fanon questions

[schmerica]

[Poll #539629]

I tend to understand the term "fanon" mostly under the first definition, there; it's when I read people using it in the second usage that it becomes confusing for me. I suppose it's because I see fanfiction as basically us all doing our best to extrapolate new stories from the canon text we're given. Some extrapolations made be used by more than one person because someone is lazy, but some are because they make sense with the facts we have.

For example -- hmmm. Using the second definition, you could consider "Ray and Stella married when they were very young" as fanon. We know how old Ray and Stella were when they met, and when the bank robbery happened, but canon gives us almost nothing about their actual marriage. Maybe they dated for twenty years; maybe Stella didn't really warm up to him for a long while. At the same time, them marrying young makes as much sense as anything else, and of course, it makes more in certain stories.

Maybe the difference in usage, to me, is that I assume fanon has a negative connotation -- you are putting something in your story that is actively wrong. And when other people use it, they seem to only be referring to the fact that it is extrapolation, and not a straight fact from the source text.

Comments

[musesfool.livejournal.com]

I think it's a combination of one and two - as you say, things that do not appear in canon but are reasonably extrapolated and then promulgated throughout a fandom until there becomes confusion as to whether these things are in fact in the text. I think some things are reasonable and useful and okay, but for the most part, yes, fanon is lazy, because it's relying on someone else's interpretation of the text rather than the text itself to write your story.

Fanon isn't necessarily actively wrong, though it can be; it's just fannish spec that has become accepted and used widely though it's not actually in the source.

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

*nod* Which I agree with you, for the most part, but -- how do you know if something is the author being fanonical, or if it is their own extrapolation or creation? Is the fact that something is popular enough of a reason that it should be rejected, even if you do think it is the most reasonable way of interpreting the text? And it is wrong for me to be so cranky as questions from newbies like "Were Ray and Stella really married so young, or is that just fanon?"

[speshope.livejournal.com]

I see fanon mostly under the first definition but I think fanon is especially things that you can barely seperate from canon because it's in so many fics that you're not sure if it's something from the show or not. Something that a person who didn't know canon would *assume* was canon because it's so pervasive.

I can't, for the life of me, think of a specific example though. And I can't seem to express myself in a way that differentiates my definition of canon from the first one there, but. There's this slight little difference. Not really a difference. Just an extra detail and--- stopping with the rambling now.

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

*giggles* No, I understand, I think. And it is hard! The examples slip away as soon as you try to think of them!

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

I like fanon; fanon is like a cliche--it's used a lot because it was a really amazing idea once, and it got repeated. So to me, the key quality of fanon is that it gets picked up and used and reused: something that appears in a single story isn't fanon, it's invention, whether good or clever. Fanon must get taken up by multiple people because it makes sense: Ray and Stella married young, Blair Sandburg is a Guide, etc.

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

See, I think what you're saying makes complete sense -- I have trouble separating "fanon" from the really negative connotation that comes with the term in most discussions, though.

[lalejandra.livejournal.com]

I want to say something really smart and participate in this discussion in a clever way, but I can't because my brain is off. I tend to think of fanon as anything extrapolated from canon, not things made up whole-cloth about characters. i.e., Ray K as a smoker is fanon; Fraser as a crying little bitch is bad characterization and kind of stupid and boring.

Maybe I'd think of Fraser as a crying little bitch if that hit one of my kinks, though; I dunno. Who knows?

I think plenty of people use fanon to mean anything about characters that is never in canon ever, but I don't know if I do that, even though I ticked that little box! I mean... um. I don't know, please love me anyway!

