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.

[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]

*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?"

[cranberryink.livejournal.com]

What she said. :)

[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.

[musesfool.livejournal.com]

how do you know if something is the author being fanonical, or if it is their own extrapolation or creation?

Generally, I think you can tell by the rest of the story - some things just seem to make sense and it can be presumed that reasonable people with similiar views will achieve similar conclusions.

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?

No, not if you can support the thing from the text itself, without pointing to other people's stories and going, "She used it, and she used it, and she used it so it must be so!"

I think certain things get really irritating through repetition, but mostly because they *don't* have textual support - Hermione being called 'Mione, Remus having superspecial werewolf senses or healing abilities.

Otoh, the whole idea of Rogue being able to have sex via condoms and crotchless tights - why not use that? It has no real textual support, but if you're writing porn and your pairing can't touch, you need to come up with something, and why reinvent the wheel?

I think it's not wrong to be cranky with newbies as you are now a BOFQ, but they probably don't mean it quite the way it sounds. You were a snarky newbie once, too. *G*

[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*

Here via friendsfriends

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

That question is how I would use it, as in "Is this explicitly stated in canon or is it just a common fannish assumption?" And I think it's a good question. Once you know whether it's canon or fanon, you can decide whether to use it yourself, or go a different way.

I've been writing a Star Wars fic lately, and I was doing research trying to figure out if the word creche, which is incredibly common in TPM fic as the place where the ickle baby Jedi are raised, is a canon term (even if only canon in EU, cause I'm 99.9% certain it's never used in the films) or if it's entirely a fannish construct. If the latter, then I'd say it's fanon, because I've seen it in tons and tons of fics, to the point where, as one who doesn't read the EU books, I'm not sure if it's canon or not.

I think the point is that you should know yourself whether it's canon or not, and the inclusion of a fanon fact should be your decision, not just because you've seen everyone else use it and automatically assumed it was canon.

[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.

[speshope.livejournal.com]

RayK being a smoker! RayK being a smoker! *points at lalejandra* I was surprised that he never smoked on the show because it's something that happened in fics all the time!

Re: Here via friendsfriends

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah, I agree that one should know what is and what isn't canon and be aware of that as you write -- but the point I'm really thinking more of with this poll is with the stuff that isn't specifically canonical. The community decides some things are fanon, it seems, and some things aren't, and they get critical about certain things, and it's complicated, especially when people are using the term even slightly differently.

[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.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Well, if it's not specifically canonical, but occurs often in fanfic, then it's fanon. I've always thought that's the definition of it. It's not a value judgement; it's just stating a fact. So asking "Were Ray and Stella really married so young, or is that just fanon?" doesn't seem to me to be judgemental, but rather simply trying to get the facts straight.

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

Well, that's what I'm asking, in this poll -- the definition, and therefore the connotations, negative, neutral or positive, don't seem to be completely fixed; people are using the word differently.

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

What, you mean fans? Get worked up? About--stuff??

Say it isn't so!!!!

[china_shop]

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

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

i.e., Ray K as a smoker is fanon; Fraser as a crying little bitch is--canon, obviously. I was so sure you were going to say that, I had to read this twice. *G*

[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]

Ces, you may want to sit down for this -- I mean, I don't want to shock you or anything, but fans? Get kind of wacky.

[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.

[timian.livejournal.com]

True. I suppose for my idea of the definition of fanon to work, one would really need an additional handy term to refer to believable outgrowth from canon, because it seems that right now, fanon is generally stretched to cover both.

[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.