fanon questions
25/7/05 21:17![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
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.
