Canon vs. Fanon, part 1: Daniel and Coffee

[fignewton]

I've been considering doing this for quite a while, and the hiatus in episodes seems like a decent enough time for it. So here we go: canon vs. fanon. Canon is defined as anything directly shown during Stargate: The Movie or episodes of the show; show supersedes movie when there's a contradiction. Fanon is defined as widely-accepted concepts that appear in fanfic, but do not have any real basis in canon. Most of these discussions will be Daniel-centered, but I'll touch upon other subjects on occasion.

Interpretation of a character is obviously in the eyes of the beholder. I fell in love with Daniel just by reading the transcripts at Gatenoise, sometime shortly after the eighth season finale aired. I started watching eps when I couldn't resist any longer, and then I fell in love with the rest of the team. Then I started reading fanfic, and I met lots and lots and lots of other Daniels and Sams and Jacks and Teal'cs – some easily recognizable, a few remarkably like the ones that I saw on the screen and that lived in my head, and many that I didn't know at all.

I'm not going to insist, or even suggest, that every fanfic author out there write their characters to fit my specifications (even if the thought of several thousand new gen teamy goodness stories is immensely attractive). I don't think even the Goa'uld are quite that arrogant! On the other hand, fanfic writers would be doing themselves a great service by making sure that the characters they write about are actually the characters that their readers want to read about – if nothing else, they'll have a lot more readers that way. 

There's nothing wrong with fanon, as a concept. For the most part, most common fanon assumptions about Daniel are based on canon, or extrapolated from canon, or at least don't contradict canon. Others… aren't. And if the writer airily asserts, "Well, this is an AU/my personal universe/not really important to the story, so just go with the flow, okay?" – then I will wish the writer well, and go find an author who is actually writing about the Daniel Jackson I know and love.

Some fanon amuses me; some confuses me; and some really, really gets on my nerves. I'll tackle one per post, or possibly a few related ones at once, starting with a real fan-favorite. 

Daniel and Coffee

 "Coffee" can be subdivided into two common fanon assertions:

 Daniel is addicted to coffee and Daniel is a coffee snob.

The first assertion might be exaggerated from canon, but if so, not by much. The movie shows Daniel plodding out of his office to refill his coffee cup right before the symbols-as-constellations inspiration hits; when he's about to present his findings to General West and others, he's juggling several rolled-up papers and a coffee mug, from which he takes a final gulp before casually leaving it on a ledge in the hallway. On the show, we often see Daniel with coffee mug in hand. In Season One alone, Daniel has a paper coffee cup with him during the meeting when he talks Hammond into letting him join SG-1 in CotG; drinks coffee to try and avoid sleep in The Enemy Within, and has a cup next to him while he watches Kawalsky's operation; parks a coffee cup on a coffee maker, or possibly some computer peripheral, before Jack attacks him in The Broca Divide; has a coffee cup with him when he's observing Sam and Janet experimenting on Pelops' nanocytes in Brief Candle; is drinking coffee when he meets Sam in the gateroom with the UAV, her "new toy," has another coffee when the UAV goes out of the Gate, and has a third coffee during the briefing with Hammond in Enigma (apparently Tollans make him thirsty); drinks coffee to keep awake while they're trying to find Jack and Sam in Solitudes; and has a coffee cup with him while he's observing the attempt to operate on Cassandra in Singularity (Daniel seems convinced that those ledges by the observation windows were specifically designed for coffee).

That's seven out of twenty-one episodes. Of the remainder, six are spent entirely off-world; four have little or no time on-world, mostly spent in formal briefings where coffee doesn't seem to be appropriate or available; one features the poor boy when he isn't human, so presumably can't drink coffee; and one involves Daniel spending the entire episode in a drugged pink stupor. That leaves two of twenty-one episodes – Cold Lazarus and Torment of Tantalus – when we could have reasonably expected Daniel to drink coffee and he didn't. (Besides, Katherine insisted on pouring him tea.) 

Yeah. I'd call that an addiction, or something close to it. 

As an aside, I will cheerfully confess that I skimmed bits and pieces of the entire first season to make sure I got all that right, which was not exactly a hardship. I almost forgot the whole essay thing to simply watch and enjoy. Happy sigh. Love, love, love the early seasons.

So our first bit of fanon is actually canon: Yes, Daniel Jackson really does constantly drink coffee. The common fanfic bit about Jack/Sam/Teal'c/Janet/some secret admirer bringing him coffee doesn't have any canon basis, but it's hardly an unreasonable extrapolation (although bringing Daniel food and drink is another bit of fanon I will discuss in a future post). On the other hand, there's not much canon proof for the other fanon assertion on the subject of caffeine: that Daniel is a coffee snob.

