The fanfic disposition

Yesterday, I mentioned Roxane Gay’s insightful opinion piece on the proposed HBO series Confederate, which was headlined “I Don’t Want to Watch Slavery Fan Fiction.” I’m still sorting out my own feelings toward this show, an alternate history set in the present day in which the South won the Civil War, but I found myself agreeing with just about everything that Gay writes, particularly when she confesses to her own ambivalence:

As a writer, I never wish to put constraints upon creativity nor do I think anything is off limits to someone simply because of who they are. [Creators] Mr. Benioff and Mr. Weiss are indeed white and they have as much a right to create this reimagining of slavery as anyone. That’s what I’m supposed to say, but it is not at all how I feel.

And I was especially struck by Gay’s comparison of the show’s premise to fanfic. Her essay, which appeared in the New York Times, only uses the phrase “fan fiction” once, linking to a tweet from the critic Pilot Bacon, and while its use in reference to Confederate isn’t literally true—at least not if we define fanfic as a derivative work based on characters or ideas by another author—its connotations are clear. Fairly or not, it encapsulates the notion that David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are appropriating existing images and themes to further their own artistic interests.

Even if we table, for now, the question of whether the criticism is justified, it’s worth looking at the history of the word “fanfic” as a pejorative term. I’ve used it that way here myself, particularly in reference to works of art that amount to authorial wish fulfillment toward the characters, like the epilogue to Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto. (Looking back at my old posts, I see that I even once used it to describe a scene in one of my own novels.) Watching The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies recently with my wife, I commented that certain scenes, like the big fight at Dol Guldur, felt like fanfic, except that Peter Jackson was somehow able to get Cate Blanchett, Ian McKellen, Hugo Weaving, and Christopher Lee to reprise all their old roles. And you often see such comparisons made by critics. Gavia Baker-Whitelaw devoted an entire article on The Daily Dot to the ways in which J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Cursed Child resembled a wok of “badfic,” while Ian Crouch of The New Yorker tried to parse the difference between fanfic and such works as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea:

Fan fiction is surely not a new phenomenon, nor is it an uninteresting one, but it is different in kind and quality from a work like Rhys’s, or, to take a recent example, Cynthia Ozick’s remarkable new novel, Foreign Bodies, which reimagines the particulars of The Ambassadors, by Henry James. Not only do these books interpret texts in the public domain…but they do so with an admirable combination of respect and originality.

As a teenager, I wrote a lot of X-Files fanfic, mostly because I knew that it would give me a readily available audience for the kind of science fiction that I liked, and although I look back on that period in my life with enormous affection—I think about it almost every day—I’m also aware of the limitations that it imposed on my development as a writer. The trouble with fanfic is that it allows you to produce massive amounts of material while systematically avoiding the single hardest element of fiction: the creation of imaginary human beings capable of sustaining our interest and sympathy. It begins in an enviable position, with a cast of characters to which the reader is already emotionally attached. As a result, the writer can easily be left in a state of arrested development, with superb technical skills when it comes to writing about the inner life of existing characters, but little sense of how to do it from scratch. This even holds true when the writer is going back to characters that he or she originally created or realized onscreen. When J.K. Rowling revisits her most famous series or Peter Jackson gives us a fight scene with Elrond and the Ringwraiths, there’s an inescapable sense that all of the heavy lifting took place at an earlier stage. These artists are trading on the affection that we hold toward narrative decisions made years ago, instead of drawing us into the story in the moment. And even when the name on the title page or the director’s credit is the same, readers and viewers can sense when creators are indulging themselves, rather than following the logic of the underlying material.

This all means that fanfic, at its worst, is a code word for a kind of sentimentality, as John Gardner describes it in The Art of Fiction:

If the storyteller appears to stock response (our love of God or country, our pity for the downtrodden, the presumed warm feelings all decent people have for children and small animals)…then the effect is sentimentality, and no reader who’s experienced the power of real fiction will be pleased by it.

