How Important is Canon, Anyway? · 5:31pm Jan 1st, 2018
It's not.
I'm serious. Canon is not important. Canon will neverbeimportant. On a storytelling level, worrying about how close to canon you are should really be the last thing you consider when evaluating what you just wrote.
I'm not saying it never matters. Canon deserves some level of consideration. But being "close to canon" has surprisingly little to do with how good or bad a story is when you finish it, the emphasis fandom tends to put on it notwithstanding. Canon is not a boundary. It's not even necessarily desirable. It's just a tool. And as a fandom, I think we tend to over-emphasize what that tool is and is not useful for.
The word "canon" literally means "rule" or "law", and as far as I'm aware it was first used to refer to literary texts in the context of sacred books like the Christian Bible, where it's used to denote what writings are (and more importantly, which are not) part of the sacred texts making up the scriptures. In fandom it's used in a similar way to denote which elements of story continuity are (or are not) part of an overall series of creative works. Fans are very passionate about what counts as "canon", sometimes to the point of absurdity.
The thing is, I can understand why 'canon' matters if you're trying to compile sacred texts. You are literally in that case trying to judge which writings by which ancient and contemporary writers express the core of a particular faith. The Gospel changes pretty dramatically if you decide to leave out the Epistles, for instance, or if you include later gnostic writings like The Gospel According to Philip.
Where canon doesn't matter as much, though, is when you're trying to evaluate fanfiction. If your sole criterion for judging how good or bad a story is depends on how well the elements of that story's fictional universe correspond to a different fictional universe, you have pretty skewed critical priorities as a reader.
Note: Emphasis here should be on "sole criterion", which is true of a number of things, not just how "canon" something is. But that's a blog for another time.
Canon as a tool is useful for basically one purpose: recognition. Fanfiction exists in the first place because fans are so in love with a story in a particular setting with particular characters with a particular approach to storytelling that they want more of those stories. Those fans then begin to provide those stories for themselves. Adhering to canon on some level is part of what guarantees you an audience. Being recognizably inspired by the source material and keeping elements of it intact is part of what helps you get noticed as a writer.
Canon is also a tool of convenience. Some stories are easier to tell with an established character or cast than they are with entirely new characters. Stories about Twilight Sparkle learning how to be a better princess don't have to spend as much time developing Twilight Sparkle, because the audience is presumably already familiar with the character. This goes double for certain fantasy elements. Explaining what a Diamond Dog is, or how magic works, or what Ponyville is are all things you don't need to do in fanfiction because the source material has already provided elements of that for you.
Canon, obviously, can provide inspiration for stories that don't already exist. When canon introduces a new character or setting detail or conceit, it means that fans suddenly have a new jumping-off point for stories. Think about how much many fan stories already exist to provide extra detailing to relatively minor characters like Trixie in the fandom's early days, or Coco Pommel, or the Dazzlings. Every time canon introduces something, fans all experience it at once, making it easier to find an audience for these new stories.
What canon doesn't do is actively make a story better or worse. In fact, canon can preclude certain story ideas if you treat it as religious law.
Do you like writing stories about Princess Celestia or Luna as quasi-gods of Equestria, and exploring the possibilities of a world where god really is one of us? Bad news, canon torpedoed the divine Alicorn as of season two and has aggressively resisted any attempts to reinstate them. Do you enjoy writing lore concepts for elements of Equestria the show previews but doesn't really dwell on, like the Diamond Dogs or Griffons? Chances are canon will eventually make your lore meaningless. What about writing long, elaborate stories about a minor character growing up? Eventually canon is going to have its own take on that development.
That's just setting details though, and setting isn't necessarily what fans care about most. What about characters? Surely the goal of any fanwork is to get the characters as close to "canon" as they can be, right?
....Kinda.
I submit to you the example of Dragonball Z: Abridged, the single best thing that has ever been accomplished with Akira Toriyama's work since ever. Most of the humor of DBZ Abridged involves them using canon as a jumping off point for reinterpreting certain characters and moments. Yes, all of their work is based in the canon of DBZ to some extent, but it's almost always used as a rough basis for exaggeration, and many of the best jokes involve taking character relationships and examining them from an angle canon normally doesn't or couldn't. Sometimes they even find new significance in moments that weren't really as big a deal in canon.
Even more than that, "canon" really doesn't provide a great frame of reference to appreciate things like reboots, re-interpretations, or alternate universe storylines. By their nature, all of the above will distort canon, playing with the pieces, rearranging it to try to tell new stories with some of the same material. But they are all, by their definition, not "canon". Does that make them less desirable, or interesting?
Canon is best looked at not as a test to see whether a story is good or not, but as a tool that an artist can use to evoke deliberate effects. When we evaluate whether a story is 'canon', we should really be evaluating how well it uses the elements of canon it chooses to preserve, and whether they were in service of the overall story - not trying to form a Council of Nicaea.
Very well put. I love the way you're able to clearly explain what you want to say in these blogs. Maybe a little jealous, even.
But you're wrong, Yuri is Best Girl
Precisely. Canon is the jumping-off point for fan fiction, not the goal. To paraphrase Estee, every fanfic is an alternate universe in one way or another.
