Fandom and Cannon. When one replaces the other.

[deathgeonous]

You know, I got to thinking about this a few days ago, but it hit me real hard now. When a type of ficional creation has had enough time passed and enough people writing on it, it seems to aquire it's own brand of fandom, one that can be at times more accepted to use then cannon.
Let me give you some obvios, yet popular exampails of fandom. in Ah, My Goddess, Mara being Urd's half sister by way of Hild. In Sailor Moon, Setsuna being a evil manipultive bitch. In Tenchi Muyo, the Grandpa being a true know it all. In Ranma one half, ugh, way to many there, you pick, how about being a chaoitc being for an exsample.
But my qustion is, at what point does fandom become so intrenched it to a type of fanfiction, that it seems it is put above cannon in importace?
I like some fandom, and I use some fandom, and some of it regulerly, but at what point does fandom take over for most fanfic writers when they are writing a story and need to chose which to use? At what point do most fanfic authors just start ignoring cannon?
I was just wondering what you guys and gals think on this, for it has been on my mind for a few days, and won't be leaveing anytime soon.

[P.H. Wise]

Er, Mara as Urd's half-sister? That's a new one on me. They were childhood friends, yes, but sisters? Uh... no. O_o

[claymade]

I think that a fanon element like that creates a potentiality for use, allowing writers to leverage them for alternate takes on the canon that are quickly accepted by the fanbase. However, I definitely don't think that fanon should ever be assigned greater weight than canon--i.e. a writer should always be free to ignore it without any repricussion.
The tricky part of it, of course, is that it's sometimes easy to simply lose track of what's fanon and what's not.

[Mitchell]

Agreed. Sometimes fannon becomes so accepted as the main use in fanfiction that when a writer writers stirctly cannon material there is sometimes an outcry for 'perverting' the origanal work, even if its everybody else that is not using the main canon information.

[stratagemini]

I'm not sure I've ever heard of someone being shot down for "Perverting the canon" ever. Period. But to answer your 2question it has to do with several factors.
The first factor is really good fics. It is really good fics that create fannon. Like the name "Kimiko Tendo", if the person using the name Kimiko was a very good author who researched teh background for his fic, then the readers tend to adapt parts of that fic into their own, either liking the ideas and concepts, or thinking them canon.
The Next factor is lack of canon information. Ms. Tendo was never named in canon, so thus a name is needed for her. Kimiko is as good as any other, so that was what was adopted.
Some other factors too, but I'll go into them later. I'm a bit to hungry to think right now.

[lwf58]

A great many fan fiction writers out there have never seen the anime or read the manga. Fan fiction is all they have to go on. Thus, something a writer in the past may have written as an experiment or supposition (such as "Kasumi the secret genius" or "Akane the psycho" or "Nabiki the boss of organized info gathering and betting pools") is picked up by a beginning fan fic author as factual, because he or she just doesn't know any better. Someone reads the second person's fiction, and the image is distorted even more.
Remember the childhood game played in classrooms, where a sentence is whispered to a student, and then he/she whispers it to the next person, who whispers it to the next, etcetera? What comes out at the end has little resemblance to what was first said. Fan fiction is like that, to an extent.
And then there are the people who are so caught up in their own opinions about characters that they cannot or will not change those opinions no matter how much you rub their noses in the facts. They perpetuate fanon misconceptions on purpose.
Another way fanon starts is because it's hard to write fully dimensional, balanced characters. It's far easier to grab an obvious trait or flaw, and let that be the end-all of the character. Plus, not very many fan authors want to take the time and effort it takes to conduct in-depth research into the series they base their stories on. Writer laziness contributes a great deal to the perpetuation of fanon ideas.

[Steiner]

The problem often lies in either lack of canon or simple ignorance - that the respective writer has not read the canon material of whatever fandom he writes in, or at least not in the last three years prior to writing his/her/its work.
The main problem comes when one reads a fanfic and thinks among the lines of "What in the name of all that is cute, fuzzy and tentacled is that guy talking about!?" and then does some research to find out that what the author writes about is cold, hard, and thoroughly canon.
In my case 'twas "The Harem Saga" for Tenchi Muyo, as JeffHarris scrounged up every little detail and wove it into the story (this is a blatant and not in any way disguised recommendation for you to read this story).
After years of reading fanfiction for the assorted fandom and missing out on the later anime releases, my view got severely distorted (I rectified that, though), and I hazard the guess that many readers/writers suffer from that (Honestly now, who goes through all thirty-eight volumes of Ranma 1/2 on a half-year basis?).
But I find it sacrilegous to blatantly ignore "common" canon. In case of Ranma this excludes some of the two-chapter oddball martial artists that are never seen again afterwards, since they have as much impact on the story as a ball of yarn has on a tank.
Gah... I wanted to add something more, but it's 0520 in the morning and I've got a fuzzy feeling in the back of my head telling me I should've gone to sleep way before now ... x.x