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

*loves you on demand*

[http://users.livejournal.com/_swallow/]

I think of it as a thing that manifests on different levels-- maybe this is because of my exposure to HP, where "fanon" automatically recalls a slick, sardonic Draco in black leather pants-- there's I-can't-believe-it's-not-canon, where you really can't remember whether it's canon or not because every single characterization in every single fic takes it as an assumption (like Stella and RayK's early marriage), and there's tastes-like-canon fanon, where it's plausible but not necessarily supported, and some people scorn it for that reason and some people don't, like RayK's smoking, and there's everybody-knows-this-is-not-canon-but-a-lot-of-us-eat-it-anyway-because-we-like-it-so-much, like, um, I can't really think of a Clubbing!Draco equivalent for dS. Badfic's self-deprecating RayK, maybe.

Anyway, they're all ancillary-to-canon ideas that meme amongst ficwriters with some degree of representation large enough that everybody recognizes them as shared ideas rather than one person's lone idea.

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

Oh, neat -- I really like your categorization levels here; that's really interesting.

[china_shop]

I vote for fanon as "non-canonical fandom cliche". :)

[shayheyred.livejournal.com]

That resonates with me clear as a bell.

[timian.livejournal.com]

I tend to think of fanon and logical extrapolation as two different things. Done well, of course, nearly anything can work in a given story, but the hurdle of "done well" is one many, many authors don't successfully scale.

I saw above that Ces mentioned Blair as a Guide, and while that's certainly not canon, it has its roots in canon events, so I consider it a reasonable outgrowth from text. However, it's in the qualities that one ascribes to a Guide where fanon steps in. In her "Nature Series" Ces gave Blair the ability to push things - people, fire, bullets - and while that could reek of fanon invention, the fact that Ces grew his abilities from Blair's canon pushy nature allowed some pretty wild stuff to remain thematically sound.

But Blair as a non-violent, vegetarian, cry-baby pyromaniac? Is most definitely fanon, as such characterization blatantly opposes canon, and belongs to the author¹ alone. Which isn't to say a good writer couldn't make it work, but it's rare.

I think hardly anyone else things of fanon in these terms though, obviously.


_{¹ Well, authors, actually. Unfortunately.}

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

*nod* I don't think it's necessarily that hardly anybody thinks of it this way -- I think maybe your definition is on one extreme edge of the scale of definitions, and something like this comment (http://www.livejournal.com/users/pearl_o/568877.html?replyto=4425773) from earlier in the comment is way on the other end of the scale. Which is what makes it so confusing, of course.

[kindkit.livejournal.com]

Fanon, to my mind, is something that goes a bit beyond extrapolation. Ray and Stella marrying young seems like reasonable extrapolation to me--given what we know about them, it's easy to picture them marrying at eighteen or nineteen and beginning to grow apart while Ray becomes a cop and Stella stays in college. It has explanatory value, and therefore it doesn't strike me as "fanon" in the bad sense.

True fanon, in my view, loses that reasonableness and that explanatory power. Fanon is the detail that becomes a cliche, a shortcut that actually prevents full exploration of the characters.

For instance, the Ray-dyes-his-hair thing. I've seen stories (probably the stories that took up the idea early on) where it's a telling detail that's used as one way of getting into what's different about Ray, what makes him more than just another tough guy. But most of the time, it just seems randomly dropped into fic regardless of whether it makes sense with the rest of the author's Ray characterization.

So . . . part of the difference, for me, is the relationship to canon. There are canon reasons for thinking Ray and Stella may have married early. There's no canon reason to think that Ray dyes his hair. (Maybe CKR dyed his hair to play Ray, but that's something else entirely.)

And the other part of the difference is how fanon is used. A fic has to convince me that Ray would dye his hair, but often that's exactly what doesn't happen. The "fanon" detail is treated as self-explanatory.

Also, I think fanon has a tendency to spread and expand. Ray dyeing his hair becomes Ray wearing eyeliner becomes girly!glittery!Ray, and canon characterization be damned. Whereas Ray and Stella's early marriage, noncanonical though it is, doesn't seem to have led to this sort of fanonical malignancy.

Okay, that was rambling. Sorry. Fanon's an Issue for me.

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

*nodding* I see exactly where you're coming from, yeah. It does sort of make it a muddy line, of course -- one person's extrapolation is another person's fanon, and then we just get into the same issues that come with any discusson of subjective and objective quality.

