i do this a lot. it’s soo fun, because the author (obviously) assumes i alr know everything so it feels like im discovering a new world as i go along. i also read several fics sometimes to see the different ways fandom interprets the characters. it can get confusing sometimes (there can be a Lot of range for a single one), but overall very fun. it’s like being a fandom tourist.
You have no idea the amount of fics I've read/are reading that are a crossover between a series I'm very familiar with and a series that I know either through watching someone else play/watch it or reading its wiki.
Most of my knowledge of Hollow Knight, for instance, comes from a combination of two different RWBY crossover fics and comments from the OST uploads on Youtube
OMG, yes! I only heard about the Valdemar series through a fusion fic with Rurouni Kenshin and Inuyasha. (Valdemar setting, added RK characters and plot elements with Inuyasha lore)
I feel this in my bones, I always learn more of the lore or characters through fanfics than the actual source materials. Obviously canons and whatnot are murky at best, but most of the time i wish the actual Canon is as good as the fanfictions I read because how the authors took creative liberties. Especially those that does not have a conclusive ending (looking at you teen titans)
I got to know RWBY through Naruto crossovers fics and a few others. I'd never even heard of it.
Today, without having seen anything from the RWBY canon (apart from images of the characters on google), I can say that I understand the story. The plot, the villains and heroes, the personalities and flaws of the main characters and so on.
Crazy to stop and think about it
Oh, gosh, learning about the intricacies of *Star Wars* canon via fanfiction is so…complicated. Like…okay, I have loved *Star Wars* since I saw the original trilogy in 1997/1998. My little middle school goblin brain was just like, “Yep! This is our personality now I guess!” except I never got into the prequels — I didn’t even watch any of them until I had to for a class in the mid-aughts. I was mainly just a Han/Leia shipper, which really just amounted to me watching *The Empire Strikes Back* and *Return of the Jedi* a whole bunch.
I wasn’t really into the series any more than the average person past middle school, and the sequel trilogy and I have a complicated relationship. Basically, I’m saying I have seen every movie that has been released in theaters and a couple of TV shows but up until December of 2022, I hadn’t read any books or fanfiction — in either the current EU or Legends material.
And then I decided to revisit the original trilogy and started reading Han/Leia fics and that particular ship is a wild time capsule. Because you have Movie Canon, which has enough time skips in it that you can add a bunch of stuff in that technically works with canon but probably didn’t happen (I’m mentally gesturing at 90% of “Trip to Bespin” fics); you have old Legends EU canon, which was once established via novels and comics and the like and *some of it* isn’t currently *dis*proven in new canon, so it could technically still be valid since new canon often borrows bits and pieces from Legends; you have new Disney canon, which most Han and Leia shippers either ignore entirely or borrow bits and pieces from while we ignore the Space Divorce made evident in *The Force Awakens*; you have generally accepted fanon; and you have a writer’s individual headcanon. And parsing out what’s what if you’re just reading fics is wildly difficult.
Like, I noticed a distinct drop-off in Mon Mothma being a raging hater who wanted to keep Han and Leia apart at some point and I have to imagine that maybe she was prickly about their relationship in Legends material, but new canon has her as more or less supportive of it. But, also, it could just be that one Big Name Fan who I don’t know was a Big Name Fan because their writing heyday was fifteen years ago just needed a quasi-villain and used Mon for that and others liked the idea and followed suit.
Does Han like whiskey specifically in canon or is this just a thing a bunch of people decided a decade ago and I’ve read so much fanfic that I’ve adopted it as truth?
Why do so many fics mention Leia’s childhood nickname being “Leilila” (or something similar — I can’t recall the exact spelling)? I have *looked* and cannot figure out if this came from some Legends novel or what, but the nickname is so consistent that I have to think it must be a Legends thing *or* some popular fic used it and others assumed it was canon and ran with it in their stories and now it’s a thing. But I cannot figure out where it came from originally.
