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The 3 Main Types of Fanfiction (and how they relate to canon)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 31 ก.ค. 2024
- If fanfiction about a source text are stories that interact with some kind of canon, I think the best way to cover types of fanfiction is through the 3 main ways they connect to canon.
Fanlore article defining Fanfiction: fanlore.org/wiki/Fanfiction
A little about me: my name is Cora (she/they) and I'm a creative writing graduate, professional copywriter, and self-proclaimed fanfic writer extraordinaire with over 10 years of experience here to help you live your best fanfic writing life! Subscribe to my TH-cam channel for your fortnightly dose of dreamy fanfiction tips. 💞✍️
A little about me: my name is Cora (she/they) and I'm a creative writing graduate, professional copywriter, and self-proclaimed fanfic writer extraordinaire with over 10 years of experience here to help you live your best fanfic writing life! Subscribe to my TH-cam channel for your fortnightly dose of dreamy fanfiction tips. 💞✍️
Want to follow me outside of TH-cam, as well? Check out these links! 👇
Write Your Dream Fanfiction Discord server: A little about me: my name is Cora (she/they) and I'm a creative writing graduate, professional copywriter, and self-proclaimed fanfic writer extraordinaire with over 10 years of experience here to help you live your best fanfic writing life! Subscribe to my TH-cam channel for your fortnightly dose of dreamy fanfiction tips. 💞✍️
A little about me: my name is Cora (she/they) and I'm a creative writing graduate, professional copywriter, and self-proclaimed fanfic writer extraordinaire with over 10 years of experience here to help you live your best fanfic writing life! Subscribe to my TH-cam channel for your fortnightly dose of dreamy fanfiction tips. 💞✍️
Want to follow me outside of TH-cam, as well? Check out these links! 👇
Write Your Dream Fanfiction Discord server: / discord
Tumblr: / thecoramaria
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And what sort of fanfic writer would I be if I didn't plug my own fanfiction? 🤭AO3: archiveofourown.org/users/Sca...
Music: music box cover of 'Bolero' by Maurice Ravel. Cover by R3 Music Box: • Bolero/Maurice Ravel [...
Logo designed by @illustratornow on Twitter and Instagram.
Tumblr: / thecoramaria
Instagram: / thecoramaria
And what sort of fanfic writer would I be if I didn't plug my own fanfiction? 🤭AO3: archiveofourown.org/users/Sca...
Music: music box cover of 'Bolero' by Maurice Ravel. Cover by R3 Music Box: • Bolero/Maurice Ravel [...
Logo designed by @illustratornow on Twitter and Instagram.
I started out thinking I'd be writing canon compliant fic, but ended up in canon divergent land pretty quickly. (And there I've stayed.)
This is a mood! I started out writing a canon divergent story but sometimes I keep tripping over canon worldbuilding and lore so I end up inching a smidge further towards AU lol
My favourite kind of fanfiction to read is canon compliant, but I can enjoy canon divergence if it makes sense and the characters seem in character and are well written
I love writing canon divergence and compliance!! I used to write a lot of AU until the past year when I got into my current main fandom, and there's just so much I could do that I never considered in my other fandoms
Awesome! My current fandom corner feels like the opposite. There's a lot of canon compliance or diverging from canon minimally or at the end, but I want to see more AUs or drastic departures from canon!
Most of what I write is divergence or AU because I feel that they allow for longer stories with more freedom. Have a few canon complaince and they are fun but always kept them short.
Agreed! I generally find it's harder to make canon compliant longfics compelling unless they're a retelling, and retellings are by their nature quite constrained, since the plot and setting and characters are already There. All that's left is to execute it, really.
I’m never really able to write au fic 😭 it’s not even intentional but when I check nearly everything I’ve posted it just happens to take place in canon I think I just feel more secure in writing the characters in character if it’s in the constraints of the original story
And that's totally fine! I know there are some characters I adore that I never want to see in an AU, since their characterisations are very grounded in the canon setting. It's canon-compliance or canon-divergence for them!
I mostly write cannon compliant fics - Though, I've recently tried my hand at a soulmate AU and had so much trouble tagging it, I ended up using both "cannon compliant" and "AU" tags lol. I mean, it's technically an AU since it has soulmate marks, but it totally works within cannon! IDK lol.. As long as people read it and like it, I try not to stress too much about these type of tags haha.
