Fanon, by definition

[amanuensis1]

Ever write a fic, and have others look at it, and discover that the fic they're reading is not the fic you thought you wrote? Yeah, I hate that. But that's what betas are for, and revisions, and at last my hd_worldcup fic is off to the mods, yaye.

I'm on Team Fanon in the Harry/Draco Worldcup tournament, and we had a discussion regarding what Fanon is--thought I'd share.

I think the beauty of "fanon" is how broad an interpretation it can be. For me, fanon can be considered anything that didn't happen and isn't likely to happen. And now that canon is closed, how wide a range that is.

Your fanwork:

-is an AU and/or departs from canon at some point (e.g., EWE)? Fanon.

-is an AR (alternate reality)? Fanon.

-is a "behind the scene" from canon, but who can say if it really happened like that? Fanon.

-contrasts something we're meant to assume about the essential nature of the characters (e.g., their sexuality)? Fanon.

-takes something canonical and weaves an explanation that debunks the plain-and-simple explanation for it (e.g., affection, death, etc.)? Fanon.

-narrates canonical events from another point of view, delving into the brain of a character whose motivations we can't truly be said to know? Fanon.

-speculates on the canon's future in a way that the original author probably did not plan for the future to go? Fanon.


Fanon is...what a fan creates.

Comments

[gmth.livejournal.com]

For me, fanon can be considered anything that didn't happen and isn't likely to happen.

Heh, by that definition, isn't all Harry/Draco fanon? What's the canon team writing about? ;-)

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

To be frank, I dunno. That's why I grabbed a team I could define! :D

[winterthunder.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid I must reject your definition because if I accept it, I've just switched teams. :D Go EWE!

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

I'm just as excited to see your team's stories! :D

[fourth_rose]

Doesn't that mean that by this definition, all fanfic is fanon? Because "anything that didn't happen" basically is everything that's not in the books, isn't it?

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

Could be! I think one could argue that "canon" means "canon-compliant," though, so, it does not contradict anything that occurs in the accepted canon. Picking up immediately after the canon closes and creating a story that could comply with the characters as we know them and as the author presented them--that I'd call more likely to fit with "canon." But see how differently the definitions can be interpreted?

[plaid-slytherin.livejournal.com]

-speculates on the canon's future in a way that the original author probably did not plan for the future to go?

Calling this fanon or AU always sort of bothered me.

I see AU as a multi-layered thing: You have you AUs that disregards part of canon more so because it "inconveniences" the story. (I.e., Snape's death, Harry's marriage). And then you have your AUs that take place in a universe where a turning-point change has taken place (ie Harry in Slytherin).

The stuff that fit in canon time/events-wise when it was written isn't really AU, IMO.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean about "this was not AU until more canon came along and made it so"--I too wonder how to classify that, I do.

[florahart]

So you're saying easterbunny!Snape is probably fanon, then?

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

There's canon and then there's fanon and there's a helluva lot of crossover between them 'cos I don't think either are well-defined for all of fandom. And then, my friend, there is CRACK. :D

[furiosity.livejournal.com]

Fanon is...what a fan creates.
So all fan works are fanon, ergo, DISBAND THE WORLDCUP TEAMS.

...or not. >.> I don't think fanon is what one fan creates. I think fanon is what a fandom creates over time.

I mean things that are not part of canon but are so popular in the fandom that they're sort of a canon of their own. Witty!Draco, for example -- pure fanon. In canon, he calls Harry "Potty" and his insults are the equivalent of "OH YEAH? WELL, YOUR MOTHER!". I mean, he is occasionally sarcastic but hardly the most shining example of sparkling wit. But there are not a lot of fics where Draco is as much of a COMPLETE LOSER as he is in canon, bless him.

[melpemone.livejournal.com]

I was commenting to say exactly this, so thanks for sparing me the effort. :)

[iibnf.livejournal.com]

What you are describing as 'what a fan creates' is fanfiction or fan art or even 'AU', not fanon - at least as I determine it. Fanon = fan canon. That is, a paradigm within fandom that's shared by lots of people, even though it's not in the original canon ('bible'). An accross the board accepted 'fact'.

Fanon is the same as canon, but as described by fans. That is a shared idea of something that is 'true' even though it's not canon.

Incorrect, but widely accepted fanon, such as Blair Sandburg the vegetarian, because it seems accurage for his character, even though he's shown eating meat.

It was widely accepted as fanon that John Sheppard's father was a military man (now Jossed) and all fans shared that idea. It had become fan canon.

Rodney McKay's parents as neglectful or unable to cope with their son as 'fanon', which may or may not be true.

It's a shared viewpoint that fans accept as a fact or a truth about a character because other writers have said it.

Oh, Snape's hair is not greasy, it's just soft. That was a popular trope that almost became fanon (until it became a joke).

