These Are the Keys, This Is the Kingdom

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Title:	These Are the Keys, This Is the Kingdom
Creator:	Merlin Missy
Date(s):	June 5, 2008
Medium:
Fandom:	multifandom
Topic:
External Links:	These Are the Keys, This Is the Kingdom
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These Are the Keys, This Is the Kingdom is a 2008 essay by Merlin Missy.

Series

This essay is part of a series called Dr. Merlin's Soapbox.

Some Topics Discussed

• Whoniverse, and how recent shows remind her of over-the-top fanfiction written by fanboys
• "Strange things happen when the fanboys are put in charge of the very things they geeked about as kids..."
• comics and fanboys
• having fanboys write canon is pretty cool, but also not
• changing views of tie-in books, are they canon?
• admiration for show writers that know where there show is going and what's going to happen
• frustration with the never-ending cliffhangers, arcs that don't end, getting lost in the weeds that long-running shows suffer from, which is not unlike reading a WIP fanfic
• shows are getting more complicated, and giving fans more what they want
• admiration for some fanboys: J. Michael Straczynski and Joss Whedon, frustration with others: Rick Berman and Brannon Braga

From the Essay

So, like, there was this fanboy, and he loved this one show, and when he got older, he and his group of buddies did this shared universe story, right? Okay, so they introduced this OC who was all way cool, and it was way slashy, and they totally started writing stories just about him and the hot guys and girls he had sex with, and meanwhile, in the shared universe stories, they brought back an old character from a long time ago, and she was so much fun to write that they started writing stories about her too. And then they wrote this one story where the main character got a daughter out of nowhere, but she was already grown up, and totally hot, and she could snark and kick ass and do gymnastic leaps through lasers (because that's so kewl) and they killed her off but only kind of and then everybody felt bad (even the people who only knew her for five minutes) so they brought her back. And meanwhile, there was this one character they really liked, so even though they'd written her out of the story, they started bringing her back again because omg One True Pairing!

On the one hand, the rise of the fans to control the things we love is amazing news for the rest of us. Not only does it provide hope for every aspiring fanwriter, it also creates a deeper bond between creator and audience. Joss Whedon can pull the old "I don't give fans what they want, I give them what they need" routine , but writers who are keenly aware that the characters they're playing with were created by someone else and will be played with again by someone new when they're finished are far more likely to play nicely. The writers who started as fans know they too will have to live with this canon until the end of time. They have both the luxury of thinking someone will come along behind them and fix the mistakes, and also the fear that the next person will come along to make those mistakes worse

Fandom builds on itself. It always has. We admire writer-creators such a J. Michael Straczynski and Joss Whedon, but we also know that it's only when someone else can pick up the characters and make them breathe that the story is greater than its author. Sometimes that's with fanfiction alone, sometimes it's through the tie-in novels and comics, sometimes it's a reboot twenty years later by someone who was once an awestruck kid with a cardboard paper towel holder as a sword. The Goldberg definition says only the latter two outlets are creatively legitimate, but honestly, the line is blurring so much and so fast that soon the only way to tell will be identifying who can send C&D letters.

Think about it. Once upon a time, a show was a show. Creators wrote a forty-five (or so) page script, shot it, and that was canon. Tie-in materials were optional, but usually considered fanon, not least because they just as often as not got jossed by canon later anyway ala the original Star Wars novelizations. In rare cases, there would be a deleted scene, or a photocopy of a script that was filmed slightly differently than written. (TNG's "Attached," I'm look at you.) Potential canon. Optional canon. Now we live in the age of webisodes, of corporate-sponsored contests for fanvids and open solicits for fanfiction, and the Goldberg line is very fine indeed.

...the Legend of JMS, which is all about how he wrote the five year plan in advance. Babylon 5 is remembered because he stuck to that plan (at least until he thought he was being cancelled after season four). Knowing where you're headed helps you get there, as long as you know how much time you have to arrive. Too much time, too many renewals between "critically-acclaim premiere" and the announced ending date, and our shows wind up treading water, creating drama for the sake of drama, and losing the focus that drew us in back when the world-building began.

We tune in to see the latest round of "Fanboy Rules the Universe" and sometimes it's the fanfic we've been writing, and sometimes it's That Other Fanfic, which we don't discuss in polite company, or at least in unlocked posts. We take our chances and we pick and choose, and we enjoy the threads we can see woven in ("retcon," "spoilers") or we mutter at the seams showing and move on because we've seen this story before and it never ends well. And we give the fanboys a thumbs-up, because they made it, even when we quickly switch to another finger because of what they turned it into later, and some of us hope to be standing there someday, and some of us just hope not to get caught doing what we're doing.

The line between Them and Us is going away.