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

[sg-fignewton.livejournal.com]

Welcome to the party! Glad you could join us. :)

Maybe it's simply hard for some people to understand that someone can be a coffee addict and not a coffee snob? Or maybe we want our heroes to have refined tastes?

I don't follow SGA, but since you're a Rodney fan, you might enjoy this:

The real reason Rodney got sent to Russia after 48 Hours

[with-apostrophe.livejournal.com]

Oh that's a great cartoon!

I'm considering (although I'm far from doig anything about it right now) doing a similar thing with SGA - specifically with John and Rodney. I was wondering if you'd mind me using your format, and even your fanon divisions, as they seem to be scarily similar across the two shows, even if at times they come from opposite directions (eg - Rodney is sometimes characterised in fanfic as 'a soldier' and NOT as someone who is useless with weapons, despite the examples of him being pathetic with firearms).

[sg-fignewton.livejournal.com]

I love littlekru's stuff. Check out the rest of it!

I don't pretend to have any claim on the concept of canon vs. fanon, and I'm sure I'm not the first one to use such a format! I don't follow SGA and so I wouldn't be able to enjoy your John and Rodney versions, but go right ahead and do whatever you'd like. Everyone loves meta. :)