Thanks for the video though! As always, your guides are super helpful and very well explained
You could probably say "Soulmate AU" and then follow up with the freeform tag "but everything else follows canon" but otherwise I think your tags work as long as you provide some kind of clarity 🙂 I think something can diverge from canon just for the sake of adapting canon to prose but still count as "canon compliant".
your fic tips help me with writing my fics a lot! Thanks so much for making these amazing videos :D Also I've written cannon divergant and AU fics if I try to write cannon compliant my brain runs away and turns it cannon divergant.
Aww thank-you~!
I tend to write canon-divergent stuff the most, except I diverge from canon so early (like, as early as the backstory) that it's practically an AU. Whenever I did write canon-compliant stuff, it was usually a oneshot, but I do have ideas for a fluffy, canon-compliant romance that I might write after my current longfic is done ☺
I only read and write canon-compliant fanfiction. My logic is simple: Why fix what isn’t broken? -Steven Universe already has plenty of characters to project my trauma onto.- However, after I told a friend the other day, she said I was an anomaly who needed to be studied in a Petri dish.
LOL I personally can enjoy a good canon-compliant fanfic, but I tend to prefer canon-compliant stories myself. The earlier they diverge from canon, the better!
I actually find that if I really love a piece of media and find little-to-no-fault with it, it doesn't inspire me to become fannish with it. I need to have some elements I'm interested in improving, or concepts I wish were explored. Not even in a "I'm gonna make it better!" way but in a "Canon is good but my ideas are good too and I'm gonna explore them" kinda way. I love the ending of 'Twilight Princess' but that isn't gonna stop me from wanting to change it in the fics I read and write!
@@CoraMaria I never saw it that way. Maybe it’s because I’m more future-driven than past-driven. Instead of thinking, “What could’ve happened instead?” I think, “What could happen next?” In fact, when it comes to incomplete series, I lean towards theories rather than fanfics.
On the subject of AUs, I think it’s okay if the characters’ canon personalities don’t perfectly match up with their AU counterparts. Their experiences aren’t going to be the same, so their personalities shouldn’t be the same either. For example, a character I’ve written a lot for canonically has a lot of trauma (pretty much everyone he’s ever loved died young and violently), and it’s been implied that he’s at least passively suicidal. In a coffee shop AU, for example, where all of his loved ones are alive, it wouldn’t make sense for him to keep his canon characterization.
That is true, and I am writing another video that goes into how to write in-character that will also cover why someone might choose to write out-of-character. It's just a topic I couldn't cover much in this video without derailing the whole thing.
Ultimately, it sounds like your take on this character is still the result of you considering the canon characterisation, looking at what makes it tick, and seeing what they'd be like in different circumstances.
Another winner from Maria!! Your videos are always thought provoking :)
Thanks! But please call me Cora 💖
Hey sorry I’m late (I was affected by the fanfic author curse) but I finally finished the chapter I was editing two days ago. You definitely beat me at our challenge. Your last few videos were awesome, i look forward to watching the next one!
My favorite fic to read and write are canon-compliant, this is because I’m a nerd who loves obsessively researching through canon material😆
I was wondering about you just yesterday! I might've beaten you but you reached your goal eventually so we're both winning 💖
@@CoraMaria that’s true! I’ll let you know if my next chapter is finished the next time you post. I want to win the next challenge in first this time lol 💜
I’m actually writing a time travel kind of story line at the moment, and I’ve been thinking about constantly where this fits. It’s like the original timeline was the canon divergent one, and the protagonist is trying to go back and fix it? I don’t know if that made any sense, but this video helped me explain it a lot better than before so thank you!! I’d be interested if you ever went in depth on writing on canon retelling stories, but either way thank you for putting content out that helps other people!!
I do plan to do a video on the Stations of Canon which will cover retellings as well, so look out for it!
you explain things so well, i hope you know that!! i have written only canon divergence or au's because being mad at canon is like, 90% of my personality at this point haha i think canon compliant fanfics are so hard to write, unless it happens *after* canon, because you have a very strict mold you have to adapt to. and for the same reason i think it's been hard for me to find canon compliant fanfics that i actually like. excited for your next video!!! i'm loving your content so much, i'm so glad i found you
Glad you love my vids! My love for canon-compliant fanfics can depend on the fandom, but I love them most when they're in conversation with canon, enriching it, picking apart its themes, or exploring the implications of a particular aspect of the worldbuilding that canon often glosses over. This can often be done through canon-divergent fics too, but there's just something about a canon-compliant fic that peels back the top layer to show a whole world of detail underneath 😍
I’ve posted three fics to AO3. Two of them are canon-compliant, but the third is in tricky territory, since canon is still unfinished. Depending on how canon ends up going, it’s either just as canon-compliant as the other two, or it’s canon-divergent. I won’t know if my fic is canon-compliant until next year at the earliest.