I would agree, though I would point out that canon should at least serve as a sort of reference point for the characters, meaning if you're writing Twilight and Rainbow Dash getting together, it should probably sound like the two characters actually talking and getting romantic with one another (on low sleep, please excuse "getting romantic"). In an AU, there's far more leeway, but you still have to at least make it make sense within the context of your AU.
But yeah, you really shouldn't be using "this would never happen in canon" unless it's something like "who the fuck is this character you're writing, because it's not Twilight Sparkle."
You do make some good points. Personally, I find canon most important with regards to characterization. Generally, if you intend to use a character in your fics, it's best to at least understand that character, even if your intention is to subvert canon characterization.
To use your example of DBZ Abridged, let's look at two characters: Super Kami Guru and Mr Popo. Both are wildly different from how they are depicted in canon.
In the case of the former, much of the humour they are able to get out of him is from starting with his canon depiction, and then inverting it. This takes him from a fairly generic wise and benevolent sage to a much darker, petty sort of a bastard.
As a result, he's much more memorable than his canon self. He relies on audience familiarity with canon, however, as his humour works most effectively through subverting the expectations of an audience that knows the source material.
In the case of Mr Popo, Team Four Star had a problem: there's no getting around the fact that he's a blackface, and worse, a blackface in a servile position. They couldn't cut him out, so they had to do something with him. Their solution was to inverse the relationship between Popo and Kami and make Popo into lively, comically sadistic stoner, and something of a force of nature.
That done, they took Popo's unfortunate nature as a blackface, and the audience's discomfort with that, to make him unsettling. This serves as a starting point for his humour by generating and then breaking tension:
As with SKG above, the contrast between canon and TFS Popo is also utilised for comedy, memorably with Blue Popo.
We have other examples: with Goku and Napa, they started with canon, but exaggerated key traits for the sake of comedy. Goku's stupidity, an interpretation of his character from Z, was taken to the forefront.
TFS is effective because it knows and understands DBZ canon and characters, and uses that solid foundation to start messing with it, and the expectations of their audience.
In short, use canon, but don't be bound to it.
Incidentally, I have an essay planned on fic types that have been killed off by advancing canon, with a particular focus on Twilicorn fics. Those are all but extinct nowadays.
Yeah, I think you've pretty much got the right of it here. I've tended to look at the subject as a matter of convenience more than anything else. You have a setting and characters and a set of events, and get to riff off of them, even to the point of major explicit changes. As things change in the source material, it may be useful, or not, to incorporate it--it can lead to interesting twists and turns or depth of development a story might otherwise have missed out on, or hewing to a developing canon can materially and adversely distort directions taken, or simply make one stop. In some respects, it may function as a fun challenge, like an improvisation game, but in that case I question the degree to which the goal is still to just make the best story possible.
Anyway, awareness is good, but here the canon is there to serve you, not the other way around.
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The weird, sad thing is I bet they could have survived to a much greater extent if the show had done Twilicorn as a bigger thing--the culmination of a path she knew she was following (or at least where we saw more of it being laid out for her), and where the consequences are more encompassing and come faster. Instead, having the event come as just this side of an accident and treated for quite a while as not changing her life that much (much less Equestria or even for that matter Ponyville), it's like we were given the message that the idea isn't that interesting or meaningful, so why write about it?
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By Twilicorn I was thinking of the old "Twilight becomes an alicorn" fics. Those used to be very common (and a common way to end a fic, as well), but then canon happened and the entire sub-genre pretty much died; only a tiny handful still update.
That said, you have a point: between S3 and S4, there were quite a few fics exploring Twilight as an alicorn (Twilicorn fics), but, since canon didn't do anything with it, really, those also died out.
Yes.
A thousand times yes.
And if I might toot my own horn a moment, I wrote a long blog on this, a depressingly long time ago, in which I ended up summing my whole argument as "canon is a buffet, not a feeding tube". It's great that canon exists, but it's not something we should be using as a stick to beat one another.
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"Twilight becomes an alicorn" was what I was thinking of, though I guess it wasn't really clear. And it's been so long I can't even think of the titles off the top of my head anymore...
Canon is important, because it is internal consistency, rules about how the world works, how characters can be expected to act in a particular situation, what effects can be expected from what causes. Once you discard that, you discard the entire framework the story is constructed upon. Internal consistency is one of the most important parts of storytelling. Without that, you don't have a story, you just have a mishmash of vaguely related events and characters. You lose the ability to set and fulfill , counter, or otherwise play with reader expectations, because there can no longer be any expectations, and the story ceases to make sense. Character development is no longer possible, because there is no longer anything to develop from, no way to contrast what went before with what happens next. Likewise world development is not possible, since there is no longer any consistent foundation on which to build.
When writing fanfiction, you are ostensibly writing a story that exists in an established world, that uses established backstory, characters, rules, and logic. Once that has been discarded, you're no longer writing fanfiction, you're writing original fiction that happens to share some superficial characteristics with the canon world.