Replace “children and small animals” with Harry Potter and Gandalf, and you have a concise description of how fanfic works, encouraging readers to plow through tens of thousands of words because of the hard work of imaginative empathy that someone else did long ago. When Gay and Bacon compare Confederate to fan fiction, I think that this is what they mean. It isn’t drawing on existing characters, but on a collection of ideas, images, and historical events that carry an overwhelming emotional charge before Benioff and Weiss have written a line. You could argue that countless works of art have done the same thing—the canonical work of Civil War fanfic has got to be Gone With the Wind—but if slavery seems somehow different now, it’s largely because of the timing, as Gay notes: “We do not make art in a vacuum isolated from sociopolitical context. We live in a starkly divided country with a president who is shamefully ill equipped to bridge that divide.” Benioff and Weiss spent years developing their premise, and when they began, they couldn’t have anticipated the environment in which their announcement would be received. I don’t want the project to be canceled, which would have a freezing effect throughout the industry, but they should act as if they’re going to be held to a higher standard. Because they will be.

Watching with the hive mind

Occasionally, when I’m sitting through an episode of Game of Thrones, it’ll cross my mind that I enjoy reading and thinking about this show more than the experience of actually watching it. This isn’t always true: when the series is at its best, as in the back half of this weekend’s season finale, it’s every bit as gripping and emotional as it once promised to be. Still, the past ten episodes have sometimes felt like a slog, with the show’s most compelling character confined to a prison cell for most of the season and endless minutes devoted to the weakest of subplots. As Todd VanDerWerff of The A.V. Club has shrewdly pointed out, the show sometimes feels like a mix tape of big moments and climaxes interspersed at random between long stretches of inactivity, and as much as I admire showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss for making such an unwieldy narrative work at all, I still feel that dividing the third book across two seasons was a mistake. There’s a reason why the second season, which had to make some hard cuts and choices to fit all of A Clash of Kings into ten hours, is by far the show’s finest, and I’d love to see a fan edit that compressed A Storm of Swords into a similar space.

Yet the fact that I’m talking about “fan edits” at all speaks to the degree to which the way we’ve watched television has changed over the past decade. It’s been pointed out more than once that the rise of the golden age of television coincided almost perfectly with the emergence of online fandoms and extended weekly reviews. As in many things, it’s hard to figure out which way the causal arrow runs—it’s possible that the abundance of great television fueled passionate online discussion, rather than the other way around—but there’s no question that the Internet has resulted in fundamental shifts in our viewing habits in at least three ways. It makes it possible for critics to post insanely detailed breakdowns episode by episode, with none of the physical constraints of printed media: it’s difficult to imagine a lovingly obsessive writeup like Tom and Lorenzo’s Mad Style, for instance, existing in any other form. The easy availability of streaming options allows us to regard a television series as one big unit of narrative, which opens up new forms of storytelling. And given all the venues where fans can read and post commentary in real time, what used to be a highly solitary activity is now a collective one, with each show eagerly consumed by something approaching a hive mind.

Ultimately, it’s a situation that nurtures and rewards ambitious narratives, both by keeping alive smaller shows that might not have survived ten years ago—even Community lasted longer than anyone could have expected—and by encouraging creators to take greater risks. There’s a sense in which someone like Matthew Weiner has been enabled and liberated by the level of scrutiny Mad Men receives to make the show ever more detailed and complex: it’s easier to drop in small touches and extended payoffs when you know that viewers are paying attention, or at least have recourse to power users who highlight the show’s choices for the benefit of others. I watch Mad Men with about as much care as any viewer can, but when I go online to read the recaps, I’m constantly alerted to tiny details and callbacks I missed the first time around. This doesn’t mean that the show doesn’t work in its own right: it functions, by design, on multiple levels, and there’s no question that it offers plenty to enjoy for viewers who are more concerned with surface pleasures. Yet the conversation and analysis that the show inspires has started to feel like an integral part of the experience, a chance to tap into the headspace of that perfect viewer on which nothing is lost.

And the fact that this perfect viewer exists, if only in the aggregate, is central to the renaissance in modern television. Of all art forms, television was the one best equipped to meet and fulfill a collective increase in narrative intelligence: unlike literature or film, it allows the story and its interpretation to unfold in parallel, and the combination results in levels of complexity that few other kinds of popular entertainment would be able to sustain. (In a strange way, the situation also serves as an unexpected argument for the importance of the weekly episode. Orange is the New Black is as rich as any show on the air today, but because we’re all watching it at different rates, there isn’t the same sense of collaborative viewing and appreciation that we get when a show parcels itself out over time.) Not every show needs to push the envelope, of course, and it’s important to meet the basic requirements of plot, character, and suspense on their broadest levels even as it becomes possible to drill ever deeper. But if every form of art naturally rises, or falls, to the level of its audience, it’s no surprise that television has evolved into such incredible forms. We may not be any smarter as individuals, but together, we’re more than worthy of the best that television can provide.

