![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
- canon,
- fandom,
- fanon,
- highlander,
- life on mars,
- lom 2.08,
- meta,
- methos
Abandoned meta from the past! Methos, with a lesson for LoM(?)
When cleaning up my old notes and paperwork recently, I found several abandoned drafts for - sadly unfinished - meta posts. I don't really have the time to clean them up and make them presentable (or add substance to the 'thinner' ones), but I also don't quite feel like simply throwing them away. So, maybe, I'll be posting a few of them here. Or at least I'll be posting one today. It's a - fairly unspectacular, really - bit of Methos meta, but I think it may actually be of some interest for Life on Mars fandom, too, as it deals with canon inconsistencies/insufficiencies and fannish reactions to those. Essentially, it's a bit like the 'canon vs. fanon' situation we have in LoM now, only that in LoM we're still struggling with declaring our mental independence from canon. HL fandom has a lot more practice in that department, as large parts of HL canon have sucked, or at least been severely disappointing, throughout the history of the franchise, and the fandom has been feverishly 'fixing' things for more than fifteen years now... (There's a difference, though, in the fact that the *majority* of HL fandom sees a need to fix things, whereas in LoM fandom only a very small minority feels that way.)
Anyway, this particular bit of meta is not really about the fixing of HL canon in general, but about one character who, arguably, is so very fascinating to fans because he was probably not planned but rather improvised by the writers, which shows in his characterisation... i.e., our fascination, and the fanon versions of his character that we love, are *based* heavily on the fact that *the source text is flawed*.
My Methos, your Methos, their Methos...
Everyone has their own Methos. There's![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
killabeez's romantic, 'just a guy' Methos, Sylvia Volk' wise Methos, Paula Stiles's angsty, psychotic Methos, Kat Allison's very alien Methos... the list goes on.
Well, I promised meta about this back in February/March(?) [that refers to 2006, of course], and now something Killa said in this discussion [no idea what discussion that refers to, sorry – if you can tell me, please do!] jogged my memory:pentapus claimed that Methos should have an alien quality (I agree, btw), and Killa remarked that, while an 'alien' Methos is a reasonable assumption based on the simple fact of his age, this is not the Methos we see in the show.
This is absolutely true.
Killa says that what we see on the show is mostly 'just a guy', and, due to the fundamentally romantic nature of the show, a romantic at heart; and she's right, mostly.
Still, to me, canon Methos is less clearly defined; he is, in fact, a bit of a cypher. What canon tells us about him is sparse; what little we do see is often contradictory. Who *is* canon Methos? You could probably argue that the fascination he holds for many of us is due in equal parts simply to the *idea* of someone being 5000 years old, and to the hotness of Peter Wingfield.
You could say that Methos' inconsistencies are a sign of sloppy writing, and they probably are. For the fandom, however, this is rather wonderful, albeit conducive to sometimes extreme disagreement: it means that with a certain mental flexibility, you can have as many different Methoses (Methi?) as you like.
We probably all pick and choose a few central character traits of canon Methos around which we construct our *own* version of 'canon Methos'; everything else is fairly wide open. As long as the central points I have chosen to base 'my' version of canon Methos on aren't contradicted in a fic, I can accept a wide range of sometimes extremely different, even contradictory portrayals of Methos without feeling that he's being written out of character. I can, for example, accept both Sylvia Volk's wise, at-peace-with-the-world Methos, and Paula Stiles's haunted, mentally imbalanced one – although these are two diametrically opposed versions of his character.
This is actually a fairly unique situation for me in fandom – 'out-of-characterness' is usually *the* cardinal sin in fanfic for me, the one thing that completely spoils a fic for me. [In fact, out-of-characterness can spoil *canon* for me, too – see the LoM situation of the last few weeks.] And usually I have a fairly concrete idea of what is and what isn't 'in character' for a character. But somehow, with Methos, I'm rather flexible in that regard.
ETA: This really hardly even deserves the title 'draft'. It needs fleshing out, it needs structure, it needs lots of things... but I don't have the time.
ETA2: I think the point I was trying to make was that, no matter *how* we interpret him, a certain degree of 'fixing things' is always involved in developing a fannish relationship with Methos.
Gah. My brain is completely fried today. I need to think more about the parallels and differences here - because there *are* differences between the LoM and the HL situation, though I can't quite put my finger on them yet.
Anyway, this particular bit of meta is not really about the fixing of HL canon in general, but about one character who, arguably, is so very fascinating to fans because he was probably not planned but rather improvised by the writers, which shows in his characterisation... i.e., our fascination, and the fanon versions of his character that we love, are *based* heavily on the fact that *the source text is flawed*.
My Methos, your Methos, their Methos...
Everyone has their own Methos. There's
killabeez's romantic, 'just a guy' Methos, Sylvia Volk' wise Methos, Paula Stiles's angsty, psychotic Methos, Kat Allison's very alien Methos... the list goes on.Well, I promised meta about this back in February/March(?) [that refers to 2006, of course], and now something Killa said in this discussion [no idea what discussion that refers to, sorry – if you can tell me, please do!] jogged my memory:
pentapus claimed that Methos should have an alien quality (I agree, btw), and Killa remarked that, while an 'alien' Methos is a reasonable assumption based on the simple fact of his age, this is not the Methos we see in the show. This is absolutely true.
Killa says that what we see on the show is mostly 'just a guy', and, due to the fundamentally romantic nature of the show, a romantic at heart; and she's right, mostly.
Still, to me, canon Methos is less clearly defined; he is, in fact, a bit of a cypher. What canon tells us about him is sparse; what little we do see is often contradictory. Who *is* canon Methos? You could probably argue that the fascination he holds for many of us is due in equal parts simply to the *idea* of someone being 5000 years old, and to the hotness of Peter Wingfield.
You could say that Methos' inconsistencies are a sign of sloppy writing, and they probably are. For the fandom, however, this is rather wonderful, albeit conducive to sometimes extreme disagreement: it means that with a certain mental flexibility, you can have as many different Methoses (Methi?) as you like.
We probably all pick and choose a few central character traits of canon Methos around which we construct our *own* version of 'canon Methos'; everything else is fairly wide open. As long as the central points I have chosen to base 'my' version of canon Methos on aren't contradicted in a fic, I can accept a wide range of sometimes extremely different, even contradictory portrayals of Methos without feeling that he's being written out of character. I can, for example, accept both Sylvia Volk's wise, at-peace-with-the-world Methos, and Paula Stiles's haunted, mentally imbalanced one – although these are two diametrically opposed versions of his character.
This is actually a fairly unique situation for me in fandom – 'out-of-characterness' is usually *the* cardinal sin in fanfic for me, the one thing that completely spoils a fic for me. [In fact, out-of-characterness can spoil *canon* for me, too – see the LoM situation of the last few weeks.] And usually I have a fairly concrete idea of what is and what isn't 'in character' for a character. But somehow, with Methos, I'm rather flexible in that regard.
ETA: This really hardly even deserves the title 'draft'. It needs fleshing out, it needs structure, it needs lots of things... but I don't have the time.
ETA2: I think the point I was trying to make was that, no matter *how* we interpret him, a certain degree of 'fixing things' is always involved in developing a fannish relationship with Methos.
Gah. My brain is completely fried today. I need to think more about the parallels and differences here - because there *are* differences between the LoM and the HL situation, though I can't quite put my finger on them yet.