Every story depends on an established canon in order to work; the longer the story goes, the more important that canon is. Why would Twilight becoming an alicorn make the slightest bit of sense -- indeed, why would anyone even care -- without all the work her character has done to learn and grow up to that point? One day there's a unicorn named Twilight Sparkle, the next there's an alicorn named Twilight Sparkle. How can we even know that these are the same character, and not just some random new character who has shown up entirely out of the blue? Why would we even care about this new alicorn character, what possible connection could we, as fans, have with such a character? It's not the unicorn Twilight Sparkle we knew yesterday, and it won't be the wombat Twilight Sparkle who will show up tomorrow. It's just a random event with no precedent and no effect on the story.
What would the The Lord of the Rings be if by the third book Tolkien could simply discard everything he had spent the previous two books building, decide that the hobbits were now giants who can accomplish literally anything simply by thinking about it really hard, elves no longer exist, and the Sauron turned the orcs into a travelling music hall/vaudeville act touring Michael Moorcock's multiverse? Where's the fulfillment of all the plot threads that had occurred up to that point? Where's the payoff to all the tension that had been built over the previous two books? Why should we even care? That's something of an extreme example, admittedly, but no moreso than some of the stuff I've read on this site that claims to be set in the same world with the same characters, but utterly discards any tangible connection to the canon world of Equestria and it's denizens as portrayed over 7, soon to be 8, seasons of the show.
But you are directly contradicting yourself here. An "Abridged" series and similar parodies do not discard canon, they subvert it, play with it, manipulate it. The canon world and characters of the original need to exist in order for such a parody to work, it needs that framework to build on. The canon world and characters may be twisted and distorted and squished and stretched and exaggerated, but they're still there. The humour comes from knowing how they're changed, how they're altered. Without that canon to build on, a parody simply wouldn't make the slightest bit of sense, indeed, it ceases to be a parody at all, and just becomes random nonsense.
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Perhaps, but looking back at all the fics I've read, there really only needs one of two criteria.
1) it either uses the characters' personalities, or
2) uses a setting that is more or less Equestria.
2 is really more of a subset of 1 because Equestria has a unique enough world that it can be explored just as well as the characters that live on it.
That's how we get stories with OCs that expand upon the world they live in or Twilight Sparkle, the Insert Species Here.
Some fics have little to do with do with MLP besides happening to be a quadruped, sure, buh not everyone is a writing genius either
It's a guideline for how you need to start,but not something you have to go and check every single check mark on.
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I'm going to reply pretty quickly because you have a pretty comprehensive response, but it's a response that I feel like dodges the fact that right in the beginning of my post (after my attention-grabbing hook) I state that canon is ultimately a tool: useful for some things, not for others. This is a post deliberately about using canon as a tool to enhance stories without letting canon ultimately dictate the kind of stories you tell, or using it as a quality analysis.
Furthermore, I don't think you're particularly well-served by using Tolkien as an example, since at that point you are defining canon as continuity. They aren't the same thing, where fandom is concerned. A fan making a work based on a previous work has no obligation to stick to canon because their work can have its own internal consistencies separate from canon. All I'm really arguing is that fanfic should be afforded at least the same amount of respect we typically afford to adaptation.
I don't contest that, in fact, my post acknowledges as much. But while they're clearly playing with canon, it's with a pretty gleeful irreverence and a deliberate repurposing and subverting of many of its elements. Furthermore, I'd argue that it doesn't really become random nonsense, it just becomes more surreal if you don't know the source material. Many of TFS's jokes are funny even if you aren't as aware of the source because fundamentally, they're writing an action comedy driven by the personalities of their characters inspired by DBZ.
It's kind of the relationship Spaceballs has to Star Wars, or Men in Tights to Robin Hood. Yes, they're deliberately riffing on a source. But I'd argue that while they're definitely more surreal without the benefit, there are so many jokes so densely packed into the story that flow from the characters that even people less familiar with the original inspiration will get a kick out of it.
Is that actually a bad thing though? If I'm re-interpreting the world of Equestria so much that it doesn't quite resemble the show you might not like it as much if you specifically wanted more of the show, but does it actually make the characters or story I did write better or worse?
Certainly it's good to have internal consistency in your own stories, but I don't think you can mandate full consistency with every element of canon.
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I don't think canon is a tool, so much as it is a foundation for a fanfic-- and I think your example of the DBZ Abridged series illustrates that very well. Without canon, there is nothing here to really make a parody *of*; at least of of the humor (I'm assuming, as I've never watched it or DBZ) relies on pointing out the absurdities that get worked into the show's canon.
Often, when people talk about adhering to canon, what they're presumably trying to get at is that the story (or other work) presented is so different from the foundation that if it wasn't presented as [insert book/movie/comic/etc here] fanfiction, you'd probably have no idea that it was, in fact, fanfiction of that work.
For example, a few years back there was a AU created by some artist that essentially featured the mane 6 as anthros, with different personalities, and with different cutie marks. While a lot of people really liked it, and the art was pretty good, I, myself, find myself wondering what exactly its supposed to be a fanfic of, if none of the characters are actually the characters, nor do they conform to any of their histories. It'd be like writing a Harry Potter Fanfic where Harry is a girl, black, and not a wizard but actually a starbucks employee. Even if its set in the world (at which point the foundation the author is working from is the setting itself) it is so radically different from the source that it might as well be an original work.
