This References Derrida and the Movie Clue. How Can You Resist?

I received the following comment on a fic: “I was totally into it until you quoted from the show.”

Fascinating, I thought. Does that mean I’ve done my job *too* well, that you forgot you were reading a fanfic? Or does that mean I haven’t done my job well enough, that you forgot you were reading a fanfic?

So then I started chatting with elizabethminkel about all of this and somehow I found myself bringing up Derrida and she was like, “You should put this all on Tumblr!” and I was like, “BEHOLD THE POWER OF PROCRASTINATION.” Seriously, the power of procrastination is such that my brain dredged up *Derrida,* who I haven’t thought about in 15 years and never actually understood.

BUT. I have always felt like, if I’ve done my job right, my fic *shouldn’t* entirely stand on its own. I intend for it to be read in conjunction with a canon. I’m doing something with the canon: commenting on it, criticizing it, hating it, loving it,  but whatever I’m doing, it’s *something.* So I have always in my head felt like the best fanfic isn’t easily serial-number-filed, if that makes sense. It should be more than changing a character name or two. Taking a fic outside of its canon conversation should, I’ve always thought, deprive it of something.

But even as I was tweeting this--which is a theory I have long held--I realized that my Inception experience was arguing against that. I started reading Inception fic kind of randomly, without knowing much about the movie at all. I fell in love with the fic. To this day, I’m kind of meh on the movie. In a kind of reverse, to me the *movie* only has value because of its place in the fan conversation. Take the movie outside of its fan conversation, and it’s deprived of full vibrancy. You don’t get fully fleshed out characters anymore. You don’t get one ridiculous word or look or musical cue or WHATEVER having so much significance your heart hurts.

So maybe I’ve been wrong to see it as a one-sided thing. It’s not that fic needs canon. It’s that fic and canon have a symbiotic relationship. Fic betters canon as much as canon betters fic. Which makes sense when I stop to think about it. The whole reason most people write fic is because there’s something about canon they can’t get out of their head, that they need *more* on, and then when you go back, everything is richer.

Which is what gets me to Derrida, I think. Derrida had something to do with referents, if I vaguely remember correctly. It was something to do with symbols not being universal because you had to know their referent? And the referent was itself a symbol and unknowable? Or something like that. As far as I could tell, modern philosophy eventually devolved into NO ONE KNOWS ANYTHING EVER. ANYWAY, I really just wanted to borrow the idea of the referent.

Because I think, what’s important in fic, is not the referent back to canon, as I’d always thought. It’s the referent to, for lack of a better word, *fanon.* And I don’t just mean fanon like John loves Tchaikovsky and Eames is a secret peer, or whatever might be the fanon of your choice. I’m using fanon to refer to “the way fans communicate.” And we, like many people, like artists everywhere, use our creativity to communicate, and it’s a language we all understand effortlessly, because we are versed in the referent. I’m terrible at understanding modern art (you should see me doing research when I have to have Eames talk about art, it’s hilarious), but that is largely, I suspect, because I never studied art, I never learned its language, I don’t know it’s referents. The other day a student told me she commutes from Philadelphia, and I was like, “*Philadelphia? How long does that take you???” and she replied, “It’s a three-hour drive,” and I still don’t know where Philadelphia is but it’s clearly not Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She and I? We had different referents. I don’t actually speak Southern very fluently at all.

But I do speak fluent fanon. With very little effort, I know what you mean when you say “coffee shop AU,” or “hurt/comfort,” or “OT3,” or “Mary Sue,” or “genderswap,” and I don’t just mean that it’s a matter of vocabulary, it’s a matter of *we know how to read these things.* Even if I *don’t* say it’s a coffee shop AU, when there’s a coffee shop involved, you know what it *means,* you know what I’m engaging with, and it’s not just the canon, it’s hardly at all about the canon, it’s about the larger fan vocabulary that has established coffee shop AUs and what they mean. And partly there’s an illumination of the canon, but also partly it’s just another drop in the coffee shop AU referent pool, regardless of the canon at issue. Our primary referent, actually, is fandom itself; canon is the secondary referent that we use to communicate through our primary referent. ::making up philosophical-sounding things like a pro::

@elizabethminkel pointed out in our Twitter conversation that probably, for me, fanon trumps canon, and I’ve decided that’s true. You know what I’ve weirdly loved about writing in Inception that I didn’t think I would: it’s closed. No one’s going to come in and mess it all up. I don’t actually *want* my ships to be canon, because I don’t trust anyone with them but *us.* And why do I trust us? Because we’re conversing in fanon terms.

Canon is presented to us with such finality. Canon is not engaging in creative play. Canon is deadly serious. “HERE I AM AND HERE IS HOW IT GOES. DEAL WITH ME.” Canon is like the closing off of doors of possibilities until there’s only one path.

Fanon, on the other hand, is aggressively *not that.* Fanon encourages the same story to be told infinity times, basically. Fanon is an explicit acknowledgment that there is no one way to tell a story, no one way to write a character, no one ending that is inevitable, and no one gets to tell you otherwise. Fanon is about the joy of pure limitless creativity (take that, dreamsharing). Fanon is about finding your own path and letting everyone else find theirs as well. This is why you don’t only have one AU of each type in a fandom, or one definitive post-Reichenbach fic, or one fic dealing with Mary. You get multiple because no one behaves like or would ever expect anyone else to behave like their fic is THE DEFINITIVE. I can read a fic I don’t agree with and I know it’s okay for me to shrug and move on to other fics. I can read a fic I adore passionately, but it’s also okay for me to write a fic dealing with the same moment, or genre, or whatever. Whereas I am not as good at doing that when it’s canon, because I feel slightly bullied, somehow. Like, I’ve had a hard time post-S3 with Sherlock, because I can’t figure out how to deal with Mary. And I’ve spent all of this time trying to figure out and now I’ve reached this point where I’m like, “What does it *matter,* they’re just going to do what they want to do and we’ll be stuck with it.” It’s harder for me personally to brush canon away, because even though I’ve been a passionate fan creator for years now, I’ve never actually felt *invited* to that. There’s a definite hierarchy, and I’m the amusing upstart with a pat on the head and the “there, there, that’s not what *really* happened,” like it’s the bloody end of “Clue” or something.

Well, I’ll tell you what really happened: ALL THREE POSSIBLE ENDINGS. EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE. ALL THE FANON REFERENTS EVER. Derrida. ::mic drop::