A very common scenario!
When sorting something into discreet groups, how many you end up with and how distinct they are depends entirely on what metric you sort them by; I was curious what you were going to use, and the relationship to canon makes a lot of sense considering it's the thing all fanfiction is connected to its parent work by. I think these categories are well-argued and make a lot of sense to me, though for me I find the line between 'Canon-Divergent' and 'Alternate Universe' to be quite blurry - on Ao3, for example, the canon-divergency tag is 'Alternate Universe - Canon-Divergence' after all. Still, for the more extreme forms of AU (high school, no powers, etc) it's reasonable to argue for a seperate category. My question is, as a fan of / writer of some crossover fics, where would you categorise them? I'm leaning towards the AU category, but I think for some types of crossover fic there might be room to argue. It's also interesting because a crossover fic has more than one canon to have a relationship with - if one argues that 'character from A in setting B' can be canon divergent for setting B, is it AU for setting A? Since there are so many different types and ways of writing a crossover fic, perhaps it argues for its own category due to that unique relationship between the canons it draws on? I'm curious as to your thoughts.
Also, I'm curious as to your thoughts on how this may apply to non-traditional fic types, like chatfics or react fics.
Thanks for commenting something so thoughtful! Funny how you mention that grey area between canon divergent fics and AUs, since that's where my fanfic sits. It diverges from canon before the canon storyline even begins, and while I tried to stick with the canon storytelling and lore while I could, I often found it getting in the way and decided to change it, as one might do so when adapting a book to a movie or vice versa. I still consider it to be canon-divergent, but it scratches that AU itch of wanting to see your favourite characters develop from the ground up in a new situation, if that makes sense.
With regards to crossover fanfic, I did realise quite late in the production process that I neglected to mention it. It's not something I tend to read or write very often, so as a result I tend to overlook it (which I also do with RPF, though that did at least get a mention in this video). I do think it could still fall into either of these three categories, though, or even represent multiple. Sometimes universes cross over after their individual stories wrap up in canon, in which case it's technically canon-compliant (especially if one story has frequent portal travel, like Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle or Doctor Who). Sometimes they cross over before that point, at which point it would be canon-divergent. Sometimes it's an AU where the characters and worldbuilding already exist together. And sometimes a crossover might be canon-compliant for one fandom and canon-divergent for another.
So while I do present categories in this video, it's really more of a spectrum from canon-compliant to AU, and sometimes when the source is still ongoing, a story that was initially canon-compliant will become canon-divergent ☺
@@CoraMaria That makes a lot of sense - I suppose I hadn't considered post-canon crossovers since I generally prefer more weaved-through crossovers and the like, so excellent point there.
And god, do I know well the struggle of a fic for an ongoing story, as all the main fandoms I have been in have been ongoing sources lmao - sometimes you'll have a really great fic that only has like, the first season or two as source material. And then commenters will be like 'what about x thing that wasn't canon when this was written' because they don't get that 😅One of my favourite fics of all time from my time in the My Little Pony fandom was Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons (which if you know anything about it, it's really really dark, like darker than the fanfic it is a fanfic of, kind of considered an edgy choice but I love it anyway. Literally got a mug right next to me which is bootleg merch of that story, fun fact) which is a fanfic of a fanfic that was started when we only had 2 seasons of the show. I wanna write my own Fallout:Equestria fanfic someday (I have some of it planned out but its not really in active development cause if you know anything about Fallout:Equestria fanfics, you'd know they're absolutely huge undertakings. Like, the original was like 600k or something and my fave PH was 900k) but the one I've planned contains locations and details that did not exist in S2 of the show and are slightly impossible due to what's canon to the original fic, so I have to do all kinds of canon-bending to make it work and I'm just not in the right place to focus tons of time towards that right now. I find fanfic-of-fanfic type stuff absolutely fascinating, but I digress.
@@AshBreeX I have listened to half of the crowdfunded podfic of Fallout Equestria, but not Project Horizons. FE isn't really for me, but I can see why so many people love it. The worldbuilding, Little Pip's character arc, and the way it stays true to the original themes of FiM is certainly commendable. I think it's just not to my taste. Def a masterclass example in canon-compliant/divergent crossovers though, since the transition from the Equestria we know to a Fallout-like setting is very believeable.
I wish you luck with your own FE fanfic!
Your videos are so helpful! Def makes writing fanfic feel less daunting. Do you think you can make a video about keeping characters in-character/avoiding OOC? Thanks!