The first real canon suggestion that Daniel is picky about coffee doesn't show up until Season Nine, when Mitchell, the ultimate fanboy, interviews one of the Daniels in Ripple Effect and gives him "Sumatra Mandheling, one cream, two sugars," as his regular preference. The problem with accepting this as proof is two-fold. First, one might theorize that the writers have picked up on the "Daniel as coffee snob" thing from the fans and incorporated it, since it shows up so late in the show's history; and second, while I'm not a real coffee drinker myself, I always thought coffee snobs drank their coffee black and considered milk and sugar to be sacrilege. I also understand that flavored coffees are considered to be anathema by coffee snobs; but an Urgo-influenced Daniel is very appreciative of cinnamon, or possibly chicory, flavored coffee. If I'm wrong about either of those assumptions, please let me know.

(Daniel moodily pours a steady stream of sugar into his coffee when he's in the Waffle House at the End of the Universe in Threads, but I wouldn't use that as proof either way, as it's pretty obvious that he has no actual intention of drinking it.) 

We can add to the "not a coffee snob" side of the argument when we note that in the movie, Daniel was using water from a regular water fountain to fill his coffee pot, which means that he didn't much care if the water tasted metallic. Also, if we consider what we know about Daniel as a whole, he probably didn't have the chance to become a coffee snob until the actual Stargate years. The fellow we met in the movie, who lugs around his entire life in two battered suitcases, is hardly likely to be able to splurge on specialty coffee, is he? Nor is it likely that the coffee he drank on digs was brewed in anything other than a small metal pot, rather than a proper coffee-maker. I very much doubt he was drinking specialty coffee when he was working on his degrees, either, and for the same reasons: too expensive, and too impractical, to manage on a student's budget.

Conclusion: Daniel-the-caffeine-addict is canon, but Daniel-the-coffee-snob is fanon with little basis in canon.

ETA: put it under a cut because it's a lot longer than I realized. Sorry 'bout that.

My personal fanon opinion? Daniel loves coffee and drinks it whenever he can; he certainly enjoys specialty coffees, but he's perfectly capable of getting along with Air Force-issue sludge if that's the only thing available.

"Anyway, I'm sorry, but that just happens to be how I feel about it. What do you think?"

Comments

[maychorian.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I love it. This is exactly the sort of thing I'm always pondering in my head, but don't bother writing down, figuring it will come out in one of my fics, someday, somewhere.

Anyway, I absolutely agree. I've never seen Daniel as a coffee snob. I can definitely see him appreciating a special, well-made cup, but he needs caffeine too much to quibble. It also fits in with his overall character; Daniel is very accepting of pretty much anything that comes his way. (Oh, I have a wife? Well, okay, then.) :)

Also agree with your love of the early seasons. I adore my Daniel in any flavor, but--eee!--sparkly-eyed, long-haired, full-of-wonder Daniel! (When he isn't all but driven into the ground by his losses, of course.)

Also about AUs--the characterization is definitely more important there. I come from SW, where I read lots and lots and lots, and I was always baffled and a little ticked off by those AUs where they would plop the characters down in, say, Elizabethan England, and call them Ben and Quintus or something. Tell me again how this is Star Wars? Those people were just writing stories with those actors in their heads, is all. I'm a big fan of what-if AUs, though.

I'm very curious about what you think of the bringing-Daniel-food thing.

[sg-fignewton.livejournal.com]

It also fits in with his overall character; Daniel is very accepting of pretty much anything that comes his way. (Oh, I have a wife? Well, okay, then.) :)

This part of your post interests me, because I completely disagree with it. :)

I don't think Daniel has ever placidly accepted whatever happens to him. Discovering his marriage to Sha're and running with it took courage, especially when she offered him a graceful out of sorts. And his entire career has been based on refusing to accept what's assumed, what's out there, and what's happened. He walked away from his planet, then from his adopted homeworld, then took on a personal crusade, then a second one when that one failed, then kept going when that one failed too, and...

Er. Sorry for getting carried away there. :) But seriously, I can't see Daniel as accepting life as much as facing it head-on.

Not that the life attitude reflects on his coffee habits... ;) We both seem to be in agreement there. And yep yep yep, there is much love for sparkly-eyed Daniel. You gotta love the boy.

Will get to the bringing-Daniel-food thing eventually. And calling him "boy," for that matter. Bad FigNewton! No biscuit!

[maychorian.livejournal.com]

Okay, I should clarify about the accepting thing. I definitely think that he is a fighter, and fiercely courageous in his idealism. I mean, he contradicts EVERYONE. Everyone in his field, everyone he works with. Philsophically, he's a warrior.

I meant more along the lines of cultural differences. He's very open to other ways of thinking. I mean, like, Emancipation, which was not that great an episode, yet it was funny for Daniel trying so hard to accept this totally un-PC culture, while Sam was fighting against it with every atom in her body. And The Broca Divide, where he said they should leave the grunty cavemen alone, even though he was obviously bothered that they had captured Melosha and were apparently going to do nasty things to her. The only culture Daniel DOESN'T accept, or at least try to, is the Goa'uld, and even with them, he shows understanding and compassion for the hosts, which most people have a difficult time with.

My little "I have a wife" comment was more facetious than I meant it to be. I agree that it took a great deal of courage for him to accept Sha'uri, even before it meant never returning to Earth. He obviously loved her a great deal, right from the beginning.