I have held back no water in its season

Wandering back through Gundam Wing it strikes me that a lot of Our Heros’ problems can be explained by the fact that they’re all involved in special ops when most of them really aren’t suited to that.

Take Quatre, for example. He acts like a line officer, maybe one pretty fresh out of academy and still with all his shiny ideals about honorable, soldierly behavior, lawful surrender and so on. He even has a unit to command, one that seems far more involved in straightforward combat than anything else.

Wufei might have had a bit of an edge, psychologically, coming, allegedly, from a culture in which the collective good has primacy and whose history provides some damn pragmatic philosophy to serve the collective good. But he seems to ignore that in favor of very individual pride in his individual, one-on-one fighting skills. He’s just not sneaky enough, and won’t let himself be.

Trowa seems to be the best suited of all in some ways, and he surely has the skills, but he’s also pretty personally disconnected. That could simply be the mark of someone born to deep cover, but to be honest he doesn’t seem quite… quirky enough to survive.  This probably sounds dreadful, but he doesn’t have enough of a sense of humor about what he’s doing–or, perhaps a sense of the ridiculous.  Well, he is fifteen, after all.

As for Heero… well, my own interpretation of his weird moments is that J took someone who is totally unsuited to special ops and trained him in them intensively anyway. He’s far too in touch with conventional morality and the idea that Killing Is Wrong. He’s also straightforward as a bulldozer, and if he weren’t, to all appearances, bulletproof, that would have killed him many times over.

Duo, on the other hand, might actually have been trained to be a good spy and saboteur, given he’d already made mental peace with the whole breaking and entering thing. He displays both social connectedness and pragmatism, and personally I think he has the best chance of coming out of the experience both successful and sane.

Which opinion explains why there are small whimpering sounds coming from this corner whenever I try to go back and read most GW fic, but that’s an entry for another day.

*brain goes click*

Oh, right, ji. Diminutive, child, kind of like ko only generally masculine in deployment. As in:

Ryuuji (given name)
Ou-ji (prince)
and *drumroll*
Ji-touki, which is Lucrezia Noin’s rank when we meet her.

Kind of like Second Lieutenant, I’m thinking. You know, Second, then First: Ji-touki, then Touki. Or possibly Touki-san, since the -san/-sama seems to act as a rank denoter (Zechs and Une, specifically).

No idea if this is germane since I’ve never seen the pilot titles spelled anywhere, but it does hang together.

*utterly stunned*

Pat Benetar’s “All Fired Up” is Relena’s song. *accusing look at little gray cells* How did I not notice this before?

Well, now, there’s a thought. Is it possible to be a fan of Story X without being absorbed by/invested in the source text? Can one be a fan of Story X when one only knows it via fanworks?

My knee-jerk reaction is “yes, of course.” Which I find odd, because The Story is the center and heart of my concept of fandom. Yet, rummaging around in my own motivation a little more, perhaps it isn’t so strange. Because I, too, consider my fannish value system a populist one, and, out of a populist value system, should not all textual producers be equal? Why should the official/original version be privileged over the fannish reworkings?

And now I’ve got myself in a real fix, because I do feel the originary text has to have some privilege; it’s the primary source, it’s the one the fanworks derive from.

Yet, sometimes it isn’t.

Sometimes fanon overcomes canon, and the text that is central to a given fandom becomes a body of fanworks which are, sometimes quite noticeably, not much based on the originary text. For example, let me return to Gundam Wing.

Well, actually, let me not return to Gundam Wing, but let me try to draw examples from it anyway.

The canon text was, in most quarters, thoroughly drowned out by a majority-accepted fanon text which used the same names but differed significantly in descriptions, characters and plot points (keywords: cobalt, bouncy, hn, safe house). The canon text became co-equal, as a source text, with this fannish production. Details upon which to base further fanworks were taken indiscriminately from either source or both.

GW was certainly fandom. It had all the standard earmarks: passionate investment in the central texts, appropriation of the text, possessiveness of the characters. Was it a fandom consisting of fans of Gundam Wing?

I have to say, yes.

I suppose my reason goes back to my conviction that a text is nothing without its readers, and that the readers are a vital part of how the meaning of any given text is produced. I also feel quite strongly that one of the most basic moves of fandom is to become author as well as reader to the source text. So, if the meaning that a bunch of fans find in a given story is better expressed by the fan telling of that story than the initial telling… that does not divorce them from the initial telling. It just complicates the relationship. A relationship still exists, even if a given fan never lays eyes on the canon text. If it is a relationship that fans who cleave to the initial telling find frivolous, well, upright, everyday, mainstream culture thinks we’re all frivolous, now, doesn’t it?

Which means it might just behoove all of us to practice a shade more tolerance. I do think there’s a difference between saying “that activity/approach/value puts you outside of good/acceptable fandom” or even “outside of fandom period”, and saying “that activity/approach/value makes you a weird fan who’s not like me”.

The latter is just discourse communities working themselves out. It’s the initial gut response to something strange or uncomfortable. What I find unfortunate is when that gut response becomes the basis of one of the former statements–the universalization of one’s own value set, as Cathexys says. Judging a member of one’s own discourse community by the values of that community may get ugly, especially if it’s part of a renegotiation of what that community’s values are. But it is, I would say, part of the basic process of thinking and communicating, and we just have to hack it as best we can. To judge a member of another community by the values of one’s own is pointless; fandom has plenty enough room for incompatible communities to ignore each other.

Of course this gets hugely messy, because we all have more than one community, and there are the questions of redefinition, and recruitment, and influence within larger communities. But I still think the basic principle is a useful one to keep in mind while processing the “Weirdo!” reaction.