The more I make/outline fanfiction the more I’ve come to realize the importance of canon and the expectations of it from the readers.
Now it seems like a no duh that canon is important without it you don’t have your characters, setting, themes, and what abouts. But it is, it’s a bit of revelation that I may have already instinctively known but didn’t fully consciously realize.
Canon is a spectrum
Fanfiction is the act of taking established characters and making them into other characters, and the established plot into another one and (trying)making it believable.
The show or book or whatever gives us the beloved characters that we wanna play around with, we wanna see them grow outside the initial conditions the original maker has set, we want to seem them struggle, succeed, be funny, or whatever and because of that, we’ll be willing to give a pass on the writer if the character is close enough and their vibe is the same.
And because quality isn’t usually always available why don’t we give them a pass on this weird detail and some other spots and give them a pass? And then give a little more and a little more. Until you don’t even have the original characters, just an interpretation on the fandom interpretation of that character. It’s how shy characters become beyond socially useless and embarassing, it’s how reserve characters become barely talking characters. The best advice I got was someone telling me to review the source before writing another fanfic because it’s so easy to forget the original or get the wrong idea from fandoms (did you know Naomasa isn’t even fully confirmed to have a lie detector quirk? I didn’t until I looked it up.)
Now I’m not saying that’s bad actually, I’ve read my fair share of fanfics that are actually just completely different characters from the source and had a great time. It’s just that when you’re thinking about writing or reading a fanfic you have to signpost the canoniticy (? I dunno what to call it lol) of the story so that readers don’t come in expecting the source characters when it’s your interpretation of the fandom’s one.
I don’t go in expecting a story that has tags like, “trans x characters” to be a story that will be very worried about accurately capturing the source characters. And I don’t go in expecting a story that seems like it’s an exploration of the source characters in a scenario to be the fandom’s interpretation of those characters.
This has been running around in my head as I’ve been outlining an series finale Azula time travel healing story, I’ve been playing with the skeleton trying to get the starting as close to that Azula and then trying to get to the Azula I want to have at the end of the story. It’s been challenging (also fun) as I’ve realize some of what I want is literally not things that would ever change in the original Azula no matter what. It’s just too drastic of changes. I’ve settled on the confident Azula from earlier but kinder (to friends), wiser, some I have no enemies but I’ll put you into the ground type beat.
But yeah, I just wanted to talk about what’s been going on in my head and this place seemed like the place to talk about. If you read all this, you’re a trooper. And if you have any thoughts or stuff comment, this is just something I typed in like an hour and if you have something I didn’t think about I love to hear it. Certainty is the death of improvement.
I’ve written two drastically different replies to this and neither of them really addressed what you’re talking about. I think about the only thing you can do is keep in mind that fanfiction is all practice. The rules are all out the door (except basic grammar, hopefully) and you’re pretty much at the mercy of the writers as they inflict their vision on their universe of choice. Add to that fact the idea that people can drift away from canon so lightly they might not even realise and it turns into even more of a Wild West landscape.
It sounds like you’re taking a pretty measured approach to your own writing though. Do you rewatch the source material much?
When I first started this fanfic, I rewatched the whole series because it had been a while since I’ve seen the show. But after that and I’m sure I got the general idea of everything, I sort of just start planning and only really rewatch the very important parts in my story. I feel that rewatching parts is a commitment that’s not fully necessary because it’s like the difference of a 90% and a 93%, like they’re both still passing but I find in writing that taking the more tedious/harder road is worth it (usually)
I do agree with it all being practice and up to interpretations, it’s infact one of the pro’s of it. There’s interpretation of characters that I wouldn’t have ever thought of but that make sense (there’s a fic where it takes Azula being a good liar to mean she doesn’t have anything really important to lie about and when she does, she’s bad at it.) and there’s fun stories with parts of their canon personalities but not all of it (idk if I explained it that well). It’s an aspect of fanfic that I haven’t thought about but it’s cool now that I fully have.