[destina.livejournal.com]

This is tricky for me, because some people take things like deleted scenes, offhand comments by producers, and the writers' stated intentions in DVD commentary (which may or may not have actually made it onto the screen when the *actors* had hold of it) as canon, and I don't. What tends to happen is that those things become incorporated into fan fiction and at that point, I do think they are fanon; they are fan-created extrapolations, and they aren't the visual or book canon. But they aren't fanon at the point where the cues were dropped outside of the original source, so... that's why I tend to think most fanon is created via fan fiction.

Sometimes fanon is stuff that gets taken as true because folks find it in fan fiction before *seeing* the source. And that's even worse. *g*

Logical interpretations of canon that isn't in the show isn't really fanon, to me. It's speculation. The other element that makes fanon is the widespread belief by many, many fans that such things are true, or the widespread use of these little bits of non-canon in character arguments/stories/etc.

[brooklinegirl.livejournal.com]

There's also the pesky detail of what the actors do reflecting on the characters: RayK has a lot of the mannerisms of a smoker, because Callum is a smoker. RayK dyes his hair because, hi, his hair changes shades of blond throughout the series, as Callum, apparently, often becomes bored. So it's easy to extrapolate from that, and while it's not STATED on the show, it is VISIBLY THERE on the show.

I think this, from speshope, above:

fanon is especially things that you can barely seperate from canon because it's in so many fics that you're not sure if it's something from the show or not.

is generally the way I define fanon. So that question from the newbie, in my mind, meant, "is it ever explicitly stated on the show that RayK and Stella got married when they were 18 years old?"

[the-star-fish.livejournal.com]

What BLG said. Yup.

::has no brain::

[nullabona.livejournal.com]

Fanon for me is anything that could reasonably be interpreted as derivative from canon, but it is widely understood that the thing may or may not be from canon text. An important attribute is that even when the thing in question has been clarified or “jossed”, fanon references in fanfic persist. Example: Lex Luthor and Club Zero(or Club Zero-styled Metropolis clubs) references from Smallville. Before the episode “Zero” aired Club Zero was infamous in fanon as a S&M/leather/crack whore/hustler bar that Lex tricked and OD’ed in as a teenager. When “Zero” aired, not so much! Yet, the fanon persisted!

[spainja.livejournal.com]

When I entered dS fandom, I did so through the fanfic. I read most of what was available at the time without seeing the source material. So figuring out what was canon and what was not was like a game. My general rule of thumb was that if a fact of idea was used in multiple stories by multiple authors, it was canon. There were instances where this plan broke down, though.

For example, I read more than one story where Ray's turtle was named Curtis. "Cool," I said. "On the show, the turtle's name is Curtis." Until I read anoother story where his name was Speedy. And then Ringo. And then I was a little confused.

So, my definition of fanon is: A concept or idea that is used by multiple authors, but is not stated in canon. And as people above said, there are different levels of fanon. There's the fanon that is an easy extrapolation from canon evidence (such as Ray and Stella's early marriage or Ray's love of dancing), and then there's fanon that goes against canon characterization (femmy glittery Ray).

Due South has a lot of fanon ideas:

-Ray K and Stella married young

-Vecchio doctoring the Victoria file

-Ray K's smoking

-Ray K calling Fraser "Ben"

-Fraser's sexual history with Mark/Eric/Innusiq

-Fraser's lack of sexual history

-Vecchio and Kowalski hating each other

-Vecchio as a homophobe/asshole/dirty cop

and, my personal favorite, which I'm shocked hasn't been mentioned:

-Benton Fraser's uncircumisized cock (Now, granted, I have not yet seen season 4, and I suppose there's a possibility that Fraser's foreskin plays a pivotal role in solving one of the cases. Somehow, though, I doubt it.)

...and so on. I'm sure there's more.

