training so much.

blarg blarg- ruling is the burden, instead of being a slayer...

The Summerlands are menaced by the Aurelian Dynasty, a longstanding territory ruled by the Vampires of the Aurelieus clan. In the war, the anti-human Master and his childe, Darla. This leaves Angel, the Vampire with a soul, trying to sort out the local squabbling and keep his kingdom from turning into a bloodbath. The bad kind. The main problems are Drusilla and Spike. Drusilla is a political tool and can never be trusted to rule on her own, but her visions are valuable to Angel. Spike, however, is a menace. He's rowdy as hell since Drusilla dumped him, makes a complete mess of Angel's poor planning for political reasons, and generally is a Problem for Angel to deal with.

Angel can't wait to get rid of him, and since he's not the official heir to Aurelieus with Drusilla live, Angel can wed Spike, and his gobs of vampiric lucre, off to a high ranking noble in the Summerlands to make the peace treaty stick.

Giles thinks it's lamentable but necessary, Willow is aghast, Buffy is just glad it's not HER, and Xander is mostly trying to get over the fact that his father knew he was gay the whole time.

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On Fanfiction, Authorial Disapproval, and Respect

Mon, 03 May 2010 20:14:56 GMT

Apocalypos of LJ posted here about a post Diana Gabaldon, author of Outlander and other novels, made in her blog, Fan-Fiction [sic] and Moral Conundrums

Ms. Gabaldon begins inauspiciously:
"OK, my position on fan-fic is pretty clear: I think it’s immoral, I _know_ it’s illegal, and it makes me want to barf whenever I’ve inadvertently encountered some of it involving my characters." The rest of the post is in a similar vein- read it if you have the time.

I replied with this post: (When I started writing, there were 83 responses. When I posted, there were 96. There are now 116 posts and growing)

( My response )

Needless to say, I think Ms. Gabaldon is within her rights as an author and creator to ask for no fanfiction of her work, but I don't agree with her characterization of fic authors.
If you feel moved to comment, please be respectful in tone if not in mind.

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Mon, 03 May 2010 02:06:55 GMT

Watching DOCTOR WHO episode, "Time of Angels", I had a brilliant fannish thought. Or, a sick demented fanish thought, but I'm hoping it was one of the good ones.

River Song= River Tam + one (ended) marriage

Think about it. Think about the possibility for crossovers. Just... let it percolate. And then write me some fic, you crazy brilliant wacko.

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