Thirty Days - Day Thirteen

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, unless it's my own personal fanon. Yes, that's as arrogant as it sounds, but I'm being honest. I base my fanon on how I interpret things in canon. I prefer not to use fanon concepts that others have come up with. Sometimes it turns out that what I think is in line with what other fans think because it's a common interpretation of the source material, but that's coincidence.

The main exception to that I can think of was when I wrote Weird Stories in the Thundercats fandom back in the day. They were kind of like a shared universe where authors used each others' ideas with abandon. But I haven't done that in well over a decade, so I don't count that anymore. The majority of those stories were removed from my archive years ago anyway.

To answer the second question, no, I don't think writing fanfic has changed how I view a given canon as a whole. Writing certain characters has made appreciate them more, but that's the extent of it. I write for a fandom because I want to do more in it. It doesn't change how I feel about the original stuff.