Andraste

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?

In my opinion, fanon is the icing and canon is the cake. Cake without icing is edible, but lacks finishing touches. On the other hand, serving up a pile of icing with no cake underneath is just silly.

There are plenty of bits of fanon I like, and some I've made up myself and use over and over. I find fanon most useful when it fills in details that the canon is never going to cover - it's not like we were ever going to get Word Of God on what the Centauri call their tentacles, so when I needed to put that in a story I consulted Selena for ideas and made something up. (This? Is my most enduringly popular bit of fanon. Which I find hilarious.) Fanon that contradicts my view of canon annoys me, especially when it becomes all-pervasive, but I don't see it as harmful in and of itself.

I don't think I've ever changed my mind about the source material because of writing fanfic, but I've certainly written fanfic because of changing my mind about the source material.

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11 – Genre – do you prefer certain genres of fic when you're writing? What kind do you tend to write most?

Is 'two people sit in a room having a conversation' a genre? Because if it is, that is by far my favourite one *g*. Fandom uses the word 'genre' in many ways, so I'm not sure if this is talking about fannish genres (het, slash, gen, angst, etc.) or non-fannish genres like 'comedy' and 'romance'.

Since - humor aside - most of my stories don't fit comfortably into any non-fannish genres, maybe I'll answer the first question instead. According to my stats on ff.net, I have posted ninety-nine gen stories, thirty-four slash stories and twenty het stories. There are also five that fall into more than one of those categories, two that I filed under other, and one femslash drabble. (It was a Chrstimas present for a friend.) So, unsurprisingly almost two-thirds of what I've written is gen, with the rest unevenly divided between different types of 'ships. Sometimes I write angst, occasionally I write PWP, and sometimes I write comedy. I have a fondness for alternative universes and I love crossovers.

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