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Heh,
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this post was submitted on 06 May 2026
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Chapotraphouse
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Is fanon supposed to mean something like fan cannon? I spent 5 minutes wondering if this was going over my head because I haven't read The Wretched of the Earth.
Yes, fanon refers to widely accepted understandings of characters and stories among fans.
Normally you can use "delusions" instead of fanon
I'm glad you learned a lesson here. We won't be removing your post so it can maybe serve an educational purpose to others in the future, too. Thank you for being willing to accept criticism.
The problem with the term delusion is that implies "mental illness" as a dichotomic alternative to "just having fun".
It’s mostly having fun, but there is a line that gets crossed into the pathological when fans get angry at the author/creator when they do something that contradicts something in the fanon. And I don’t mean just being disappointed, I mean full on “how dare they this is an offense to me” anger.
I didn't even think that, you're right
I disagree. Spoilers for everything::
spoiler
Sometimes fanon gets confirmed later, or just adopted because it is actually a quite nice take on the story.
Like Vault Tec being the ones to drop the nukes, or the Xenomorphs being made intentionally as a weapon.
Sometimes the fanon is basically canon but there's just not textual confirmation.
Like Jon Snow being the son of Lyanna Stark
But most of the time fanon either fulfills a need for the story to be better than it was, or it just refers to established conventions for fan fiction purposes.
It can do both
A delusion
If we can spin subtext into a more lesbian story then what some corporate board of market researchers approved, you're not gonna stop us.
Some of that is better described as fan theories.
Like #Garashir. (Textually confirmed for alternate universe)
Don't be a DEckhead. The stories aren't real, the characters aren't real. They're subject to reimagining and reinterpretation.
Oh shit I've been searching for the OG post for like a year now but couldn't remember enough details to find it lol
That was a good reading but
That becomes a problem when for example the Korra fandom try to whitewash the nazi Kuvira to be something likeable. Okay the show itself try to do that but come on you should not agree with the bullshit the characters are saying(the authors are saying). The fandom can write an alternative universe that Kuvira is not a nazi piece of shit but why? Why the fixation on the nazi character?
Because she was the only villain that was really humanised at all in the show, so people gravitate towards that. I think a better question would be "why did the writers of the show decide that the only villain who needed to be portrayed complexly and sympathetically was the Fascist?"
Awesome Hitler effect where western writers make their villain Hitler but also really cool and stoic (also always conventionally attractive) Her death camps are reduced to passing dialogue and we never get a follow up on them (also the ideology behind her death camps is so contrived and incomprehensible as to basically provoke fanon).
A lot of western action stories have a worrying amount of Awesome Hitlers.
Had no idea that was posted here, the original post is so hard to find with google being so shit these days.
I like the term "Death of the Author"
death of the author is about reading the text by itself. fan-canon is about making a bunch of shit up outside the text
I'm genuinely surprised no one's scolded me for not reading all the theory that's ever been written and said I would have understood the joke perfectly if I wasn't such a lib. Either we've all moved beyond elitism and purity testing, or we're all a bunch of libs.
the latter most likely
The oppressed readers of badly written characters imagine themselves taking the author's position, sleeping in the author's bed with his wife.
(I'm parodying the quote from memory it's probably way off)
In Naruto Sakura doesn't get a lot of screen time and isn't a big force multiplier. She does some stuff and you get to argue about her capacity to be there against Kaguya or whatever, but she's rather stunted as a character.
In the fanon they glorify her. No special family but still became the strongest kunoichi, she's the best educated, etc. etc. It's not that these things are necessarily untrue, but it's certainly not focused or highlighted in the narrative.
Naruto pissed me off because I'm like 150 episodes in and she's still useless.
Her entire driving force thus far is that she has to be stronger / smarter so sasuke will like her.
One dimensional ahhh character
Warning: minor non-specific spoilers about the direction of the characters and narrative of Naruto:
It doesn't get better. I mean maybe in the anime, idk, I've only read the manga. But in the manga while she does do some incredible things, it never really feels earned or believable. She has a couple of moments in the final arc where she pretty much looks at the camera and says "I'm finally on equal footing with the other main characters, I'm gonna show them how great I am!" And then she dunks on some faceless fodder enemies for a moment, then we cut back to Naruto and Sasuke basically transforming into Godzilla and going toe to toe with God. Like, she is in like the top 10 strongest people in the setting's history by the end of the story, but we never get any believable explanation for how she accomplished that or any satisfying achievement she uses that strength for. She's like a narrative leech, by existing in proximity to Naruto and Sasuke she absorbed some of their plot armor.
The only female character in Naruto who is ever written even kind of well is Tsunade.
I think one of the weakest things Kishimoto ever does is write side characters with a double whammy of being a woman as well. He does some stuff extremely well - for example, themes you've seen in 150 episodes absolutely inform the shape and content of the climax of the narrative writ large. Writing Sakura is not one of his strengths I would argue.