I don’t care about canon.

I suspect that J K Rowling’s primary evil, the one that primed her fans to reject her transphobia and began to dispel the hold she had over a great many people, was messing with canon. Tweets about Hogwarts upset many of the most active participants in the Harry Potter community – those who engaged with fanfic, fanart, fan discourse, and all kinds of deep introspection and creation based on this property, those who had developed rules of engagement for both community interaction and the output the community built, engaged with, and fed upon.

Rowling is not the only owner of a large IP who has decided to flex in the direction of canon: Kathleen Kennedy faced a major backlash when Disney bought Star Wars for ‘wiping out’ the expanded universe of official content that had previously been considered canon. Whilst many were angered, she seemed to be pulling on the same idea as Rowling and choosing an attitude to art that favours its original creator. Star Wars is now, at least officially, made up of things George Lucas created and the things that have been created under the Disney umbrella. It is an exercise in auteurship, in creative control, and in brand management.

These two behemoth properties are right to control their image, in some ways. It protects the bottom line to acknowledge that anything ‘official’ makes money and that they can create more hype with bigger production value – whether that’s a west end play or a Disney Plus limited series. It’s also, honestly, only PR: not only are JKR and George Lucas not writing or signing off on everything in their fantasy worlds, they cannot control the world they created beyond what has ‘official’ stamped on it. They cannot remove the Etsy pin badges, the Redbubble stickers, and the fanfic with its serial numbers filed off that, in rejecting as part of a rich and wide world within their IP, they have helped create as bestsellers[1] Fandom is a self-fulfilling act: when you love something enough to make it a hobby, wear it in public, or find a community of fellow lovers, it will spread. It will pique the curiosity of outsiders and develop the intensity of those who are allied with something, and fans can be absolutely rabid when a property passes into the wider culture as something to be proud of and be identified by. It is these fans who are upset by changes to canon, because to find something you love, to share in it and pass it around and engage with it beyond the easy way, creates a passion that doesn’t like to be told that it’s wrong.

On a personal note, however, I couldn’t care less if something is ‘no longer canon’. This is a joy of fiction: it’s made up, I can believe what I want about its world or its characters. That’s the power of fanfic, as far as I can see – you can never make it invalid, because it is built on a shared self-deception and a meta created by the community. Once you create a work it is released into the world, ready to catch the attention of others and spark something in their mind. If a group of fellow fans believe one thing and I believe another, they cannot tell me that I’m wrong, no matter whether they own the story legally or not.

Am I an oktaku? Certainly. If I love something, I will wear it on my sleeve and it will become a part of my life to appreciate it [3]. I am an active consumer of fan content, whether that’s books I read or stickers I put in my journal or community I surround myself with, and will quite happily write thousands of words of my own in response – fiction or non – if the prompt is right, and whilst somebody may have legal dominion over the IP they do not have the right to control fan responses, whether criticism or as an artistic response, if properly camouflaged or differentiated. If somebody draws a hypothetical book cover and sells it as a sticker, or if somebody writes a book where the magic works the same as ACOTAR but with different characters, that is their own work, and if I like the picture or the prose I will engage with it as readily as I do with the original work that I loved.

Art grows. There is always work that inspired your favourites waiting for you, there are threads to follow backwards and forwards from anything you love to discover more, and from the things we love our own creations and communities grow too. There is no evil except banality, perhaps, after all, and art can grow stagnant and banal if left in the same stale hands. My love will not be limited: I love movie posters as much as the films themselves, and I will consider my loves ‘canon’ simply on the basis art cannot be deleted entirely. Ignore the banality of original sin, and embrace art you love, wherever you find it.

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[1] Ali Hazelwood I downloaded your book but it’s not really my thing. Alchemised was on my TBR before I knew it was fanfic.

[2] Please stop having Clara grow up into the 20th century.

[3] Ask my Taylor Swift group chat, I dare you.

On This Topic:

• The best Dr Who fanfic
• The fever dream fan response I am compelled by
• And the fanart I want for my journal

To-Do:

• Defrost xmas goose
• Write 5x journal pages per day (then it will finish this notebook with shitty paper before the end of the xmas break) – this is going better than you’d expect
• Make some slides for teaching in Jan

Today’s Culture:

• Goose for Christmas is the most exciting thing in my life and I’m not sorry. I will be having a quiet, Dickensian Christmas.
• I brought a glass pen to live at my in-laws’ house and I think that’s smarter than leaving a fountain pen here to go crusty
• I have gone back to buying everybody books for Christmas. Do they want them? Probably not, but by the time I’m done pitching them they will.