#canatics

I worry that I sometimes come off as idealizing the past in the Tolkien fanworks community. And there are some things that I worry about, not so much in wanting to go back but wanting to make sure that we don’t lose the good parts that are historically part of our community.

But today, I have been working on a fandom history paper and I found (via an academic source no less!) a 2004 thread that reminds me of everything I don’t miss. (I first began lurking in the Tolkien fanfic community in 2004, and reading this, I marvel that I had the courage to not only delurk but post a story and start a fanfic archive of my own.) I spent about an hour reading through it and am still only about halfway through. I stopped because it was honestly giving me a headache.

For those who weren’t around the fanfic community during the LotR film trilogy and immediately after, this thread will give you a taste of what you missed. Things I won’t miss:

The kinds of people who will argue that an award should be rescinded because they perceive the author has made a canon error.

The kinds of people who tidily define quality Tolkien fanworks by how closely they stick to canon or use other expert references in conjunction with that canon.

The kinds of people who think that there is an objective way to measure quality of fiction, fan fiction or otherwise, and it is a good idea to exclude people and stories on the basis of those dubious criteria.

The words “purple prose.”

People who think the aforementioned purple prose is a sign of sophisticated writing.

Threads stretching over hundreds or thousands of replies that never once discuss canon/characterization choices in terms of their artistic impact or merit. (Everything is canon canon canon! Which is an absolute, unshakeable, nondebatable, black-and-white, right-or-wrong entity.)

People who dismiss a story the moment it uses the words man or woman rather than terms like elleth or hobbit-lass. And those who dismiss entire sites for containing such stories.

A fandom culture that will gleefully participate on a community called fanfic_hate while also complaining that everyone is so meeeeean and point fingers at others for destroying the fandom.

The sorts of people who admit that they lie awake and “pray” for the rejection or failure of another author’s work.

People who compare a fandom award they don’t like to Nazism. (And then, when merely asked to think about the appropriateness of that comparison, flail their hands around and invoke George Orwell.)

People who brag about how hardcore their favorite archive is about deleting stories that don’t fit the “guidelines.” And mean it as a compliment.

Some of the issues under discussion on that thread were very legit, the hurt and anger that people felt was very real, and this thread is probably the best proof I’ve found of the deep-seated distrust and animosity that existed between members of different archives.

And certainly the Tolkien fanworks community today isn’t perfect and isn’t pure nicey-nice ... but it is a relief not to have to engage in these kinds of canatic arguments anymore. (Not saying they don’t exist ... but these attitudes were mainstream in the early/mid-2000s; it was hard to write fan fiction without routinely encountering them, e.g., a well-meaning friend who advised me to label a story as AU because my Elves slept with their eyes closed, and I could avoid a lot of criticism and rejection of the story on those grounds.) I like feeling that I’m making art, not little replicas of Tolkien’s books; that fan fiction is not a paint-by-numbers kit but a deeply thoughtful, critical genre in which the complexity of Tolkien’s canon is honored, not distilled down to a set of inviolable rules.

canatic: a person so obsessed with viewing Tolkien's canon as facts that they forget that this whole fanfic/fanart thing is supposed to be a creative endeavor.