When I sit down to read a fanfic here, I expect Twilight to behave like Twilight; this doesn't mean an author can't present the character differently (Say, Shining blew himself up when Twilight was 5 and this author's Twilight has an irrational fear of using magic at all and doesn't ever do so) but it surely has to be justified somehow, otherwise, what am I actually reading?
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Work inspired by the original in a way that you wouldn't have been, and is a significant departure, but may be good or bad on its own merits?
Again, I'm arguing here that canon is hardly how you should judge quality of a work, not that it has no place. And treating canon as more than it is can lead to under-valuing story archetypes that don't correspond well to it.
Canon's certainly a basis for ideas, but sometimes those ideas are going to stray from the show. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
I admit that I haven't perused the comments of this post, so if anything was said there already forgive me, but I can't entirely agree with this sentiment.
It's important to remember, while writing fanfiction, what exactly fanfiction is. It is a story that does more than simply pay homage to an existing work - it is heavily based upon the already extant work, to the point that it directly employs aspects of that work (use of existing characters and/or backgrounds, lore, et cetera). How the story relates to the established canon is therefore of key importance, and I consider it a mistake to diminish that bond. To ignore it is to alienate your audience.
That said, while the bond must exist and be paid attention to, it should not be considered a hard limit to what you can do with a fanfiction story. While you must base the work off of the world you are seeking to emulate, once you have gone far enough as to establish the differences in your own unique tale, you can take it from there in any number of directions. I have refused commissions in the past that ask me to portray a canon character in a way totally adverse to that character's personality, but not because I can't deal with the idea of a departure. Rather, I refuse because I am neither given, nor allowed to establish a reason for the new behavior. If your story can do that, then you have created the necessary bridge to move it out from hard canon to what you personally want to be. Fail, and you've created something that your readers are likely to look upon incredulously.
Case in point - my biggest problem with the story "Rainbow Factory" is that Rainbow Dash is presented in an implausible way with no sufficient reason for the departure in her behavior, other than to try to suggest to us that the character we know is somehow secretly criminally insane. Had there been at least some sufficient bridge from canon to original tale it would have been acceptable, but without that bridge, I'm left feeling that the author simply does not understand the character - which, given she is part of the main story cast, is a crucial flaw when writing a fanfiction based work.
I would feel the same if I were to read a story where Fluttershy starts burning ants with a magnifying glass, or Applejack suddenly admits to the world that she hates apples. There's nothing wrong with doing this, but we have to know why. Why are these characters acting against their nature? It needn't be a dissertation, but there still needs to be something established in the tale as to how we're at this gross departure from what we know. Your readers know the lore. They're expecting certain things, and while you can take them in any direction you please, you need to paint some manner of picture as to how all they know is being thrown out the window. You can even turn Equestria into a gestappo police state if you like, but something has to be there as to how that could have happened.
Original fiction is an entirely blank slate. Fanfiction is a picture that somebody else started painting already. You can finish it however you like, but you can't simply splatter all over what's there and expect your audience to ignore the original picture.
As far as evaluating fanfiction entirely upon how closely it adheres to the canon, again I relate the above. If you can't show us that you're at least respecting the bond your fanfiction tale has with the source material, than I can think such judgments justifiable. If you can give us that bridge, I would not consider it fair to judge the story in this way - we're not here simply to write more episodes of the TV show after all, and it's just as important for the reader to understand what they're getting into as it is the author.
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While I agree with you mostly, I'd say that where we differ is right about... here.
Counterpoint, literally everything Aragon has ever written ever.
Aragon's stories differ wildly from the show's characterization of pretty much everybody. There's still obvious direct inspiration - Fluttershy is still the shy one, Twilight's bookish, Rarity is a bit of a diva- but they're all fundamentally different characters to some degree. Or for a new take on Equestria, I can point to ChuckFinley's "The Quiet Equestrian" (or Mr. Numbers's "The Reluctant Demesne of Twilight Sparkle"), both of which are clearly inspired on some level by canon but also taking massive liberties in genre, tone, characterization and plot.
Canon is a great place to jump off from, but it's not necessarily where you need your story to land. And that's primarily what I'm writing about. I don't consider canon particularly important except in regards to how it informs your starting point. You're right, it reads badly to completely depart from canon to the point where none of the characters seem at all like themselves. But usually that's also accompanied by a host of other failings, entirely. Rainbow Factory is a shit horror story whether you think Rainbow Dash is in character or not. It's actively badly written, many of the plot points are badly explained, and it leans heavily on canon to inform our investment in certain characters without respecting the emotional impact it'll have on the audience. I don't have to really complain that it isn't 'canon' to point out the ways in which it's a bad story.
I do think there's a place for comparisons between a fan's work and the source material, but letting that become your dominant framework for deciding whether it was a good story or not feels a lot to me like judging adaptations on whether they were faithful to the book or not. The comparison will always be unavoidable, but it can be painfully unfair. Kiki's Delivery Service was based on a novel. Is it bad because it deviates from that story to tell its own, with its own thematic elements and motifs? How about Howl's Moving Castle?