I think the reason people want to know what's fanon and what's canon is so they know what rules to follow. Fanfic writers are bound by canon, but not by fanon. If you want to write a story where Ray and Stella get married after she graduates law school, there's no reason you can't. If you want to write a story where Ray is valedictorian of their high school, unless it's an AU, you're going to have problems.

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

-Fraser's sexual history with Mark/Eric/Innusiq

-Fraser's lack of sexual history

See, this is interesting, because -- okay, Fraser's sexual history is something that is of central interest in a lot, if not most fanfiction, and really really isn't on the show. So it's never going to be canon, there, and there are really a limited number of ways you can go as an author, aren't there? Those two things are pretty much opposites, and both are somewhat reasonable given what we have to go on -- if they're both fanon, my mind immediately goes to tryign to think of something other that won't be labeled so, even if it doesn't make sense, just for the fact of being original.

-Vecchio and Kowalski hating each other

-Vecchio as a homophobe/asshole/dirty cop

Um, those may be fanon to some degree, but I would say those are both supported to some extant by the canon. I mean, I don't think Vecchio and Kowalski want to kill each other or anything, but a lot of tension in CotW comes from their personalities clashing (along with the jealousy that RayK, especially, feels and takes out as aggression).

And I love Vecchio -- seriously, I adore him -- but the dirty cop thing is something that is brought up on the show. The missing heroin in Eclipse, tangentially, and then especially in Dead Man Running -- beating up suspects, almost lost his badge, suspected of murder.

I don't think Vecchio is necessarily a homophobe, so I can see how that might be fanon. BUt wouldn't Vecchio not reacting by freaked-out homophobia be equally fanonical? I mean, I've seen that in plenty of stories, too.

[brooklinegirl.livejournal.com]

Benton Fraser's uncircumisized cock (Now, granted, I have not yet seen season 4, and I suppose there's a possibility that Fraser's foreskin plays a pivotal role in solving one of the cases. Somehow, though, I doubt it.)

well, he WAS born in a barn. Canonically. I'd say the odds are with the lack of circumcision.

[spainja.livejournal.com]

Well, sure. I agree completely. But since it's not explicit in canon, foreskin=fanon. It's an example of the logical extrapolation type of fanon. Actually, this is an idea that's so well entrenched in dS fanon, that it would be weird to read a story where he is circumsized.

Huh. I wonder who originally came up with that idea? I mean, I wonder who first put the idea to paper and caused the fandom to go, "of course! That makes perfect sense!"...which is probably how 99% of fanon gets started.

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

I chose the first, since it’s the closer of the two, but what I really mean by fanon is "things that are not in canon, but which one fan comes up with (usually in fanfic) and then is taken up by many others as if it were canon."

It's not so much that they believe it is canon -- though some do -- as that they believe it should be or might as well be. And it's not so much what each individual fan believes, as it is what has surpassed the fans who originally extrapolated it from canon and taken on a life of its own.

I do think fanon often has a negative connotation, but I don't think it's because it's actively wrong -- explicitly contradicted by canon -- so much as because it's one of many ways to go from canon but it has become the only way some people will accept. (And because it often feels unneccessary or off in tone.)

In the Buffyverse, which is my fandom, the classic example of fanon is the term "childe" for a vampire to refer to the vamps he or she sired. This term does not appear anywhere in all seven seasons of Buffy or five of Angel. It's not actively contradicted by canon -- it is theoretically possible that the vamps have a word they just never used on screen -- but it seems unlikely given that the situation comes up a lot without them using it.

[holyschist.livejournal.com]

I do think fanon often has a negative connotation, but I don't think it's because it's actively wrong -- explicitly contradicted by canon -- so much as because it's one of many ways to go from canon but it has become the only way some people will accept.

Yes! A neutral (or nifty the first three times) piece of fanon gets boring and stifling to creativity when EVERYONE does it.

sneaking in late to say

[gloss]

dS fandom is beautiful. Like, these are the kinds of things - distinctions and definitions and examples - that could get a BtVS or HP fan roasted alive and left for dead on the north tip of Ellesmere Island.