The Long Game

Note: Spoilers follow for the most recent episode of Game of Thrones.

Last week, while writing about the season finale of Hannibal, I laid out a pet theory about television shows that have a tendency to kill off their lead characters:

When it comes to predicting who lives and who dies, I’d like to think that [Bryan] Fuller will follow Lecter’s own rule: “The world is more interesting with you in it.” I feel the same way about Game of Thrones, which isn’t shy about killing off its leads, but only if the dramatic weight gained by one bloody incident offsets the loss from the character’s absence. If you’re fun to watch, you’re more likely to make it.

In other words, when someone dies, there’s always a tradeoff involved, and a smart show will only eliminate a protagonist if the short-term benefit outweighs the long-term cost of no longer having that character around. This rule doesn’t really work for a show like The Vampire Diaries, which finds myriad ways of resurrecting its key players, but until recently, it did a decent job of explaining events on Game of Thrones. The characters who died tended to be either figureheads who were more interesting in what they represented than in their actions within the story; initially compelling players who had been increasingly sidelined; or ostensible leads who weren’t all that engaging in the first place. And I felt confident that if a character—or actor—was actively enriching the show by his or her presence, the series wouldn’t lightly throw it away.

Well, so much for that theory. (In financial terms, the model worked fine when tested against past data, but fell apart outside my historical sample.) If last night’s episode was especially shocking, even for a show that seems designed to regularly break its viewers’ hearts, it’s partially because of the ways in which the series has diverged unexpectedly from the books. To hear readers tell it, Oberyn doesn’t seem to have been a particularly memorable character on the page, but Pedro Pascal’s performance has been one of the small delights of an often meandering season, and his departure feels like a real loss in a way that previous fatalities have not. Another series, after seeing what it had on the screen, might have revised the storyline accordingly—it wouldn’t be the first time that a character was granted a stay of execution because of the charisma a performer brought to the part—but showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have been cruelly faithful to Martin’s overall vision. There really wasn’t any way to keep Oberyn around, and it’s in the collision between what the show was slowly discovering on its own and the brutal necessities of its source material that makes the outcome so painful.

I’m not really complaining here: it’s that very tension between the unpredictable nature of television and the demands of the text that makes this show special. Still, Oberyn’s death bothered me beyond any reasonable measure, and I don’t think it’s entirely because I’d grown so attached to the character—or because his demise was so graphic. (You know when a show has set a new standard for violence when I start to long nostalgically for Hannibal‘s more aestheticized form of bloodshed.) Game of Thrones is a good show that I’m glad to have the chance to watch, but there’s also a sense in which it uses its virtuoso moments of gore and reversal to cover up the lack of momentum elsewhere. A lot of the fourth season has felt like it was stalling for time: events at Castle Black and across the Narrow Sea have been stuck in a holding pattern, with much talk and declamation leaving the characters more or less exactly where they were before, and it’s hard to avoid the feeling that they’re playing for time. For all her power, Daenerys can’t go anywhere or do much of anything yet because we still have four more books of material to cover, and the result has turned one of my favorite characters from the early days of the series into something dangerously resembling a bore.

In retrospect, I think it may have been a mistake to divide the third novel across two seasons: it buys Martin more time to finish the books, but it leads to a lot of thumbs twiddling between the squishing of heads. To its credit, Game of Thrones has always nailed the big moments, and I’m eagerly looking forward to next week’s episode, which, if the pattern from previous seasons is any indication, should be a real barnburner. Over the long term, though, the show needs to find a more sustainable rhythm if episodes like “The Mountain and the Viper” are going to play like the dramatic culminations they are, rather than another instance of Martin and company jerking the audience around. This may require even more radical departures from the structure the books have imposed, and even a willingness to drop certain plot threads altogether—while building up the rest—until the time comes to integrate them again into the main story. This isn’t a radical notion; serialized television drops and picks up characters all the time, and the space it gains allows the show to develop its heart more fully. Game of Thrones spends an inordinate amount of time, even now, reminding us that certain characters exist, when that space might have been better spent showing characters like Oberyn simply existing, if only until they depart from the stage for good.