We don't tend to talk about adaptation and fanfiction together because they're considered different spheres of prominence, but they have a decent amount in common. In both cases there's usually some kind of medium transfer going on, and in both cases it's sometimes preferable to make changes in order to tell the story you want. Sure, you can go 'too far' with your adaptation, but all that means is your story is a bad adaptation of a thing, not that it's bad on its own merits.
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It sounds to me as though we are in agreement, as what you just said there is also what I'm saying, in the sense that your story does not need to remain canon. On the contrary - to keep a fanfiction story to nothing but hard canon the entire way through doesn't really show us much, other than the fact that you can emulate. Where the bond to canon is important is at the outset - the point before you've sent us to where you want us to go, and established the departures we're to take in as we read.
I don't know the author to which you speak, but it sounds like he's doing the same. If his portrayal of the canon cast is at least rooted in the personalities we know, but then they make grand departures, well...he's established his bridge. The bridge needn't be a dissertation, or a rote mess of tell versus show. What I mean to say is that at the outset, in a work of fanfiction, there needs to be some nod to the accepted canon.
I will agree that I don't care for the Rainbow Factory story for reasons other than characterization problems. It was an example I figured would be likely to be recognized, but I feel also that the popularity of tales like that is on a basis of 'right place, right time'. With regards to the portrayal of Rainbow Dash herself in the story, I don't much care for the approach that "X character was always this way, you just never knew it." Sometimes I can allow for that, but not when the departure is so extreme. I can accept something like "Celestia is a closet BDSM bottom because she's spent so many years being a leader and it wears on her", or "Rarity is a narcissist who prefers the company of her imaginary friends and doesn't like all of you as much as she pretends". I can't accept "Rainbow Dash, chosen by the Elements of Harmony as one of their harbingers, who has assisted in saving Equestria time and again and has been an inspiration to young ponies everywhere is actually a heartless, gory murderer who grinds her own kin up into puddles of goo to create rainbows". That, to me, is an example of what I mean - you've given us nothing to explain how this could exist, and it is so far off of what the canon presents, that it doesn't come off to me as a 'unique spin'. It's just a poor portrayal of the character.
The nod to canon needn't be extensive - even so much as a correlation between the character's canon behavior and how you extrapolated the approach you're taking is enough. But I feel that the nod needs to be there. I'll grant you that a story can still be well done on it's own merit, but without that nod, it's an original work being judged as fanfiction. If I build a beautiful sculpture of an ancient deity and take it to a dog show, it may be wonderful work, but it's going to get disqualified nonetheless. And this site is about fanfiction.
It sounds like we're mostly in agreement anyway though
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If I read a story where the story clearly deviates from canon characterization of the characters, with no explanation, than yes, I think it's perfectly okay to judge the work as being of poor quality because its clear the author doesn't quite understand the source material-- or worse, doesn't care. Often times we see stories that expand the canon, here, but that differs from blatant breaks from the canon for no good reason.
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What is the bare minimum a story has to do in order to justify deviation from canon?
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If it's not recognizably related even as an alternative universe interpretation, then it's no longer fanfiction. Period. It may or may not be good or bad in its own right, but it's not fanfiction, and belongs in a more appropriate venue. The entire point of fanfiction is that it's about a particular world and the canon that defines that world and the characters within it.
There is a huge amount of room for exploration, expansion, and re-interpretation within the rules of the canon world, whether that's strict adherence to canon, or whether it's an alternative universe that is clearly an offshoot of the canon universe. And even given the volume of work here on Fimfiction, the bulk of it barely scratches the surface of many of those opportunities. Some of the better examples of both are Novel-Idea's Wavelengths timeline, Jmac's Quizzical series, Winston's Seashell and Ghost Lights, GhostOfHeraclitus' CivilServiceVerse stories, Carapace's Respite stories, or Sharaloth's Harmony Theory (which he needs to update more often dammit). All of these either work well in canon, or create alternate universes which, while distinct from the canon world, share enough of the defining rules and themes as to be recognizably related; what in musical terms would be referred to as variations on a theme. The fundamental melody is there and readily discernible, even if many of the actual notes are different.
It's even possible to write avant garde psychological dramas or outright crackfic that, while breaking the rules, still uses the fractured pieces of them as a foundation to build on, like Kamikakushi's Luna's (finish this already dammit!), Home Is For The Weak by Pickleless, or NorrisThePony's Awful Lot Of Coffee In Equestria. Hell, I'd even include law abiding pony's Hive series, despite some fairly large flaws and plot holes.
To create something that is entirely unrelated, that completely or predominantly discards all the rules and themes of the world and characters, slap a bunch of horsewords on it, and expect people to accept it at face value as fanfiction is simply lazy, if not outright parasitical. My two most recent reviews in Rage are pretty good examples of what I'm referring to (not going to mention them here, due to the authors' tendencies to react badly to criticism).