*takes a moment*
*savors*

Extrapolation is lovely and as you say above, there's only a certain number of extrapolative vectors, sometimes. I don't think Ray and Stella's early marriage is fanon, nor is Fraser's foreskin. Those are logical developments. Fanon gets into the realm of shadow canon, and often replaces the source (Xander hates vampires but fanon!Xander just wants Spike to claim him and love him forever and ever...)

[penknife.livejournal.com]

I don't think fanon is necessarily wrong; to me it's anything that doesn't appear in canon but does in a lot of fan stories. And I think there are two types of fanon, fanon that's a reasonable extrapolation from canon and fanon that someone wrote once and everyone else thought was cool.

Fanon type A makes sense based on canon, but can limit creativity if everyone assumes that of course X is true and stops thinking about alternatives. Fanon type B often doesn't make as much sense, because although the original author did the work to support X, later authors just assume it's true despite the fact that there's little support for it in canon.

Of course, then the big question is what is a reasonable extrapolation from canon, about which people's mileage varies.

[the_rck]

Canon and fanon can be fairly slippery in some fandoms, too. daegaer mentioned Weiss Kreuz earlier-- That's a very complicated fandom because there are several mutually contradictory pieces of canon, not all of which are available in English (and some of which make no dramatic sense at all). It can be hard for a fan to tell what's fanon, something that a fan made up that became popular, and what's something from an untranslated or hard to find drama CD/radio play, from one of the manga series or from the official art book (which has character profiles) and so canonical.

This has resulted in my being more troubled by fans savaging each other over questions of canon/fanon. I don't really care if what I'm reading is canon, fanon or something ludicrously incompatible with either that the fic writer made up. As long as it fits the story and the story's fun to read, I'm happy. (I reserve the right to mock stupid ideas, characterization, etc., even when they are canonical.)

[http://users.livejournal.com/_inbetween_/]

Things that do not appear in canon, but are taken as canonical by A MAJORITY OF fans AND appears in fanfiction but does not appear in canon.

[holyschist.livejournal.com]

I'm using mostly Good Omens examples, as it's the fandom in which I encountered the most persistent, widespread, and often annoying fanon. Please bear with me.

Fanon to me is anything that becomes really, really common in fandom which has either no basis (e.g. Aziraphale has blue eyes and blond hair) or only very vague basis in canon (e.g. Aziraphale is pudgy).

Sometimes fanon is actively wrong (e.g. Aziraphale is weepy, weak-willed, and unable to stand up to Crowley).

Sometimes it's only very unlikely (e.g. Aziraphale is a gorgeous bishounen).

Most of the time it's neutral wrt to canon (e.g. wings are an erogenous zone for angels/demons).

I use the term deuterocanonical for things that are optionally canon (e.g. the original Star Wars trilogy is canon. The comic books and spinoff novels are deuterocanonical -- more credibility than fanon, but if an author wants to ignore them, I don't view that as violating canon). I think I've only met one other personal who uses this term, though.

[holyschist.livejournal.com]

Short version: common fandom cliche that is either based on extrapolation or nothing at all

And then you get situations like the Tamora Pierce slash fandom, which pretty much accepted that Raoul is Gay, and then she went and married him off to Buri (also pretty widely accepted as Gayer Than A Treeful of Parakeets) in a recent book. Originally reasonable extrapolation, it then became Just Plain Wrong, sparking denial amongst the slashers (myself included). This is always the problem with extrapolation, of course.

(But are sexual orientations -- viewed as fair game to play with by slashers -- part of fanon or not? Hmmm.)

here via metafandom

[nerdcakes.livejournal.com]

For me, fanon tends to mean something used so often in fic that it's almost canon. I mostly use it in terms of pairings. Like, in a lot of my fandoms I don't tend to support the main OTP but there are somany people who do, I tend to think of fic with my pairing in terms of how it'd fit in with the fanon OTP.

