The weird reason I like fanfic better than tie-in novels.

[shadowscast]

yourlibrarian mentioned Star Trek tie-in novels in a post today. The reference had to do with the gender split of the writers and the way it's been changing over time, if you're interested in going and checking out her post, but it incidentally got me thinking about my own relationship with tie-in novels.

When I was a teenager, I read quite a few Star Trek tie-in novels. I enjoyed them. But then I discovered fanfic when I was 21-ish, and I pretty much stopped reading official tie-in novels after that (even though I hardly ever read Star Trek fics, oddly enough). And I think I've read literally two Buffy tie-in novels, ever (Pretty Maids All in a Row by Christopher Golden, which somebody gave me as a gift; and a French translation of Halloween Rain by Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder, which I read for the French practice).

So, why did I decide that I liked fanfic so much better than tie-in novels? I mean, tie-in novels are novel-length, curated, nicely copy-edited, and generally of a fairly high quality of writing—which are all things that I like! Sure, fanfic is free and tie-in novels potentially aren't, but that's not a big deal; I do have a good job, and anyway it's easy to get books cheap at second-hand shops or book sales or yard sales, or free at the library.

No, the real reason that I turned towards fanfic and away from tie-in novels is, frankly, a bit quirky and weird.

Let's start with the idea of canon: canon is the stuff that really, actually happened to the characters. (For Star Trek, admittedly, canon is a concept without well-defined edges; is the animated series canon? Are the video games? The Short Treks webisodes? etc. But anyway, the live-action shows and the movies are canon for sure. Let's assume for now that canon is a thing that exists.)

Now, the thing about the Star Trek tie-in novels (many of which I read and enjoyed as a teenager, I will remind you!) is that I always understood them to be taking place within the canonical universe, in an officially-sanctioned way. That was the real Captain Picard beaming down to that planet and having that adventure—yep, the same guy who was going to be onscreen next week trapped in a turbolift.

So the books were in the official universe ... but nothing that happened in the books could affect the official universe. While they were living in the books, the characters could refer to events that had happened in the TV show, but never vice versa. And at the end of each book, the characters all had to be right back where they'd started, so that they could return to the TV show without a hair out of place.

So after a while it felt to me like nothing that happened in the books mattered. The things that happened in them didn't really happen, so what was the point?

But how is that different from fanfic, you might ask?

Well, here's how I see it: Official tie-in novels take place within the official canonical universe, and so they have to tread lightly and can't really affect anything. But every fanfic splits off into its own brand new divergent-timeline universe. (Like the JJ Abrams Star Trek films!) And in these new universes, everything is real, actions have consequences, and anything can happen!

In fic, characters can grow and change. And sure, whatever happens only matters for the space of that one fic, and when I'm done reading the fic I need to reset everybody back to canonical values before starting to read a different fic—but that fic-universe exists, those versions of the characters exist, and the experiences that they had matter.

Is that super weird? Does anybody else's brain work like mine does?

Comments

[labingi]

Great post! I agree with you. Fan fic feels truer in terms of character development. It also tends to focus more on character than plot, which I prefer.

[shadowscast]

It also tends to focus more on character than plot, which I prefer.

Yes, me too—or at least, in order for me to feel like the plot matters, I need to see how it's affecting and changing the characters. And that's what's missing from the official tie-in novels, where the characters can't change.

[maia]

Fascinating!

There are some tie-in novels that I like a lot, but overall...I think I agree with you.

[shadowscast]

Well, even with all that I said above, I still have fond and clear memories of several of the Trek tie-in novels I read 25-ish years ago!

[the_shoshanna]

Oh, definitely! Official tie-ins have to end where they began, more or less, and have a strictly limited route they can travel along the way. I was obviously very aware of this once I matured into a slash fan, but it also affects things like crossovers: official books can't use any characters they don't have the rights to, fanfic can bang any universes together that we like to see if they strike sparks. And while the "canonical characters" aren't changed by their adventures, our understanding of them certainly can be! And they may well have later adventures affected by and following on from these.

