ewe-canon and epilogue-canon

[marguerite_26]

Last night, frayach posted several questions about canon!Harry. The questions are really interesting and the answers even more so. Do go add your 2 cents. It's very much a refocusing on Canon which often gets lost in all the porn around here. LOL.

Anyway - in my response I mentioned how in my head I have two canons: ewe-canon and epilogue-canon, for which I was promptly and good-naturedly laughed at. :D

But it's true. I have this on/off switch in my head for when I write fic. There are two canons: one where the epilogue happened and I MUST satisfy all that was entailed in those 19 years later pages to be content to write and one where canon ends with Harry being 17.

I'm not talking about some official definition of canon, I KNOW that everything contained in the books is 'canon,' but I need to know...

When you pick up a pen (or sit at your keyboard) to start a fic - does your mind contain the epilogue no matter what you are writing about? If you are writing something school-age or just after school or anything that does not include the epilogue, do you consider your work AU? Does the epilogue sit in the back of your mind poking at you saying 'what you are writing cannot exists because I exist?'

For me, it does not. The epilogue just... disappears when I write something that is ewe. Canon becomes the ewe-canon that I truly believe in and I hold to JKRs work religiously, and try to respect what she has given us without any guilt of those last few pages being ignored. My creativity would be stifled if I believed that there was only One True Canon while writing. I find it suffocating to think about.

Comments

[bootsy-mine.livejournal.com]

Being a Buffy and Angel fan that makes perfect sense.

I had the hardest time accepting that Angel could fall in love with Cordelia. I could understand his having affection for her but not being "in love" with her. To me Angel's one and only true love should always have been Buffy. He went for a century before he found her, I have a hard time believing that after a year or two he could fall head over heels for someone else.

When Buffy ended with every potential slayer being a slayer, it really ruined it for me. What made Buffy special was that there was only 1 slayer. I always thought that when she died the second time a new girl should have been called but they didn't pursue that avenue and I could accept it since she lost her place in line after her first death.

I was just as disappointed in Angel's end. It ends with the beginning of what appears will be an epic battle, the fabric of the world torn apart. Not a good place to end.

I can totally understand it.

[marguerite-26.livejournal.com]

*nods*

when Buffy ended, there didn't feel like any more story to be told as you said, so I moved on to Angel and was deep in Wesley love... yeah... I just couldn't go on. Then having to make every new piece of fiction try to explain that Epic battle (or worse bring Wesley back to life) or fall into that 'everything is an AU' pit... that just made my muse shrivel up.

So I love that in HP, I can just throw out that epilogue thorn when I choose to and feel no guilt about it. :D