Okay, it's late, this isn't really making sense.I'll try an example. Star Trek. Kirk/Spock is, like, the mother of all slashpairings, right? My taste in Trek is for Spock/McCoy,but K/S is so embedded in the fandom's - hell, in Fandom itself's- subconscious that I tend to think, 'okay, I want Spock to have sex with McCoy. How am I supposed to get past the fact that Spock has been having sex with Kirk since the '70s?' I mean, obviously I don't see this as the only way to write a pairing, but I will often be fitting my pairing in around the fanon OTP as well as any canon obstacles, y'know? AmI makign sense?As I say, it's very late.

Re: here via metafandom

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I find myself doing this, but only if the fanonical slash pairing has a subtext embedded within canon. For example, in Buffy, Spike/Angel and Giles/Ethan have pasts with each other (in fact the former pairing is canon, but bairly) and a very real subtext. So I write around it. On the other hand, Spike/Xander is a popular OTP, and I see no basis in canon for that (but YMMV). So I ignore it completely.

[executrix.livejournal.com]

Here via metafandom.

Another area for fanon is something that must have occurred--i.e., a human being must have had parents of some sort (although s/he might not ever have met either of them). If a character's parents aren't shown or referred to in canon, they still must have existed at some point.

The Firefly episode Out of Gas takes place in part on Simon's birthday, although the episode doesn't give the date (or for that matter which birthday it is, although by other evidence it's probably either his 26th or his 27th). I could imagine a fan consensus developing that, e.g., Simon's birthday is May 19th.

The character Wash says that the planet he comes from his so polluted that you can't see the stars (but he doesn't say which planet it is). Obviously everyone comes from *somewhere* so again I can imagine a decision that he's from Regulus-IV and his parents were factory workers. Or for that matter everyone who writes Wash backstory comes up with a different planet and a different scenario. I could understand the impulse to get together and agree on something.

Really, I think fanon has a terrible reputation because of the tendency to strive for maximum bathos. The fact that a character has reached adulthood implies that s/he was born somewhere, raised somehow, and educated in some fashion (not necessarily academically) but not necessarily that s/he witnessed his/her parents being murdered by Cossacks, that s/he was frequently sexually abused by trusted persons, or that s/he interspersed selling matches barefoot in the snow with being a sex slave on a particularly unattractive planet.

[wemblee.livejournal.com]

*whimper* You mean my retelling of the The Little Matchgirl Sex Slave Match-Whore starring Simon Tam isn't canon? There were going to be Cossacks Reavers!

(Which is a long way of saying: "Word.")

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

*waves*

Here via metafandom.

When I use the term fanon I either use it to mean the first option (Things that do not appear in canon, but are taken as canonical by fans) or things that recur so often in fanfiction that they become, not exactly canon, but a kind of cliche for that pairing. For example, in BtVS/Ats fandom, I consider Spike "claiming" Xander as fanon. I wouldn't consider that a behind-the-scenes bit of canon, but rather an incident that occurs often enough in Spander fanfic to resonate/seem plausible to many readers.

[minisinoo.livejournal.com]

As a couple of folks have said, I think fanon is an element that slips into fanfiction and becomes common, but which isn't part of the canon. It may be recognized as fanon or not, depending on familiarity and involvement. I don't see it necessarily as negative. Fanon cliches may be negative, but some fanon can make a lot of sense, but it doesn't change the fact that it's not part of canon.

I tend to see fanon as coming in two basic varieties. The first is a "logical" deduction which may appear spontaneously in several stories, or which may first appear in a popular story, but is quickly taken up by others. Soon, it becomes almost 'canon' in the fic, and I think that would fall under your first definition, though the degree to which it's recognized as fanon not canon can vary (obviously).