[Waruiko]

There is little I can add to this as I don't write anything regularly, but I feel the need to point out that Manga and Anime often differ on some points on their own without fannon. Because of this variation sometimes you end up with false fannon. An example of this is if a fanfiction mentiones something that only happens in an anime in explicit detail, and someone who has only read the manga finds it. They will think it is fannon both because it doesn't happen in the manga and because the detail that went into it was so compleat in explaining the how and why that to the reader it seems as if the writer went into detail to explain something that they made up, rather than for the benifit of those who didn't know about the event.

[mondu_the_fat]

Two of my favorite franchises are the Ultima and Starcon.
Starcontrol goes down in history as one of the greatest games ever made (check out whatever "top lists" from various gaming magazines and you'll find it there). Not just the game is good, but the story, too.
Then came Starcon 3. It was an official continuation of the events of Starcon 2, giving closure to the series.
No one takes Starcon 3 as canon.
The same goes true for the Ultima series of games. When Ultima 9 was released, the fans did not consider it canon. For one thing, it blatantly contradicts events set in the previous games. While the previous games ultima are guilty of retcon, the events in Ultima 9 are not retcons, but simply sloppy writing. It isn't even consistent within itself.
In the case of Ultima, fanon is taking over canon, as fanon now has a rewrite patch of ultima 9. To some, this isn't enough (because, really, U9 was crappy, and no amount of fixing dialogue could fix it), and so a fan made release is being created, more in tune with the previous ultimas. Considering that U9 continuity is being thrown away by fans, likely they will latch on to anything that look even remotely better.
To answer: when does fanon override canon? When canon begins to be so bad (no matter what the reason) that the fanon alternative is better.
Unforunately, that brings us to a definition war of the words "canon" and "fanon", and "better".
"Canon" can be defined as being written by the original author. But what if the author never wrote it down and simply mentioned it in, say, and interview? We seem to accept that Ranma will be cured by water from spring of drowned man... but proof of this is quite the opposite in the manga. Likewise, there are many people who will not consider not found on the series to be canonical, even if the authors say otherwise. Such can be seen in Final Fantasy VII and the ultimecia compendium. While the ultimecia compendium (which is canon) verifies several things stated in the game, some details in it are dismissed as "errors" when they came to direct contradiction to what was stated in-game (especially if its the japanese version) by fans.
Or what if officially licensed products provide something that contradicts the original source? For example, Star Wars lightsaber can can through anything except another lightsaber. Look it up in wikipedia, and you'll find have a dozen things that the lightsaber won't cut, all introduced by people _other_ than George Lucas. These are all canon, of course.
In other words, "canon" seems to me is nothing more than "licensed". If its not licensed, its fanon.
And now we come to the definition of "better". That is a completely subjective term, which is fine... until someone tries to say canon is automatically better than fanon (funny that some people consider the law to be an authority of which is a better story).
Sometimes authors will make a contradiction or omission in their stories, sometimes deliberate, sometimes not. Fans will spot these, and want an explanation. If they're feeling generous, the creators will patch it, sometimes they won't bother to ("a wizard did it!"). This isn't enough for some people, and thus anything that fixes them is "better". The more well-written it fix is, the better. It may not be right, but then again, the people who care are the ones who dismiss anything not canon as "bad".
Take the lack of Ranma 1/2's resolution. As I said in the other thread, the lack of a conclusion gives plus points to a fiction that does. Its not necessarily better (that's a function of the plot, but rather the entire fanon piece), but it helps a bit. Or, in a more specific case, the lack of a name for Akane's mother -- given enough time, a fan-made name will take the place of the canon character having no name.
Sometimes, the fanon story itself is just plain better overall. I will rate Shadow Chronicles to be, at the very least, as good as the original Sailor Moon anime (if different). Some do not consider the SM series canonical; personally I can't stand reading the manga as it is an eyesore. The same goes true for the canonical Tarzan versus The Legend of Greystoke (movie); I vastly prefer the movie.
When fanon is sufficiently "better", filling in more detail, fixing incosistencies, just being a funner experience watching etc., then it takes over canon.
Finally, as lwf58 said, sometimes fanfiction is more accessible than the actual source. Certainly, my first exposure to SM was fanfiction (Fire's), and it was only later after it got me interested that I got a hold of the anime. I'd imagine that someone impressed enough with the fanfiction they first read to base their opinions on said fanfiction, and not the original show. Again, should the fanfiction be better, the author might prefer to use that as a source even after they had viewed the original.

