Girls Go Slash/Boys Go Bang
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should be accorded to different sources. Will Brooker (2002), for example, has
drawn our attention to the debates that take place within Star Wars fandom over
issues such as whether or not the original or the remastered versions of the
original Trilogy should be considered as canonical as well as the status within
the canon of a variety of spin-off media such as TV shows, novelisations, radio
adaptations or computer games. More recently, Lance Parkin (2007) has
outlined similar debates within Doctor Who fandom, highlighting, in particular,
the difficulties in articulating a central canon within a fictional universe that has
been created over several decades by dozens of different authors and producers.
Within W40K fandom, material produced by Games Workshop or one of its
subsidiaries is seen to possess canonical authority, with material sanctioned, but
not produced directly by Games Workshop seen as having significantly less, if
any, authority. At the absolute apex of canonicity, then, are the Official W40K
rulebook, the individual rulebook supplements produced for each army (or
‘Codexes’ as they are known) and any articles published within the company’s
official monthly magazine, White Dwarf. All this material is produced in-house
by staff members within its design studio. Elements of this material have
changed over time, with each subsequent revision superseding its predecessor.
Carrying slightly less canonical authority are books and other material produced
by Games Workshop’s subsidiaries, Forge World and the Black Library. The
latter, Games Workshop’s publishing division produces novels set within the
W40K universe that ‘flesh out’ the canonical material found within codexes and
the official rule book, such as the series of (currently) eight novels that narrate
the story of the great schism within the Imperium of Man 10,000 years prior to
the events of the 41st Millennia that provides one of the central leitmotifs of the
universe. As these, however, are typically written by freelance authors,
including, on occasion, fan-authors who have won competitions, rather than
being produced in-house by Games Workshop, they are often seen as possessing
less canonical authority, particularly if their content is believed to contradict
‘higher level’ source material. At the opposite end of the scale, one finds
material produced by other companies under licence from Games Workshop,
such as roleplaying games, comics and graphic novels, and computer games.
While much of the content of this material clearly stems from the ‘higher level’
material, it is typically seen as non-canonical because it is not produced by
Games Workshop itself and often contains elements that contradict this
material.4
In spite of all this material, however, the W40K universe is still
nevertheless a largely underdeveloped one, containing numerous areas that have
not been explored in any of the canonical sources. Indeed, this indeterminacy is
itself one of the W40K universe’s central tropes; that much of its history is, as
one fan-author put it, “simply unknown or forgotten or deliberately covered up”
(‘Richard’). As will be explored in the next section, W40K fanfiction authors
typically eschew elaborating on existing characters and those parts of the canon
that have been explored within official sources. Instead, they set their stories