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Very much this. There is a story that I reviewed a while back which was ostensibly a MLP:FiM/Revolutionary Girl Utena crossover, but which had nothing whatsoever to do with canon MLP. The author essentially re-wrote (badly) several episodes of Utena and renamed the characters and locations with Equestrian names. The names were the only thing from MLP that was used. If you changed the names of the characters and locations, there would be nothing whatsoever to make anyone guess that it was in any way an MLP fanfic, although it was quite clearly Utena (almost to the point of being plagiarized in some spots).
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If you can change all the names and horsewords, and still have people familiar with MLP guess that it's at least inspired by the show. As long as it maintains the themes and principles, and the fundamental nature of the world and its characters, a good deal of divergence in the details is possible. The examples I listed above, as is just about anything in my Favorites or Liked lists, show the possibilities of divergence while still maintaining recognizable relationship to canon. (There are a small handful I'd probably exclude as good examples, but still like on their own merits, mostly crackfics.)
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The amount of justification is obviously proportional to the deviation.
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I'd like something more concrete here, because that, to me, is super nebulous. It also doesn't really specify what, if any, link comes between canon and quality of the final product.
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If we agree that you can diverge significantly from canon and still have a good story, then we're at most disagreeing on whether or not it's appropriate to call canon a 'tool'. And I do, because canon is something you can draw on while creating a work of fiction, but not necessarily something a work of fiction is subject to. I can write a gritty reboot of Equestria and have it be not canon, but perhaps still decent or terrible on its own merits. That's literally all my post is about.
Like, to make a further point,
Isn't the real problem there not the divergence from MLP cannon, but the fact that the author literally just re-wrote Utena? That they wrote an inferior version of an existing story? That story is bad not so much because it rejected pony, but because it decided to be a lesser version of an existing thing.
I would argue that restricts fanfiction unnecessarily. If I'm inspired by another writer's fan-setting, is what I write in that setting no longer fanfiction even if it has more to do with the new setting than with the original source? I'm clearly still drawing inspiration from something tied to canon. What about when I'm more inspired by fictional concepts within the setting of a work than by the characters? What if I like the characters, but I want to write them in a wholly different setting?
That's all I'm really talking about here, and I think being devoted, slavishly, to ferreting out what's "canon" and what's "not canon" in the MLP universe really hurts stories like that, or stories that use canon as a jumping-off point but land on their own unique themes and concepts. There's adhering to canon to cultivate an audience, and then there's using canon for whatever you want because you're writing a piece of fiction and you can do that.
Like, again, to reiterate my conclusion:
If a story pulls almost nothing from canon beyond shallow recognition, it's not using the elements of canon it chose to preserve well. It's using the tool badly. But even that doesn't make it bad or good, it just means that canon was entirely extraneous to the story.
That's all I'm calling for here. I don't think the final judgment on a story should be "could this happen in the show". It should be to look at what the writer did with the elements of canon they did choose to use or emphasize. If they use literal nothing and come up with nothing, then yes, that could be a problem.
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The problem here is that you're trying to have your cake and eat it too. Whether a story is good or bad on its own merits is irrelevant to the question of whether it's good or bad as fanfiction. Just look at that word, what it means: fanfiction. Without the fan component, it's just fiction. If a story departs from the rules and themes of the world sufficiently that it is not clearly related to, an extension of, or a plausible reinterpretation of, the canon world, then it's bad fanfiction, regardless of the merits of the story itself.
Personally, I cannot imagine why someone would want to post a work on a fanfiction site if they're not fans, if they're interested enough in the canon world to want to stick with it (and there are people posting here who make no bones about not being fans of MLP). Writing a completely original story that has no relation whatsoever to the existing canon world, then posting it on a fanfiction site with just a few names and terms altered seems to me utterly pointless. Why do that unless you're trying to parasitize an existing property with a story and world that cannot stand on its own merits? What is the point in taking a D&D RPG session, renaming some of the characters, and claiming it's LotR fanfiction? Why take a adolescent power fantasy Tumblr post, change some of the character races to something vaguely approximating anthropomophized equines, and claim it's MLP fanfiction? What does that accomplish? Where's the fandom?
If you don't care enough about the canon world to want to stick closely to it, and play with it, then what is the point? There are a lot of other sites out there where you can post original stories, get criticism and/or adulation, and garner followers. Why bring it to a specific fan site if it isn't about the world that the fan site exists to support? At best, it's cluelessness; and at worst, it's self-important entitlement whoring.
Well, no, probably not. It depends on how far the original story diverges from the original world, and what from the world it uses and preserves. If it's more to do with the new setting than the original world, then it can't really be fanfiction, despite drawing inspiration from those sources.
Except that it's not necessarily clear that that's the case, and "inspired by" is simply not enough. There is a whole world of fantasy literature out there that is heavily inspired by Lord of the Rings -- The Sword of Shannara, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Earthsea Trilogy, Harry Potter, Eragon. All of these show influences, and many of the authors admit to having been strongly influenced by Tolkien's work. Do they all qualify as fanfiction? If so, then the word becomes essentially meaningless. If not, then there is clearly a dividing line between original fiction and fanfiction. There's a similarly huge world of science fiction heavily influenced by the writings of Robert Heinlein, are all these Heinlein fanfiction? Okay, I'll grant you Spider Robinson, but what about David Gerrold, or Gregory Benford, or David Weber? Are they writing Heinlein fanfiction? Not to mention the overwhelming number of contemporary horror writers who were influenced by H.P. Lovecraft, some of whom certainly got their start writing Lovecraftian stories. One would be hard pressed to call their work, aside from a few short stories, Lovecraft fanfiction (although Derleth does tend to blur that line at times).