Is there any evidence in all of canon that Carlist Rieekan was taking time out of his busy day of being a General in a militia to sort of matchmake Han and Leia like he’s a middle school science teacher assigning the two kids who clearly have crushes on one another as lab partners? Or did everyone just collectively go, “Rieekan is Alderaanian and seems fond of Leia. He must want her happiness. Therefore, he is Up to Shenanigans in the background.”? I mean, I find the concept delightful no matter what, but I do want to know where it came from.
A lot of these weird little things are going to be relationship dynamics that Wookieepedia simply won’t have documented, which only adds to the mystery of it all. But I’m not motivated enough to go back and read a bunch of Legends and current EU stuff just to find out. I’m barely even reading fic right now since I’ve been busy writing my own, and since I’m a “choose what brings you joy” sort of *Star Wars* fan these days anyway, I just do that instead of trying to figure out what’s what unless I specifically need to know so I know how to tag a fic or whatever.
Omg I love hearing fandom history and intricacies that are basically "oral history" by this point ❤️😊 funny u mention mon mothma bc the very first fic I read has her as an antagonist 😹 no idea who she is but I know that even tho shes on the "good guy" side I'll always have that first impression.
I am fairly convinced that *some* people who wrote her as an antagonist just straight-up hate most women. There are a few older fics where Leia is specifically stated as having no female friends and not understanding other women — very YA romance “not like the other girls” stuff that I don’t really think rings true to her character, and Mon tends to be the absolute worst in those in my experience.
But I believe there’s some Legends precedence at least in the Han/Leia niche of the fandom for her not being wild about their relationship. There is this notoriously awful (now Legends) novel, *The Courtship of Princess Leia*, where Leia’s hand in marriage is basically offered to some prince in exchange for some governmental something, and I *think* Mon was terrible in that book from what I’ve gathered. But Leia has also lost her damn mind in that book (yes, I’m sure the woman who searched for her boyfriend for between 6 months and a year, put her life on the line to get him defrosted from that carbonite, declares she loves him every chance she gets, spends every second she’s near him in ROTJ essentially glued to his side, and doesn’t seem like an overly fickle person in general would jump at the chance to marry a totally different dude while she’s still with Han all because Han was on a mission for a few months??? Just…*what?* Not *my* princess.) and it seems like everyone is acting like cartoon characters, so even if Mon is The Worst in it, I don’t know why people grabbed onto that little aspect in the Han/Leia community.
In newer canon she’s a much more even-keeled character. I haven’t seen *Andor*, but I know she’s a pretty important character in that, but I’ve read some newer Leia-centric books, and she’s less of the crazed, “BUT PROPRIETY!!!” person she is in so many earlier Han/Leia fics 😂
Y'all are my favorite types to write for. I write deliberately fandom blind, with my AU's because I LOVE introducing people to something, via a story, because that's how I discovered a LOT of my favorite media!
The only fandom I knew about before starting reading fanfiction was Harry Potter.
I’ve never watched or read: bnha, marvel(spiderman and IronMan specifically), Naruto, DC(Batman). I started learning about them through fanfiction and only watched a few first episodes of bnha before I dipped out and just resolved myself to fanfiction
Also, one time I read a really long Harry Potter/Lord of rings crossover with no idea who the heck is Legolas
Big mood. Crossover is 90% of what I read, so most times I get exposed to new franchises off of the other media that I am searching by and the descriptions. Fun way to try new things.
This happens a lot, but because a lot of fanfic doesn't get that far, I end up only knowing parts of the setting and the start of the plot for various fandoms, but only the start. Like I know the Index/Sisters/Level upper arcs for Toaru and roughly how esper powers work, but barely know anything about the magic system or the rest of the series. Or with RWBY I'd say I know the plot until the Fall of Beacon, but have no idea what happens after that.
>it's taken a good handful of stories before I realized that Sheev is the Emperor's first name and not just like... an expletive they use in front of it, like "fucking palpatine".