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

Fanon = fan canon

Ah! I think those are what I've come to call fandom cliches, though I like the idea that there could be a term that softens the disdain of the word "cliche." And I can see how "fanon" could come to be used in that way, yeah! Because not all fandom cliches are disdainful.

[capri-chan.livejournal.com]

I pretty much call that "fandom." Though I also refer to the people who like it as "fandom."

Fanon is more like...cliches before they become cliches, if that makes sense. Or things that aren't said in canon but are pretty much accepted by the entirety of fandom.

And then you've got the "almost-but-not-quite-canon" category.

Kingdom Hearts 2 canon, for example, never quite says it, but it's pretty obvious that Axel loved Roxas. Well, as much as someone without a heart can love someone. There are people who don't even like yaoi, and they can see it.

Putting them in an actual relationship? Then you delve into fanon.

(Oddly, I've developed a dislike for this pairing in fanon, but I still like it in the game.)

There's also Crack!Fanon. The things that are not canon, are not "almost" canon, and never will be canon. And yet you see it everywhere. Veela!Draco, for instance (IT'S PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE BECAUSE HE IS MALE. WHY IS IT EVERYWHERE?!).

Actually, I have no idea what I'm talking about anymore, and I may have contradicted myself.

I don't really care at the moment, either. I went off-topic in a (now-deleted) paragraph and ended up putting myself in a bad mood.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

Oh, we must do something about that bad mood! *tickles, but is ready to stop if it is not amusing*

[glockgal.livejournal.com]

Wow, it's really neat to read people's definitions of fanon vs canon. I LIKE DISCUSSION! (although I personally have nothing pertinent to add. except perhaps ilu<3 <3 <3)

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

I LOVE THAT ICON SO IRRATIONALLY MUCH. &hearts And I'm glad I raised this discussion--I'm getting a lot of people with different ideas of what fanon is and that's so cool!

[adina-atl.livejournal.com]

Fanon to me is any fannish "fact" that has been repeated in so many stories that people believe it to be canon even if it directly contradicts canon. Someone already mentioned Blair Sandburg's vegetarianism, but there's also Daniel Jackson's pacificism/dislike of weapons. You also have fanon regarding character heights and/or ages, where the shorter/younger character becomes much shorter and younger than his partner, even if canon has only a couple of inches or years.

The important distinction between fanon and fannish cliches is that the author who writes it and often the readers who read it, believe that it's canon, and will often continue to believe it even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

(I swear, one day I'm going to write a story where the characters are exactly the same height and same build. Specifically say so. And when they take off their clothes and compare their manly equipment, it will be exactly the same in length and thickness--none of this, "While X's was longer, Y's was a bit thicker" crap. :D )

The important distinction between fanon and fannish cliches is that the author who writes it and often the readers who read it, believe that it's canon --Oh, I can see that! How that distinguishes that definition of fanon as something above and beyond fannish cliches. A greater entity, even.

[meredyth-13.livejournal.com]

It would be almost impossible to say just how excited I am by the idea of you writing H/D. I need a better vocabulary. :)

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

I LOVE H/D. I mean, I really do. It was my first exposure to slash pairings in HP, and it's the one I think has the greatest likelihood for Harry in a subtextual reading of the text. I may have significant emotional ties to Harry/Sirius and adore the filthy non-con deliciousness of Harry/Lucius above all, but I will never stop believing in Harry/Draco either.

[tbranch.livejournal.com]

C-Can we build a fandom around YOU?!

It would be awesome. There would be cake.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

I was about to say, don't be silly, I am not worthy to have a fandom built around me--and then you mentioned cake. CAKE? Where where?! :D

*hugs you*

[calanthe-fics.livejournal.com]

*laughs* Oh, yeah. A lot of my early fics were written with a certain thing in mind, but actually came out looking altogether different.

To me the concept of fanon is more about working with the cliches that have developed as a result of fans talking and writing about the books. Otherwise everything would be fanon!

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

*laughs* Oh, yeah. A lot of my early fics were written with a certain thing in mind, but actually came out looking altogether different.--Thank you for saying something about that, 'cos, MAN, that's startling to discover! :D

Yes, I see that a lot of what I call fandom cliches are what people define as fanon for themselves. And for some it's the sort of mindset that believes commonly-used elements are canon. This is a fun discussion!

[no-mad-skillz.livejournal.com]

As usual, I have nothing but irrelevancy to add: A few weeks ago my eye was caught by a picture in the WSJ of a book entitled Fanon and the line "Fanon freely blends fact and fiction" and just for a moment I thought, "Wow, someone's written a scholarly book about this"......and then I realized it was a review of this book. (http://www.amazon.com/Fanon-John-Edgar-Wideman/dp/0618942637/)

Sorry, reposted to edit half-asleep stupidity. *gets cup of coffee*

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

Okay, if I EVER hear anything about that guy in the future, I will giggle uncontrollably. There will be no helping it.

