Quote:
|
But regardless of your feelings about Oedipus, (or dragons), the artistic merit of the work should stand on its own, according to Tolkien.
|
I got two problems with this: One - No fic writer I've ever seen has shown the talent of Sophocles, in other words, I've yet to see a Tolkien fic that is so well written, be it slash or no, that the sheer artistic merit of the work would justify its 'non-canonicity' (if that's a word
)
The second problem is that I really don't feel comfortable with you using Tolkien's arguments on Beowulf to defend slash fic. Tolkien was quite an intolerant man, in that he had very categorical views and he didn't mince words when it came to things he plainly disliked. I'm sure that he would have acted very differently if the subject matter of Beowulf involved slash. Dragons, now that's another matter: dragons was something he was quite fond of and could relate to.
Bottom line being: There are degrees of canonical bend, and the way I imagine Tolkien, he would have hated slash fics, be them well-written
And on top of that, there's the question of ownership. He did say validity is much less important than the quality of the work, but I doubt he would have said the same thing if someone meddled with
his characters. Mythological characters are ambiguous, symbolical and collectively defined; they are endowed with new, sometimes even conflicting atributes over the ages. But here we have a work that is the product of an intelectual mind who knew exactly where he was going with his characters and subject matter. Everything in Tolkien's world falls into place like a perfected piece of a giant puzzle. Non-canon fic is a hurricane which shatters this delicate balance simply to see where the uprooted pieces would land and what the overall effect would be. The problem is that, by uprooting these pieces, (read characters), they lose their initial meaning, therefore all their world loses meaning. So in this case, subject matter and artistic quality are interwoven and difficult to separate.