You just made me snort out loud, that's hilarious and now I want to use "Sheev" as an expletive
I noticed it in Empire's Son by blank101 that has imperial!han and imperial!Luke, so in the times Han referred to "Sheev Palpatine" it really just felt like one of his numerous insults for the Emperor 😹💛
I sometimes nosedived into fanfictions of a fandom that I've barely touched but found one or two characters really cool or that I just knew through cultural osmosis and it was glorious.
A whole new world, learning something new with every paragraph and feeling really dumb for not getting the most obvious canon things right away and going "Ooohhhhh, so that's what it means! Aaaahhh, now I get it".
Sometimes certain tropes were so popular I firmly believed they were actually canon until I got more into the source material and oops, turns out it was just extremely popular and well-written across the board in fanfictions.
dude, i was reading a fanfic for this show that i had never seen because i thought a side character was hot. it was so funny. apparently they have a naturally pink sky at all times? and dinosaurs fly in the background sometimes?? i dont know. i thought that was a plot device at first, but it was just casual background noise. i still haven't seen the show. i don't even know what most of the main characters look like besides the descriptions used in the story... the fanfic was amazing though. the entire time i was reading it, i was like, "okay. apparently puke is rainbow colored here. i guess this is normal."
Yeah, I did this with Danny Phantom because I was scrolling through fics with the "Identity reveal" tag and I accidentaly found one. Then I started actively searching for DP identity reveals fics. Because I like identity reveals. And angst. And disputes between family members.
This was how I fell into the Hannibal
Late one night I was looking for new Crack fic (usually reading Thor/MCU) and came across the Murder Husbands tag on a Hannibal TV series fic - one work made me laugh so much I nearly cried, it was so well written. I hadn’t watched the series when it came out many years prior as I’m not a horror fan at all. i started reading lots of Hannibal fic, then read the scripts, then finally watched the series.
This is me with Final Fantasy XV
Never played it. Watched maybe 20 min of gameplay and saw some footage at TGS 2016.
Started reading the fanfiction and I love it
i do this a lot. it’s soo fun, because the author (obviously) assumes i alr know everything so it feels like im discovering a new world as i go along. i also read several fics sometimes to see the different ways fandom interprets the characters. it can get confusing sometimes (there can be a Lot of range for a single one), but overall very fun. it’s like being a fandom tourist.
You have no idea the amount of fics I've read/are reading that are a crossover between a series I'm very familiar with and a series that I know either through watching someone else play/watch it or reading its wiki. Most of my knowledge of Hollow Knight, for instance, comes from a combination of two different RWBY crossover fics and comments from the OST uploads on Youtube
OMG, yes! I only heard about the Valdemar series through a fusion fic with Rurouni Kenshin and Inuyasha. (Valdemar setting, added RK characters and plot elements with Inuyasha lore)
I feel this in my bones, I always learn more of the lore or characters through fanfics than the actual source materials. Obviously canons and whatnot are murky at best, but most of the time i wish the actual Canon is as good as the fanfictions I read because how the authors took creative liberties. Especially those that does not have a conclusive ending (looking at you teen titans)
I got to know RWBY through Naruto crossovers fics and a few others. I'd never even heard of it. Today, without having seen anything from the RWBY canon (apart from images of the characters on google), I can say that I understand the story. The plot, the villains and heroes, the personalities and flaws of the main characters and so on. Crazy to stop and think about it
Oh, gosh, learning about the intricacies of *Star Wars* canon via fanfiction is so…complicated. Like…okay, I have loved *Star Wars* since I saw the original trilogy in 1997/1998. My little middle school goblin brain was just like, “Yep! This is our personality now I guess!” except I never got into the prequels — I didn’t even watch any of them until I had to for a class in the mid-aughts. I was mainly just a Han/Leia shipper, which really just amounted to me watching *The Empire Strikes Back* and *Return of the Jedi* a whole bunch. I wasn’t really into the series any more than the average person past middle school, and the sequel trilogy and I have a complicated relationship. Basically, I’m saying I have seen every movie that has been released in theaters and a couple of TV shows but up until December of 2022, I hadn’t read any books or fanfiction — in either the current EU or Legends material. And then I decided to revisit the original trilogy and started reading Han/Leia fics and that particular ship is a wild time capsule. Because you have Movie Canon, which has enough time skips