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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.

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.

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.

Current Location: I had to delete the old post on this from earlier today
Current Music: because the fucking formating got fucked

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.

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.

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.

( My Thoughts on Sam in )

( Thoughts on )

Current Mood: anxious
Current Location: bounded in a nutshell and yet the queen of infinite space

I can pinpoint exactly how I got into reading fanfic. Exactly. It was sometime in 2000 or 2001 (back when the set up of the computers put them in the den on the main floor of the house- back when people in my family had to share two computers, well before it became common to see us all huddled in the living room illuminated by the glow of separate laptop screens).

I was bored, and of all the random stuff in the world, my sister told me to go to bored.com and find something there to do. There was a link to fanfiction.net. And thus my addiction began.

Now, mind you, I was a geek, but I was a superhero geek. I was delighted with BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES, or whatever they were calling it that season, and I was fairly addicted to a number of other superhero offshoots. I was a Marvel comics reader with a guilty love of a few DC characters, but limited by my suburban surroundings and being several years from my driver's permit, I was shit out of luck finding a comic book shop.

But there was fanfiction. On the internet. For free. People were writing stories about characters I liked, and I could get them without ever having to spend money or leave the house! The valkyries had come in the night to take me to my geeky Valhalla. And for a long time, I was content.

For, you see, this was before fanfiction.net stopped hosting NC-17 material. And thus, much of my introduction to fandom was paired with my introduction to porn. And I was happy, happy girl.

I existed like this for a damned long time, actually. I read more Marvel comics fanfic than I read the comics, and I was able to glean canon events and changes from that. Ff.net was still my one and only pit stop on the internet for this sort of thing, however, but it opened my brain up to something completely mind bogglingly different about being a geek.

There were others. Not only were people writing fanfic (and this, for me, was still a shockingly novel concept- authors of books were ephemeral creatures who stepped down from the clouds with completed works in hand. I could love a series to death without having any interest in the author whatsoever- it honestly just did not occur to me at all to care, ) but people reading the same fanfic as me. And writing comments. And praise. And then the author would respond, and the story would go on, and the cycle would repeat.

[This was pretty shocking to me, actually. I was the weird kid in school who'd moved in late when everyone else was already friends, and my social activities were greatly limited. Either as a cause of this, or just as a result, I read a metric shitload of books at a time. And no one ever read the same thing as me. Never. The Library was a place I went to restock on books, about a half dozen at a time, and other people went to socialize at the little tables together. No one ever read the same stuff as me.

[At least, no one I ever wanted to talk to- certainly none of the other girls. (I have vague recollections of geeky boys at school avidly discussing the logistics involved in the Yeerk invasion of Earth in ANIMORPHS, but I never talked to them because I never spoke to anyone of my own free will during the school day.) I read HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER'S STONE around the time it came out, not because it was recommended to me, but just because it was in the public library in the scifi/fantasy section, and carried it around with me at school and I was flabbergasted when another girl wanted to talk to me about it. Befuddled, bewildered and utterly taken aback. Weirdest thing that had ever happened to me, and honestly was probably the point at which I began viewing that series with suspicion. But I digress.]

So there was fanfiction.net, haven of geeks, freaks, and other assorted weirdoes who were better geeks than me, because they were spending more time and energy thinking about their characters and backgrounds. Seriously. Nowadays I hardly ever visit ff.net because the ratio of awesome to crap is sadly skewed, but I was young and foolish and I didn't judge stories on their bad grammar. I just went with the flow and liked the Mary Sue even if she was unrealistically perky.

But one thing that ff.net did have going for it, was it was multifandom. You could find fanfic on just about anything there, and while I was initially too faithful and too fearful to leave my comicbook bailiwick, eventually I began to explore. I ignored Harry Potter because I just didn't like their conception of magic compared to that depicted in the YOUNG WIZARDS series by Diane Duane, but I went out into the world and found Star Wars, and Jane Austen, and more than a few others things.

Which brings us to about 2002, the year when NC-17 material was banned from ff.net. I remember some of the outraged posts about this, but honestly, this was a good thing for me, because it forced me to decentralize my fannish attentions- there was no more smut to be found on ff.net, so I went further afield, and bumped accidentally into really good authors writing really good porn. And honestly, just other really good stories.

Clearly, this marked a turning point. Teland.com became my new favorite place on the internet, and introduced me to a concept that (had I any functional social network) would have occurred to me before: recommendations. People who wrote good stuff were usually reading good stuff too. My intake grew exponentially in my given fandoms, and it was all good. I didn't have to wade through crap anymore to find well-written stories. I didn't have to deal with horrific punctuation. There were good writers making interesting works, and all I had to do was follow one link to another to find what I wanted.

There were even sites where people did nothing but write recommendations for fic, and this was where I came across

thefourthvine. While TFV and I do not interact hardly at all, her recommendations for fandoms I liked were great. She found really, really good stories. The only problem was, large fandoms tend to produce more authors, and when you get a bigger pool of authors, you get better chances of finding really good stories. And the stuff she was reccing? Not in my fandoms, generally. Some were! And they were great stuff, but many were not, and I was loathe to read fic stories where I did not know anything about the canon.

But going through her TFV's lj looking for my fandoms, I found an older post of hers, where she detailed this shocking truth: she often didn't know the fandoms either. She often read fic from fandoms where she only had the most basic information about the canon. In fact, she threw another shocking concept my way: she did not even feel guilty about this. She didn't seem to think that she really needed the canon. She read the fanfic because she liked the fanfic.

And in that moment, friends, I was set free.

I don't need to know the canon. I don't need to feel like I need to watch the first season of a series before I can read the fic authors I want. I don't have to care about spoilers. I can just read the fanfic because I like the fanfic, and forget about the canon entirely if I want to.

This attitude changed my interaction with fandom entirely. It opened doors into fandoms I never thought I would care about, with shows that had been off the air for years or things that were only available in languages I don't speak. I became a fan of fandom in and of itself, not merely as a means to worship of canon, but as a concept of shared creative endeavor without any hope of profit.

And here I stand.

Current Music: My Name Is Jonas - Weezer

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kitewithfish

May 2025

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Page Summary

My Phandom Renaissance
Relationship to Canon: Shot out of one!
Meta On Venom and Pronouns and Aliens
Buffy plot bunny- Royal AU
On Fanfiction, Authorial Disapproval, and Respect
(no subject)
Supernatural Thoughts- Spoilers for 513 and 514
How I met my fandom(s)...

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Style: Ivory Alcea for Mobility by branchandroot
Resources: Mitsuba Aoi

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