[angiepen.livejournal.com]

Huh. I'd always defined "fanon" as anything fairly commonly (relative to fandom size and compartmentalization) seen in fanfics which isn't actually canon, but is treated as such by some significant number of fan writers.

So to come up with a particularly shmoopy example from my own primary fandom [duck] a few years ago it was pretty strongly fanon that in the Viggo/Orlando end of LOTRiPS, Viggo often called Orlando "Angel" as a nickname. It was so common that when I was new to the fandom, I thought it was canon -- that he'd actually done so in some interviews or whatever. [wry smile] It was only later that I found out it was fanon, not canon, and I stopped using it in my own stories.

But that's fanon, as I've always defined it. Something that's used like canon (not 100%, but then canon isn't followed 100% either) but isn't.

Angie, pondering

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

Something that's used like canon but isn't.

Ooh, that's nicely succinct! Must remember that!

[penknife.livejournal.com]

I think of fanon as things that aren't canon, but that are nevertheless accepted by a lot of fan writers as if they were canon. This can include fannish cliches and particular interpretations of characters that become hard to challenge even if it's possible to look at their canon behavior another way. It also, I think, includes more useful fanon -- details that aren't in canon but are widely used because they make sense, or useful ways of spackling over canon plot holes. If someone comes up with a clever way of explaining how something works in canon (for instance, "why you can't just Transfigure rocks into everything you want"), that's likely to spread as fanon, even though it's not in the original source.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

You do know that now I'll be wondering why one can't Transfigure rocks into anything you want. I guess it's one of those five essential Transfiguration rules or something!

Just me

[aiji-yuywell.livejournal.com]

I think "fanon" is supposed to be more "fan canon".
Fanon examples, to me, are:
- Draco "Sex God" Malfoy.
- Harry Being a dark broody character after the war.
- Snape being attractive and mysterious under his "dark eyes" and "shiny hair".
- Marauder orgies

Stereotypical AU stuff. But that's just me.

Re: Just me

[wook77.livejournal.com]

If marauder orgies aren't canon, I don't know what I'm going to do with myself. *weeps and gnashes teeth*

They're outtakes in Prisoner of Azkaban: The Adult Version

[acromantular.livejournal.com]

Add me to the chorus of "but it's fandom canon"!

I'd have liked to see a Team Crack. Now that would have been fun.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

God, Team Crack. I swear I would have signed up for that. --Okay, maybe.

Here via Metafandom

[scarlet-pencil.livejournal.com]

Hmm... The definition of fanon that I'm used to is "something made up by fans that most fans write into their stories as as if it were canon." For example, in Yu Yu Hakusho fandom, there is a guy named Hiei. Although it was never mentioned in canon, the majority of the fandom believes that Hiei calls ice cream "sweet snow" and reference this "fact" in their fics. That is the definition I am used to. ^_^

Re: Here via Metafandom

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

I'm seeing a lot of people agree with you! Others reference fandom cliches, without saying whether everyone recognizes them as cliches.

[fly-chickadee.livejournal.com]

Before I discovered there was a term called fanon, I just called my crazy ideas "What I think should've/could've/would've happened...and this is it." I especially agree with the last point. Of course, being a children's author, she would've never had the series go in many of the directions a lot of fic writers are fond of, but if Harry Potter was erotica, we (fic writers) would be it.

Looking forward to reading your new stuff. :)

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

Yes, "the characters in Harry Potter have explicit sex" could be plenty fanon, couldn't it!

Clearly I'm from the wrong perspective entirely

[yduras.livejournal.com]

(here from metafandom)

Wow, that's not remotely how I define fanon. Maybe I'm just out of the loop. I always thought fanon was "stuff that's either not specified in the source material (or is technically contradicted by the source material), but has been adopted by enough fanfic writers that most readers would assume it came from the source material."

As a value neutral example, there's a television fandom in which I can identify which archives a writer hangs out at by what first name and/or career they assign the lead's mother. (Neither has yet been specified onscreen). It's fanon because it crosses multiple authors consistently, and a reader unfamiliar with the source material would probably think it was drawn from onscreen material.

Not wrong, just different from me (and in accord with a lot of others, I'm finding)!

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

I have seen that in HP fanfiction as well--middle names that have not been canonically assigned somehow finding their way into multiple fanfictions--first names too, yeah!

[dawn_felagund]

Hello, here from metafandom! :)

This is interesting because the definition of fanon in my fandom (Tolkien, specifically Silmarillion) is completely different. Fanon isn't so much a fan creation as it is a fan creation that has come, in the minds of some/most fans, to have the same weight as the original when creating fanworks. Fanon is often confused with canon, in fact, with people quoting "facts" that never appeared in any of the books but were invented by a fanfic author and were picked up by others until the sheer prevalence of this single, non-canonical idea was assumed to be canon by those who didn't know any better.