Hell, then there's Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden books, which pull from an almost uncountable number of different worlds and influences; and simply wouldn't exist without those influences.
As an aside, a work can be a tribute to another author's world, without being fanfiction of it.
No. That's a secondary problem to the question of fanfiction. If it had been a good imagining of an original story set in the Utena world, it might have been good Utena fanfiction, but it still would have been bad MLP fanfiction under those circumstances, because there was nothing in it besides a painfully thin pony paint job to relate it to the MLP world. Again, what is the point? Drop the half-assed paint job and post it to an Utena fansite, or a general anime fansite, and it would likely be better appreciated. What worthwhile purpose could possibly be accomplished by posting it here? I've read stories here that were good stories in their own right, but were worthless as MLP fanfiction, because there was nothing characteristically MLP about them, none of the same backstory, none of the same world, none of the same characters, none of the same themes or values. Leading me to wonder just what the authors hoped to accomplished by trying to pass them off as MLP fanfiction.
I don't think you really understood my comment, if you can use a term like "shallow recognition". If it is, as you say, the "elements of canon it chooses to preserve", then those elements of canon should make the story recognizable as related to the canon world. If the only elements of canon it chooses to preserve are a smattering of names and vocabulary, that is what is shallow, because it's no longer recognizably related to the canon world.
Canon is far more than mere names and vocabulary; those are arguably the absolute least important aspects of canon. Example, EQG, which is Equestria stripped of nearly all the pony vocabulary, yet its still very effectively the same world, it's still recognizably MLP. What is important are the mechanisms by which the world operates (and I'm not just talking science vs. magic), the history of the world in which the stories take place, the themes addressed in those stories, and the values those stories express, even promote. MLP:FiM has a very rich set of themes and values, and an increasingly complex history and world, MLP:EQG creates a clearly related alternate universe which expresses the same themes and values and mechanisms in a different context. Why would one want to ignore all that?
A good fanfiction example is Cynewulf's "80 Days 'Til the World's Farthest Shore", which superficially has very little to do with MLP by way of vocabulary or names. The setting is entirely different. There is some canon references, but they're secondary, and the bulk of the story takes place outside MLP. On top of that, it's based as much on a completely unrelated property as it is MLP. Yet it's still a recognizably MLP story, because the themes are there, the values are there, the influence of the MLP world is clearly felt. It's an "alternate universe", but still recognizably related to MLP where it really matters.
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I dunno, it seems like a reasonably concrete answer to me, given the nature of the inquiry. The more one diverges from canon, the more responsibility lies on the author to justify the deviation while still calling the end result fanfiction. Read the previously mentioned Harmony Theory for a great example of extraordinary deviation given extraordinary justification. It's not finished yet, so the justification may still fail; but so far it's working very well, and has been doing an excellent job tying the two worlds together.
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I think Batwing essentially made my point; the greater the different from canon, the greater the justification has to be. Sometimes that justification is more on a meta level than internal to the story, such as an AU where NMM won; but even then it boils down to a sort of "what if?" which in turn is essentially the justification in and of itself, but its still justified within the story.
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But why do we insist on evaluating it as "fanfiction" first, as if nothing else about it matters? If I had to evaluate adaptations this way, it'd play out... weirdly.
Does it matter?
Like, I get your concern ,but no. I don't really think this is a great or helpful way to evaluate writing. It might mean a lot as far as my personal enjoyment or desire to seek it out, but I don't see it as particularly helpful.
I'm sorry, how is lazily re-writing a show a secondary problem?
If that's how you read, I don't know that I agree it's helpful to the writer.
Neil Gaiman's "A Study in Emerald" for Sherlock Holmes.
Gregory Macguire's riffs on the Oz books.
Countless examples of fan-stories translated into original fiction that keep happening.
Yeah I'd call all of them at least fanfiction-adjacent. The only phenomenon that really separates fanfiction from other forms of derivative fiction is that fanfiction is often written specifically to and for other fans rather than for a general audience, is usually focused on stories that have not yet entered the public domain, and is not produced commercially. That's it. Trying to gatekeep what is and isn't "fanfiction" runs into the problem that fanfiction itself is a neologism and something we really didn't have a literary definition for until recently.
I don't think we can agree even on this. Canon is not the themes of the original work. The themes of the original work are the themes of the original work. If I can use the characters, setting, and concept of the story to explore themes the original work couldn't or didn't, then that doesn't mean what I'm writing is bad. I admit I don't follow your logic here at all. This sounds to me more like a laundry list of what you expect from fiction you enjoy rather than tools for evaluating whether fiction succeeded or failed in its goals.