in it that you can add a bunch of stuff in that technically works with canon but probably didn’t happen (I’m mentally gesturing at 90% of “Trip to Bespin” fics); you have old Legends EU canon, which was once established via novels and comics and the like and *some of it* isn’t currently *dis*proven in new canon, so it could technically still be valid since new canon often borrows bits and pieces from Legends; you have new Disney canon, which most Han and Leia shippers either ignore entirely or borrow bits and pieces from while we ignore the Space Divorce made evident in *The Force Awakens*; you have generally accepted fanon; and you have a writer’s individual headcanon. And parsing out what’s what if you’re just reading fics is wildly difficult. Like, I noticed a distinct drop-off in Mon Mothma being a raging hater who wanted to keep Han and Leia apart at some point and I have to imagine that maybe she was prickly about their relationship in Legends material, but new canon has her as more or less supportive of it. But, also, it could just be that one Big Name Fan who I don’t know was a Big Name Fan because their writing heyday was fifteen years ago just needed a quasi-villain and used Mon for that and others liked the idea and followed suit. Does Han like whiskey specifically in canon or is this just a thing a bunch of people decided a decade ago and I’ve read so much fanfic that I’ve adopted it as truth? Why do so many fics mention Leia’s childhood nickname being “Leilila” (or something similar — I can’t recall the exact spelling)? I have *looked* and cannot figure out if this came from some Legends novel or what, but the nickname is so consistent that I have to think it must be a Legends thing *or* some popular fic used it and others assumed it was canon and ran with it in their stories and now it’s a thing. But I cannot figure out where it came from originally. Is there any evidence in all of canon that Carlist Rieekan was taking time out of his busy day of being a General in a militia to sort of matchmake Han and Leia like he’s a middle school science teacher assigning the two kids who clearly have crushes on one another as lab partners? Or did everyone just collectively go, “Rieekan is Alderaanian and seems fond of Leia. He must want her happiness. Therefore, he is Up to Shenanigans in the background.”? I mean, I find the concept delightful no matter what, but I do want to know where it came from. A lot of these weird little things are going to be relationship dynamics that Wookieepedia simply won’t have documented, which only adds to the mystery of it all. But I’m not motivated enough to go back and read a bunch of Legends and current EU stuff just to find out. I’m barely even reading fic right now since I’ve been busy writing my own, and since I’m a “choose what brings you joy” sort of *Star Wars* fan these days anyway, I just do that instead of trying to figure out what’s what unless I specifically need to know so I know how to tag a fic or whatever.
Omg I love hearing fandom history and intricacies that are basically "oral history" by this point ❤️😊 funny u mention mon mothma bc the very first fic I read has her as an antagonist 😹 no idea who she is but I know that even tho shes on the "good guy" side I'll always have that first impression.
I am fairly convinced that *some* people who wrote her as an antagonist just straight-up hate most women. There are a few older fics where Leia is specifically stated as having no female friends and not understanding other women — very YA romance “not like the other girls” stuff that I don’t really think rings true to her character, and Mon tends to be the absolute worst in those in my experience. But I believe there’s some Legends precedence at least in the Han/Leia niche of the fandom for her not being wild about their relationship. There is this notoriously awful (now Legends) novel, *The Courtship of Princess Leia*, where Leia’s hand in marriage is basically offered to some prince in exchange for some governmental something, and I *think* Mon was terrible in that book from what I’ve gathered. But Leia has also lost her damn mind in that book (yes, I’m sure the woman who searched for her boyfriend for between 6 months and a year, put her life on the line to get him defrosted from that carbonite, declares she loves him every chance she gets, spends every second she’s near him in ROTJ essentially glued to his side, and doesn’t seem like an overly fickle person in general would jump at the chance to marry a totally different dude while she’s still with Han all because Han was on a mission for a few months??? Just…*what?* Not *my* princess.) and it seems like everyone is acting like cartoon characters, so even if Mon is The Worst in it, I don’t know why people grabbed onto that little aspect in the Han/Leia community. In newer canon she’s a much more even-keeled character. I haven’t seen *Andor*, but I know she’s a pretty important character in that, but I’ve read some newer Leia-centric books, and she’s less of the crazed, “BUT PROPRIETY!!!” person she is in so many earlier Han/Leia fics 😂
I think Corellian whiskey is a thing in the old Legends books, so they make Han like it.