I read a ton of official Trek tie-ins too, back in the day -- starting with the James Blish novelizations, moving on through the New Voyages (which I recognized as officially-sanctioned fanfic even when I wasn't fully cognizant of what fanfic was, and which gave me my very first example of a classic Mary Sue), and toward the end focusing on tie-ins with connections to fandom (did I go line by line through my not-first-edition copy of Killing Time with a zine-published list of all the changes from the first edition in my other hand? YES I DID). And, amusingly enough, I was given a French Buffy book to help with my French! but I never actually read it, mostly because I never really learned the passé simple and had no expectation of needing to use it in Quebec.

[shadowscast]

fanfic can bang any universes together that we like to see if they strike sparks

Oh yes, that's a good point too! I don't read crossovers very often, but maybe I should, because when I do I tend to really enjoy them. I actually just finished reading a massive fic series (three novels, basically) from 1999, crossing over Once A Thief and the even shorter-lived and more obscure TV show, Kindred: The Embraced. I think I never read that fic series back in the day because I'd never seen the latter show, but I was nostalgically poking around the old Once A Thief archive recently and I decided to give it a shot just for the heck of it, at which point I realized that the short-lived TV show was based on a tabletop RPG called Vampire: The Masquerade which I am familiar with (I even played in a short campaign, back when I was 18 years old!) and so in the end I really enjoyed seeing how the fic author had incorporated the Vampire mythos into the world of Once A Thief.

I was given a French Buffy book to help with my French! but I never actually read it, mostly because I never really learned the passé simple and had no expectation of needing to use it in Quebec.

Hah, yeah. I found out about the passé simple when I tried to read book one of Harry Potter in French, and I was all "how are there all these verbs that I don't even recognize, when I've been taking French classes in school for 15 years??" The passé simple is indeed a big part of why I almost never attempt to read novels in French. I mostly stick with newspapers, magazines and comics (BDs!), thus avoiding the passé simple entirely. Actually the French Buffy novel was given to me as a gift too (I think my mom found it at a yard sale and gave it to me for Christmas?), and it was in fact not only a translation but also an adaptation for the youth market; it was a simplified translated BtVS tie-in novel. :-D So I figured maybe I could handle it, and it turned out I could. You get used to the passé simple conjugations of être and avoir pretty quickly, and the rest of the verbs are at least recognizable.

[yourlibrarian]

It's definitely not super weird, in fact on the flip side it's a big reason why so many fans don't read fanfic at all, because they feel anything non-canonical doesn't matter so why waste time with it?

My problem with tie-ins is that they're often just so dull and sometimes aren't any more in character than many fanfics. Some of that dullness probably comes from the prescriptiveness of the tie-in model, but I think another part is simply the author's unwillingness to take charge of the characters which is something that fanfic excels at but may also turn off a lot of people.

[avrelia]

I don't think it's weird at all. I felt that tie-in novels are "kind of fake" before I knew about fanfiction, and didn't understand why I would read them after I discovered fanfiction.

However. I did read several novels I loved. One of them was a prequel to Star Wars - YA novel by Claudia Gray "Leia, the princess of Alderaan." I picked it up randomly, and... it made me fall in love with Alderaan and its people and culture and the whole beautiful world, which is, you know... I can't watch "New Hope" now, I get too upset...

Then "Bloodline", also by Claudia Gray, which deals with much older Leia and politics after the fall of empire. it's far enough from all movies to have direct effect, but it explains some stuff nicely.

And this summer's "The rise of Kyoshi" - which deals with the youth of avatar Kyoshi, and again, too far away from the series that it look like a cheerful play in avatar sandbox, that also manages to confirm some suspicions (yes, avatar Kuruk was an idiot!) and expand our knowledge of the universe.

[shadowscast]

Yes, I actually am tempted by The Rise of Kyoshi (my pile of already-bought to-read books is still too big, though...). And I loved the Avatar tie-in comics which continued the story from the series. But of course those comics followed a very different model from the Trek tie-in novels where the characters aren't allowed to change; in The Promise etc. the characters and the world changed significantly, while staying very much in character and playing out the logical consequences of events of the series.

[avrelia]

The Rise of Kyoshi, in my opinion, got the best of both: it's written by an obvious fan for the fans, and it's also a well-constructed and polished character driven story. SO it really was a joy to read - and of course, he had an opportunity to start with a character that's seems very different to see how she might have gotten to the point we're familiar with.

But there is no rush - next summer the second story is supposed to come out (of promised duology), so you might get to read both at once, if you feel like it.