The second type is an element introduced by a well-known/loved author or which comes from a popular story, which is then taken up by others. It may be somewhat idiosyncratic, and is a bit more likely to be recognized as 'fanon' because it IS idiosyncratic. (g) (For example, by chance, I happened to introduce the fact that [in a particular subarea of X-Men fandom] Scott Summers (Cyclops) likes chocolate milk. That was even the title of a story. It got picked up and has since beome a common tidbit. Every once in a while, I get asked if that was in the comic somewhere, but it's much easier to pinpoint as fanon.)

One last thing to add that affects only some fandoms -- sometimes it can be hard for readers in one subgroup of a fandom to be sure if something is "fanon" or "imported canon." This is something that affects X-Men fandom in particular, though I'm sure it's not alone (Harry Potter may also qualify). X-Men fandom began with the comics, years before there was any movie. There's quite a LOT of backstory in the comics. When the film came out, it was hugely popular, and the fandom exploded, but many of the new-comers didn't read the comics and didn't know (and some didn't care to know) much about the comics. But there were also writers of "movieverse" X-Men fanfic who were familiar (to greater or lesser degrees) with the comics. They "imported" details, backstory, and even additional characters from the comics into movieverse fanfic. These comicverse elements aren't -- strictly speaking -- canon for the movieverse. But they're not fanon, either. And sometimes the elements can't be imported exactly. The comic can get pretty silly and convoluted. (G) In keeping with the more realistic tone of the films, comic elements may be introduced in a modified form. That's comic canon which can become "quasi-fanon" if a particular reading of an introduced character becomes popular because he/she appeared in a popular story.

I'm not sure WHAT you'd call that. (g) But I'd imagine that the same issue could appear in fandoms like Harry Potter, where there are probably some writers who have seen only the movies, not read the books. I suspect it's far less common, though, because there's a lot less "backstory" to manage -- now 6 books as opposed to almost 45 years of comic history across multiple 'books' (series), etc. In that respect, fandoms that grow out of films based on comics can have a very peculiar character that other fandoms don't have to deal with. (Although in HP, there may be some debate as to whether to follow events as they were depicted in the books, or in the films.)

(Additional thought -- this might also apply to fandoms based on movies about history, like Troy fanfic, or fanfic based on Stone's Alexander. There might be some 'head-butting' there between the "canon" of the movie versus actual history. When is it fanfic and when is it historical fiction?)

[sangerin.livejournal.com]

As with most things, I tend to think that the "definition" of fanon has a lot to do with the fandom about which one speaks. When my primary fandom was Star Trek: Voyager, I would have said "fanon" were those things that were used by one writer, and then others picked them up and used them in homage (so to speak) and then more people picked them up... like the name of Joe Carey's wife. To a large number of people, the fanon name is Anne. But not to everybody - and those of us who generally called her Anne Carey knew that. And so if someone called her Sarah Carey, it's not as though there was going to be a flame war or anything.

That's not really the general concept of fanon these days, although as I'm not involved in any fandom to the extent I was involved in Voy fandom, I can't actually think of a good example of an alternate definition. I just know that when I used the word "fanon" in the author's notes of The Returning Saga, I meant a very different thing to the way I usually see it used now.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

That's a very good example of value-neutral fanon.

here from metafandom

[pinkpolarity.livejournal.com]

Some kind of hybrid between one and two? I define fanon as anything that isn't in canon but is so oft-used, either by the fandom as a whole or by a certain writer or group of writers, that it becomes convention. Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it's horrid cliche-- it doesn't have to be a negative thing. There are also bits of fanon that become canon, for example, the whole notion of the first name of The Chevron Guy on Stargate SG-1. Fans used the same name so often (I think it was "Walter"? I don't write Tau'ri fic, so I don't really remember...) that the show eventually named the guy, and IIRC, the show used the same name. A better example, but IIRC very murky, is the whole business of Darth Maul being a Zabrak from Iridonia named Khameir Sarin. That started popping up all over Maulfic, and then the Maul Journal came out and used exactly that information. As far as I know, though, it was never stated as canon anywhere before that book came out-- I'm not sure which came first, someone in the Lucas shop having that idea, or a fan coming up with it.