30 days of fanfiction meme (day 13)

[petronia]

13 – Do you prefer canon or fanon when you write? Has writing fanfic for a fandom changed the way you see some or even all of the original source material?

In my earlier anime fandom days my principle was to ignore canon and write to fanon, because in many cases fanon was better developed (WK, I'm looking at you) and canon made no sense (Gundam, I'm looking at you). This turned out not to be ideal either. All my longer stuff from that era stalled out because I should have come up with my own theories and assumptions, instead of gacking unexamined ones that I couldn't work with.

I'm cautiously selective about cribbing from fanon these days, but there are still lots of cases out there where I find fanon more delightful than canon. NuTrek ficcing fandom - hey, finally I get to talk about NuTrek in this meme! - created all these clever and nuanced updates of TOS female characters, such that I've been dreading the eventual collective re-cognizance that, um, Gaila and Number One and Janice Rand are not going to be in the sequel next year, and even if they were (T'Pau?) they're unlikely to bear any resemblance to what fandom has agreed to do with them. The creative team may be more responsive to this type of concern than I'm expecting (DW was, this season), but well. I'm not even sure we got WoG that Gaila isn't dead.

I've talked about this at some earlier point, but reading fanfic is what nuances and complicates my opinions on the original source material. I sort of hold up every idea against a mirror - does this make sense to me? Does it fit with or add to my view of things? Does it make my ass look fat? Writing fanfic is about creating a coherent picture, perhaps as much a reaction to the pile of rejected ideas as accepted ones.