[Dumbledork]

Don't shoot me but I think that sometimes fanon is better than canon, especially in very long series. It's especially true for some manga where the author has only planned for one story arc but because of popularity is forced to continue the story. This allows for a lot of errors later on as he has to weak some of the orginal elements to be able to continue the story. And there's quite often a divergence between the manga and the anime because the anime is generally produced after a good many chapters of the manga were published and thus can correct some inconsitencies from the manga. But I have to agree that the original work (be it either manga or anime) is canon. But if there are changes (quite often anime are produced without asking the original author for his opinion) shouldn't the be considered fanon?
It's very easy to create fanon elements for Ranma because the series is finished and there won't be any changes later on that may contradict what has been written before and some of the charcters (even several of the main ones) lack any background (e.g. what do we really know about Ranma's family? He has a father and a mother. What about his grandparents? Any cousins?...) The same goes for most of the other characters).
Personally I don't care if a story stays true to canon or reinvents the original story in large parts as longs as I'm entertained by it.

[deathgeonous]

Moudu, you ansered my question perfetcty in my eyes. I didn't even think I'd get a real answer that would help me get this thought strait in my head, and you made everything clear again.
And Iwf58 was right as well about sometimes lacking the cannon source. I used to have all 38 Ranma manga, but now I only have up 31. The last seven died with my dog. I have yet to replace them. and I have only ever owned up to the end of the first part of Sailor Moon in manga form with book one of Super S as well. I had to read the whole thing on a fan scan website that's down now.
In cannon, most times I prefer the manga to the animie for some reason.
And you guys are right, a well writen fic with a good fandom idea can infulance you. I am a case in point. I read a fic where Urd was Sisters with Mara. It was only casuly metioned though when Urd was calling hell's hospital to see how Mara after Ranma put her in there. It was just casully metioned, yet it caught my eye. Then I read two more fics where Mara was Urd's half sister. one was just Ok, and one was prety good, but nowhere near the first in quility.
So when I started my first Ranma one half fic, The Merger, and since I was making Ranma and Hild become a single being in it, I took that part of fandom into my fic. And now I have used it in every fic that Mara has made an appaerence in that I have wrote, for that fandom has become ingrained into me as something I like to write.
And sometimes there is the fact that cannon seems to be bad fandom. My case in point would be Dragon Ball GT. Really, if I ever do a Dragon Ball fic that would deal with the main cast, I would start it off with Goku waking up and GT was his nightmare. Clechie, true, but I have always seen that as Goku's nightmare after food poisoning.
And finally I think there just does come a time where fandom has been around for so long, that most of it's better then the cannon. It takes a while, but you have listed the reasons it does. Before now I just knew this to be the case, but now I have some ideas on why.
Thanks for helping me out with this question going through my mind.

[Seraphim]

Some do not consider the SM series canonical; personally I can't stand reading the manga as it is an eyesore.

How so?

[Waruiko]

A good recent example of where Fannon is better than Cannon would be book six of the Harry Potter series verses all the fanfiction that simply rewrites the entire year while only drawing a few plot points if any.

[Dumbledork]

Sailor Moon an eyesore? I agree when it comes to the art. I think that Naoko Takeuchi's drawings aren't "very nice" (don't want to use a stronger word) to look at. The positive point of the Sailor Moon manga compared to the anime (and this goes also for Dragon Ball Z and other series) is that the plot advances much faster. The Sailor Moon anime has several severe faults, mainly the poor art and the many filler episodes (compared to the manga where generally there are only two youma fights before they go for a general).

[Seraphim]

Sailor Moon an eyesore? I agree when it comes to the art. I think that Naoko Takeuchi's drawings aren't "very nice" (don't want to use a stronger word) to look at. The positive point of the Sailor Moon manga compared to the anime (and this goes also for Dragon Ball Z and other series) is that the plot advances much faster. The Sailor Moon anime has several severe faults, mainly the poor art and the many filler episodes (compared to the manga where generally there are only two youma fights before they go for a general).

I guess it is at the beginning, but it gets better, especially in Stars.
You could also say the same for the first two volumes of the AMG! manga.