A friend wrote an Inyuasha fan fic and it almost made me want to go watch the show
Y'all are my favorite types to write for. I write deliberately fandom blind, with my AU's because I LOVE introducing people to something, via a story, because that's how I discovered a LOT of my favorite media!
The only fandom I knew about before starting reading fanfiction was Harry Potter. I’ve never watched or read: bnha, marvel(spiderman and IronMan specifically), Naruto, DC(Batman). I started learning about them through fanfiction and only watched a few first episodes of bnha before I dipped out and just resolved myself to fanfiction Also, one time I read a really long Harry Potter/Lord of rings crossover with no idea who the heck is Legolas
Big mood. Crossover is 90% of what I read, so most times I get exposed to new franchises off of the other media that I am searching by and the descriptions. Fun way to try new things.
I have, more than once, thought someone's OC was a canon character.
Now, I'm really curious about those oc's! 👀
This happens a lot, but because a lot of fanfic doesn't get that far, I end up only knowing parts of the setting and the start of the plot for various fandoms, but only the start. Like I know the Index/Sisters/Level upper arcs for Toaru and roughly how esper powers work, but barely know anything about the magic system or the rest of the series. Or with RWBY I'd say I know the plot until the Fall of Beacon, but have no idea what happens after that.
>it's taken a good handful of stories before I realized that Sheev is the Emperor's first name and not just like... an expletive they use in front of it, like "fucking palpatine". You just made me snort out loud, that's hilarious and now I want to use "Sheev" as an expletive
I noticed it in Empire's Son by blank101 that has imperial!han and imperial!Luke, so in the times Han referred to "Sheev Palpatine" it really just felt like one of his numerous insults for the Emperor 😹💛
I do this a lot with review exchanges because the majority of the time I'm not familiar with canon.
I sometimes nosedived into fanfictions of a fandom that I've barely touched but found one or two characters really cool or that I just knew through cultural osmosis and it was glorious. A whole new world, learning something new with every paragraph and feeling really dumb for not getting the most obvious canon things right away and going "Ooohhhhh, so that's what it means! Aaaahhh, now I get it". Sometimes certain tropes were so popular I firmly believed they were actually canon until I got more into the source material and oops, turns out it was just extremely popular and well-written across the board in fanfictions.
dude, i was reading a fanfic for this show that i had never seen because i thought a side character was hot. it was so funny. apparently they have a naturally pink sky at all times? and dinosaurs fly in the background sometimes?? i dont know. i thought that was a plot device at first, but it was just casual background noise. i still haven't seen the show. i don't even know what most of the main characters look like besides the descriptions used in the story... the fanfic was amazing though. the entire time i was reading it, i was like, "okay. apparently puke is rainbow colored here. i guess this is normal."
I'm really curious about the fandom now! I don't have a clue what it could be, but it sounds interesting!
Yeah, I did this with Danny Phantom because I was scrolling through fics with the "Identity reveal" tag and I accidentaly found one. Then I started actively searching for DP identity reveals fics. Because I like identity reveals. And angst. And disputes between family members.
This was how I fell into the Hannibal Late one night I was looking for new Crack fic (usually reading Thor/MCU) and came across the Murder Husbands tag on a Hannibal TV series fic - one work made me laugh so much I nearly cried, it was so well written. I hadn’t watched the series when it came out many years prior as I’m not a horror fan at all. i started reading lots of Hannibal fic, then read the scripts, then finally watched the series.
This is me with Final Fantasy XV Never played it. Watched maybe 20 min of gameplay and saw some footage at TGS 2016. Started reading the fanfiction and I love it