Plenty of people have asked for that topic so I can tell you that it's in the works~!
The one I'm writing is canon divergence. I'm writing the story the way I'd like to. Different things happen to the characters. One reader says that I have a character that's a different version of the character. I'm just taking the characters in different directions & sort of changing him. However, talking with beta readers help me think of things either right away or weeks later. They also point out how some characters are written like those in the game. I also notice how my latest beta reader is finding less & less mistakes the more I write. I don't know if I'm making sense. It's after 1 in the morning, but I wanted to watch this video before going to bed.
It seems like you're really improving if your beta always has less to say! Sounds like you've been carrying their feedback on one chapter through to the other chapters as well 💖
@@CoraMaria Thank you! I think you're right. So far, she's staying with me which is a good thing. I'm not sure if the other beta readers will continue or not. It's a very long fanfic. Yes, I think the beta reading is helping me become a better writer.
I write both canon-compliant (or at least not openly canon-divergant) and canon-divergant fix-its on a regular basis, though I always keep very strictly to canon in all other elements but the actual fix-it (does that make sense?). So as an example, my fix-it of fix-its was killing off my mc instead of his son-in-law (which canon does, and which displays said son-in-law’s incredible stupidity, and which has consequences that… well, let’s just say I do my mc a massive favour by killing him off. Nevermind. I’m raving. Back to the text) so I kill one character instead of the other, but keep everything else as canonical as possible.
But, BUT… my current WIP is a fully-fletched AU and maaaan, is that difficult. Like you have to think of so many things. It’s fun though 😂
AUs do mean you typically have less context from canon to lean on. Someone else on another video asked for a video on writing AUs. Would you find that helpful, too?
Have fun killing off your MC~!
@@CoraMaria oh yes, very much. :D
@@CoraMaria oh no, seems youtube swallowed my first reply. Yes, I would find that very helpful. A video on AUs would be awesome.
My WIP-AU is a bit tricky because it’s not, like, a modern AU. It’s just a things-turn-out-differently-very-early-on-story, but because of that the whole storyline changes so dramatically that I think it’s fair to call it an AU. And as my fandom is the Silmarillion, which obviously has a rather prominent sequel, I have to think of A LOT of consequences. Or I want to, rather. I know I could go completely AU but that somehow doesn’t feel right:
@@stellagetreuer5164 I do plan to cover the grey area between canon-divergence and AU since it definitely exists. You and I are in similar boats with our AUs :)
So far I've only uploaded one fanfic and it's kind of like a prequel to the story
Sounds like it's canon-complient then, yes?
@@CoraMaria lol yeah
I usually write alternate universe because I'm in the Dream SMP fandom and canon is a confusing mess
Everyone remember! There are no OOC characters in fanfiction, only different levels of canon divergence!
I kinda feel like an outside for the fact I barely wrote anything in years, but the most I did was a "series" where it's one fic, but every chapter is a self-contained short story and I made a whole lot of AUs, including an AU where a character is an astronaut, another one where it's a huge twist on the canon based on a fan theory that also requires the characters to be born 10 years later, which literally doesn't make sense unless someone knows what's the deal with that theory.. and another one where literally the only difference is that said character suffers from regular migraine attacks.
I don't fully agree with the idea of "There are no OOC characters in fanfiction" because while I do agree that enough canon divergence can justify any change, sometimes the change isn't justified and characters are flanderised or woobified. There's also the fact that seeing characters act in-character (particularly if they're the main characters of the fic) is a huge draw for a lot of readers and a goal a lot of writers want to persue, even if it's an AU, so being told "there's no such thing as OOC" is more likely to frustrate them than encourage them. I do have a video script in the works that goes into writing in-character and the reasons why someone might deliberately choose to write out-of-character.
To me, it sounds like your examples are really just "Here's how this character would act if they were in this situation instead" which is not writing them OOC imo. It's just putting them in a new situation where we get to see how this particular character would deal with it.
im not sure if you've already done a video about this already or not but is there any specific tricks i can use to come up with ideas? And if you have can you share the link? It's something i've been struggling with for a while now, i have the motivation to write something but i don't have any ideas to begin with
I have a oneshot video that I filmed recently that goes into this a bit, but for now, I recommend you try writing stream-of-consciousness. This is where you write whatever comes to you, even if it's "I don't know what to write but Cora told me to write what comes to me."
If that doesn't help, try revisiting the source material! Whenever I revisit 'Twilight Princess', I always get a few fanfic ideas because I observe something new about the story, characters, and setting each time.
@@CoraMaria that actually sounds like a great method, I'll definitely try that sometime!