30 Days Meme day 13

Time to start getting back to this...

Day 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?

I prefer canon. When I wrote Xena fanfic I used to incorporate a bit of fanon sometimes, but a lot of times it would end up being contradicted, and once it was I would inevitably go with the canon. One of the main ones I remember was where Joxer was born, and since it hadn't been stated, it became fanon that he came from a particular place - Corinth, I think it was? Then the series actually gave a place, in season five, and people were perplexed. "WAIT Athens? I thought he was from Corinth!" That irritated me since it was pure fanon that had spread. It's silly to get annoyed by this simple mistake, but I was anyway. ^^;

I don't get annoyed by fanon as much anymore but I do get annoyed when people believe that it's canon, and correct me for it. Like someone who told me that it was canon that Quackerjack's real name was "Jack Quackers" or something like that. No, in canon, he does not HAVE a real name. You can't control what fanon people believe comes from the show, though - they're like memes, they just spread and no one knows where they came from - so I just have to shrug it off. (I hate being corrected wrongly though, lol.)

Uhhh, this kind of doesn't really answer the question, does it... it's more of a ramble... Okay, back to the real question.

Do I prefer fanon or canon? I prefer canon. In fact, with the fics I write now, I stick to canon as close as I possibly can; if there aren't details given sometimes I'll make some up but more often I won't directly address it. Like, I don't believe DW has any siblings and I don't think his parents are around, but I don't necessarily think they're dead either. I'm never going to state one way or the other in my fics. On the other hand, I think it's fanon that Launchpad has a good relationship with his sister Loopy; in DuckTales they barely interacted. But I WANT them to be close so I came up with an explanation that they rarely see each other but they write letters *constantly*. So I'm not a nazi about it canon-only. ;)

As to whether writing fanfic for a series has changed how I see the source material? Not... really... I mean, usually I only write fic for a series if I've already examined it heavily, which is something I do with series that I like. I like to go into things knowing what I'm trying to examine. I have had opinions of the source material change but I think that has more to do with my aging and viewing it differently than with it being a result of writing for it. I honestly don't think writing for a series, and whether I use fanon or canon, has ever changed my opinion on the series.