I also find that fanons (by this definition) enjoy a time of popularity and adoration and then, being revealed as fanons, slowly become almost reviled by fan writers and artists. For example, when I joined this fandom three years ago, I remember a favorite character of mine being almost universally written as evil and abusive, despite little evidence to suggest this in the books. Now, that idea is despised by a good proportion of Silm authors. It's like people realized that idea wasn't Tolkien's, wasn't theirs (i.e., original), and was more like a fannish lemming run and revolted. Personally, I'm glad for that. ;)

Interesting, though, the difference between definitions here, as I'd always thought our fandoms fairly similar with a lot of overlap! :)

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

So far I'm seeing several different definitions: what I've put forth, what you've put forth, and the idea of "fandom cliches" which are recognized as cliche and overwritten. It looks like there might be some overlap between that last one and your definition of fanon, as you say that the fanon conventions you describe become reviled!

[una--sola.livejournal.com]

I don't really see all fanfiction as fanon and I actually think that fanon is harder to pin down in Harry Potter, because it's such a large fandom. No matter what cliché you can think of, it's probably been done and then parodied, argued, mocked and it's likely that there are a few fics that take on the cliché seriously and deal with it well, too.

Anyway, I think of the distinction between fanfiction-fanart/fanon/canon this way:

In one of my (relatively small) fandoms a couple authors liked to write dark, abusive fic with two of the main characters. There was plenty of this fic, but only a few people writing it and even they considered it a little out of character. This is not fanon to me.

However, everyone was certain that those two characters shared a room. Many fics by many different authors included this, in passing or as a plot point. This was taken as fact, although nothing in canon pointed to it. To me, this is fanon.

Once the DVD came out with deleted scenes, we got a look at the sleeping quarters and it turns out that everyone has very small individual rooms. Obviously, this is canon.

The fact that people just kept on writing fic as if those two main characters roomed together is what truly locks that into the 'fanon' category in my mind.

Which makes me wonder ... is it fanon if fans pick up on subtle foreshadowing and accept something as canon before it's available in official canon, but is ultimately a correct interpretation?

(http://dragcave.ath.cx/viewdragon/6cW6) Please don't mind the dragon. Just looking for unique views.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

No matter what cliché you can think of, it's probably been done and then parodied, argued, mocked and it's likely that there are a few fics that take on the cliché seriously and deal with it well, too.

I'm in agreement with this! I guess now I'm curious to think how many people think fanon means, to them, that these are cliches that are recognized as cliches, versus being assumed to be canonical (or "semi-canon," if there can be such a thing.

[iamthewombat.livejournal.com]

Here from metafandom.

I usually use the word "fanon" to describe any little fact that I or anyone else makes up that isn't in canon. So I decide that character X slept with character Y when there is no idication of that in canon, that's fanon. The same if I or someone else decides that character X loves jelly beans when there's no indication of that in canon. It doesn't have to contradict canon, it just has to not be in canon.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

I think that's a new perspective on it than I've heard here, too! Thanks for bringing that!

[dreamflower]

Hmm...differences between fandoms, I suppose. In LotR, "fanon" tends to be defined as the *shared* non-canonical extrapolations: for example, most writers of pre-Quest hobbit-fic assume that before Bilbo, Frodo's guardians were Saradoc and Esmeralda Brandybuck. Now, there's nothing *explicitly* stated in canon to say this is so, but there's evidence that it *could* be so, and a great many people accept this assumption into their fic. Another idea that is "fanon" is that hobbits like to sleep all huddled up together when they are not in the Shire--an idea started by Baylor, and pretty much accepted by a lot of hobbit-writers. There's not a shred of canon to support this, yet it is so widely accepted that pretty much everyone knows what is meant by a "hobbitpile". Much of what happens in "movie-verse" is accepted as "fanon" by those who otherwise write "book-verse" (e.g. Pippin's accent or his scarf; Frodo's blue eyes; etc.)

On the other hand, an idea that only one writer uses (for example, one writer who bases much of her fic on the idea that originally Frodo and Sam's souls were meant to be Aragorn's real brothers--literally) would not be fanon, unless several other people take it up and use it. An AU that is written by only one person would not be "fanon", but if several writers *shared* that universe, then the basis for the AU would be "fanon".

Generally in LotR, describing a fic as "canon" usually means what is meant by "canon-compliant" or "canon-friendly".

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

And I see people in HP and in other fandoms who concur with your description. Though I'm seeing at least two other definitions, too, besides my generalization! This is a great discussion, thank you for contributing.