Put bluntly, I don't really see the value in what are ultimately really shallow interrogations of who is and isn't a real fan, who is and isn't writing Real Fanfiction. While that can certainly impact how you enjoy the final product, it feels to me like gatekeeping. Just because I wouldn't think to do this with the world or characters doesn't mean it was wrong to do. I have to resort to judging the fiction as fiction to decide that.
Inviting that comparison to an original is often unwise, but I'm not sure it's wrong, is what I'm getting at.
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Context. We're discussing the nature and definition of fanfiction, not the craft of writing. Lazy writing is lazy writing, regardless of whether the writing is ostensibly fanfiction or original fiction or non-fiction. Plagiarism is plagiarism, regardless of the nature of the work. In this context, that's not a significant concern.
I don't think this is going anywhere, and won't if you keep reading into my posts things I'm not saying. I never said anything about who is or isn't a real fan, and this has nothing to do with gatekeeping. You're dragging in utter irrelevancies to defend a position that is essentially too nebulous to have any meaning. This is about defining a term in a way that it has a real, useful meaning. To say that "fanfiction means whatever I say it means" is useless, because at that point the word loses any meaning, it communicates nothing.
"Fanfiction" is a category, it's a "set". Sets need to have boundaries, or they are utterly useless. And as a set, it exists as a "subset" of a much larger set of "fiction", which has much wider boundaries, and includes a much wider range of types of fiction, a "superset" that contains many different subsets. If I want to read a Mystery novel, I don't go and pick up a book by Stephen R. Donaldson or Terry Brooks. Likewise, if I want to read a Fantasy Adventure novel, I don't go pick up a book by Arthur C. Clarke or James Michener. And if I want to read My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fanfiction, I don't go to a Harry Potter or Warhammer 40k fanfiction website, I go to a fansite which is ostensibly focused on My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.
It's about creating terms that have readily-recognizable meanings, so that we can communicate effectively and clearly.
Do you complain that people insists on tagging their stories with specific genre tags? Do you insist that you should be allowed to use whatever tags you want, because you can define them any way you want? Do you get annoyed when you open a story tagged as "Mystery", and there's no mystery involved at all, just a Romance? Can I write a dark, brutally-violent, gore-fest and tag it as a Slice-of-Life Comedy? Would you defend my doing so? I would hope not, because then those tags are useless for allowing me to decide what I want to read.
And this is no different. Words have meanings. Without them, there is no communication. The definition of fanfiction is that it is fiction written to express a particular fandom, a story set in a pre-existing world envisioned and implemented by a different creator.
No, this is probably the most shallow and pointless evasion possible here. The overwhelming majority of words are "neologisms" at some point, words have to originate somewhere. The word "fanfiction" is relatively recent, but the phenomenon isn't. At some point in time, the phenomenon became distinct and well-known enough that someone decided a word was needed to create a convenient shorthand to allow people to communicate about the phenomenon without having to spend a paragraph or more defining their reference set when discussing stories.
And when you stretch definitions that far, they lose any usefulness. What possibly use could "-adjacent" have when you've already re-defined "fanfiction" to mean "anything I want it to mean"? It becomes meaningless gibberish at that point.
This is what is known as a "Re-Definition Fallacy". Changing the meanings of words to support the argument, rather than supporting the argument with logic and fact.
Themes are just as important to a canon world as any other factor, and more important than some.
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No, you are having that discussion. I'm trying to frame how we evaluate fanfiction in the context of the larger discussion of evaluating writing in general. That's not expanding the scope, that's just what my post is about.
...And I'm not contesting that. I'm just leery about what we can say counts in that set. We are discussing what does and doesn't belong in the set, and it's clear I think more belongs in it than you. So fundamentally, we're talking about two different sets using the same word. Which would explain why we're both coming back with different results.
They're as important to a canon world, but are they as important to works based on that world, is what I'm getting at?
And no, I'm hardly re-defining the terms.
This is literally how I defined canon in the body of the blog post that spurred this discussion. If you're arguing that canon is more expansive than what I outlined here, it might have been helpful to lead on that instead of assuming that was my working definition from the outset. Because I don't consider theming part of 'canon' any more than I consider Pacing or other writing-intangibles part of canon. Canon refers to a story's internal logic and continuity for the purpose of this blog, always has, I never expanded that definition or moved away from it throughout the discussion. If you disagree with that definition that's alright, but I never subscribed to it in the first place. It's incorrect to accuse me of deliberately changing definitions mid-discussion when I've been consistent.
You've made your case just fine, but I'd argue whether it's good writing should be what we evaluate first, before we decide it was good or bad fanfiction. That's all.
And even then, to restate myself for the second time:
If a story chooses to adopt elements of a canon but makes bad or no meaningful use of them, then that's grounds for criticism. Not the most important grounds for criticism, but yes absolutely those are grounds for criticism. Which, frankly, makes me wonder if we aren't just violently agreeing on the subject.
You're absolutely allowed to criticize how well something uses elements from canon, I just don't think that's fundamentally what makes a story a good or a bad piece of writing. And I find that way more important than whether it meets the criteria of "fanfiction" you've laid out, particularly since I think writing of that nature is fine to discuss in the greater context of the fandom.
I'm not trying to twist your words, I'm just abjectly frustrated there's this much friction being generated. :/