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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?
Question the first: I prefer canon. At least in principle. There are some fanon tropes and characterizations that work for me--as they do for lots of people, or they wouldn't be fanon--but in my own writing I tend to get fixated on Getting Things Right.
(Which has led, in RPF fandoms, to the "be creepy or be wrong" dilemma killing a story or two. I realized when I was in bandom that the thing I found viscerally upsetting about the idea of the actual people in question reading my stories was not how horrified they would be--they have back buttons like everyone else--but that they would know what I was getting wrong. This... probably tells you altogether too many things about how my brain works.)
Question the second: I think writing fanfic in general has changed how I see all original source materials. Writing fic about it is very close to being my default manner of interacting with any movie or tv show, and books to a lesser but still significant extent. Long before I write fic about anything, I'm trying to figure out if I could and how I would.
Also, for a lot of the things I wind up writing fic about, I read fic first and then track down the source material, so I am already viewing the source through fic-colored lenses when I get to it. This occasionally means that I have these revelations about canon vs. fanon on first viewing the canon, which leads straight back around to generally preferring to stick as close as I can to canon when I get around to doing my own writing. AUs notwithstanding.
( All 30 questions under the cut. )
Question the first: I prefer canon. At least in principle. There are some fanon tropes and characterizations that work for me--as they do for lots of people, or they wouldn't be fanon--but in my own writing I tend to get fixated on Getting Things Right.
(Which has led, in RPF fandoms, to the "be creepy or be wrong" dilemma killing a story or two. I realized when I was in bandom that the thing I found viscerally upsetting about the idea of the actual people in question reading my stories was not how horrified they would be--they have back buttons like everyone else--but that they would know what I was getting wrong. This... probably tells you altogether too many things about how my brain works.)
Question the second: I think writing fanfic in general has changed how I see all original source materials. Writing fic about it is very close to being my default manner of interacting with any movie or tv show, and books to a lesser but still significant extent. Long before I write fic about anything, I'm trying to figure out if I could and how I would.
Also, for a lot of the things I wind up writing fic about, I read fic first and then track down the source material, so I am already viewing the source through fic-colored lenses when I get to it. This occasionally means that I have these revelations about canon vs. fanon on first viewing the canon, which leads straight back around to generally preferring to stick as close as I can to canon when I get around to doing my own writing. AUs notwithstanding.
( All 30 questions under the cut. )