As you might imagine, my inboxes have been flooded over the last few days. My fic represents, for a lot of people, either their start in Avengers fandom, or the safe place they retreat to when the angst and infighting and shipwars got too intense. Which I get, and I appreciate, and I’m so glad if my old fics can give people a little happiness, even after all this time.
But there’s a thread I keep picking up in comments, that kind of worries me.
That things that happened in the MCU have taken the fandom away from them. That the way things happened in Endgame have left people distraught, or angry, or just grieving. And a lot of people have worried that they’ve ‘lost’ these characters.
I say this as a fandom old. I say this as someone who reads comics. Who came from the Trek fandom. Who’s lived through bad movie adaptations and subpar ghostwriters and writing staff changes that have destroyed tv shows before they had a chance to really fly.
Don’t let canon take anything away from you.
You can be disappointed in a thing. You can have your heart broken by a writer. You can hope against hope that something that means the world to you will be ‘true,’ but don’t let a corporation take your heroes away from you.
Every one of us has to pick and choose what we keep and what we leave behind. But every single version of Captain America has been fanfiction since Jack Kirby and Joe Simon put their pens down. He’s owned by a corporation, and they can decide what’s on screen, who gets paid to write him, who gets the big platform. They get to decide canon.
But canon is meaningless.
Canon is a way to win an argument in a bar or in a schoolyard. It’s knowing publication dates and issue numbers and who wrote what arc and when the reboots happened. It exists.
But when I think of Hawkeye, canon is only part of the picture. I do think of Matt Fraction’s run on the comics. I do think of those early years, sneaking my brother’s issues of West Coast Avengers. I think of the weird, wild, off beat run of Secret Avengers. But I also think of @dr-kara’s art of him. I think of fanfic long since deleted, that introduced me to the fandom tropes of Clint living in the vents. I think of the Tumblr posts, diving deep into the psychology of trauma, into his place as the most human and the most pointless of the original six, into a thousand stupid memes. Caw-caw, motherfucker. I think of the comments I got, telling me he was OOC. I think of the Hawkeye cosplayers I’ve met, including the one guy who was in full gear at Star Wars Celebration in Florida. I asked him why, and he shrugged and said, ‘Clint would’ve.’ I agree with him.
I think of the first time a friend put a bow in my hands, and showed me how to shoot, wobbly and uneven, at a straw target all the way across the yard.
I think of the bruises that dotted my arms afterwards.
So canon can add new things. Take bits away. Make me think. Make me hurt.
But nothing canon does will ever cause him to be different, not on any fundamental level. Clint Barton started forming in my head when I was eight years old. He belongs to Marvel, but the version I carry with me has a lot more sources than that.
Guys, this is a long way of saying: find your own version of the character. Find what you need in a fandom. And think of canon like that one fic that has a million kudos on AO3 and you just. Don’t. Know. Why. That one fic, that everyone talks about, that you just can’t stand.
If canon doesn’t work for you, then discard it. And move on.
But don’t let a corporation take a character you love away from you.
Don’t ever let that happen.
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