Well, Xanthine, what do you think about people who don't like canon and use it...? -baits-
*throws bait*
Now I want to hear the rant. xD
I hate you both. XD
First, let me start off by linking to a few rants that might say it better than me. (One of them also answers icomeanon's comment about doing whatever you want in fanfiction.)
Rant #1 (Although, okay, I wrote this one two years ago.)
Rant #2
Rant #3
What do all three have in common?
The fact that we're all emphasizing the
fan part of
fanfiction.
Here's what I don't get about people who say they're not following canon because they don't like it. The entire
purpose of writing fanfiction is because you're a fan. I mean, seriously. Honestly.
Obviously. Look at the prefix. It's just three little letters, and they spell "fan." So, right off the bat, you really have no choice but to respect canon because you're doing this out of fan love.
I mean, sure, fanfiction's also about expanding on the canon world. After all, the point isn't to simply restate canon because if we did that, we might as well just watch, play, or read the original material. The entire point is to be creative in the set world and laws that the creator gave us. But that's really the thing. We're bound on at least a minute level to someone else's creation because otherwise, all we're doing is writing original fiction and slapping vague references to someone else's work in our own. That's not called being creative. That's called not having enough balls to cut yourself off from canon completely. (After all, fanfiction usually comes with a preset audience of people who are also fans and are also looking for something about the things they're familiar with. Original fiction tends to sell a bit harder because you have to get across an entire new world. It's unfamiliar to them, so you don't have the benefit of attracting the audience of an already published work.)
Point is, you're doing this because it's called fanfiction. Therefore, if it's not Ash Ketchum's personality, it isn't Ash Ketchum. If you screw with the six-Pokémon limit, you'd better have a workable explanation besides you did it because you don't like the limit. (Same thing with the age limit, for that matter.) If you decide Charizard can use Explosion to knock out a bunch of Haunter, I'm sorry, but that's called raping canon, and you can't just
do that. I know I keep saying this, but if you can't at least respect the original laws, why are you calling yourself a fan?
That's another part of the rant that I really feel needs to be touched. All too often in this fandom (and it seems to be
only this fandom that has this problem, whereas other fandoms simply reject
parts of canon), people say they hate canon but still write fanfiction.
Um, what?
Okay, okay, okay. You're a fan of Pokémon... but you don't like Pokémon? Not even
one form of canon? Not the games, not the manga, not the show... nothing? I'd hate to be a nazi about it, but why are you still calling yourself a fan?
Basically, what I don't get is this kind of mentality. It's one thing to like writing Pokémon fic in which you create your own region and your own set of Pokémon. You might not even touch the canon ones. However, there's still one fundamental string in your story that makes it a Pokémon fic. Otherwise, you wouldn't be labeling it as such, right? (I mean, it doesn't make sense to
completely disregard all the laws and norms of canon, create your fancreated land with a bunch of fancreated monsters, and call it a Pokémon fic when there's no way for us to recognize that there's anything related between your world and the one in general canon.) But if you don't like canon, I don't quite understand how it's possible to like Pokémon. Yes, you might like the individual creatures, but that's about as basic as you can go. After that point, you're back in canon.
Before I go any further, I'd like to point out that there's such a thing as general canon. It's simply the sorts of things that are shared by
all forms of canon and are never contradicted. These include the existence of gyms, badges, Poké Balls (and an accompanying transportation method that enforces a six-ball limit -- which occurs later on in
Special but still exists), the trainer class... I could go on, but if you can think of it and it exists in pretty much every canon, yeah, it's general canon.
Now, with that in mind, if you say your character's a trainer, you're back in general canon. If you have the six-Pokémon limit, that's general canon again. If you say Mewtwo is a clone created by Team Rocket, you're in either
Special canon or anime canon. If you have a League end in a tournament, chances are, you might be in anime canon. In any case, yes, you're going to end up using canon. Even if you go with the very basics, you like canon to an extent because you're using certain elements of canon, even if you don't recognize it as such.
And, even simpler, let's face it. You're writing
fanfiction. Fan.
Fan. This implies that
you, the writer, are a
fan of the series. Why would you waste your time and energy writing something that's essentially dedicated to (because it's completely about) something you don't even like?
So, simply speaking, canon's the original material. It's the facts, as presented by the media in question. Fanfiction is the act of writing a story based (even loosely) on canon because the writer happens to like the media. (After all, it doesn't make sense to waste time doing something for something you don't even like.) If you write fanfiction and don't like the canon, that's a bit of a paradox there, and it sounds like you might be a bit confused as to what it means to write fanfiction in the first place.
In other words, yes, I don't like it when people say, "lolz i write fanfiction and don't like canon!" Because you're contradicting yourselves there, lovelies.
And there you have it. The canon rant.
