Sarah, I'd like to genuinely thank you for approaching these topics in the way you do. Fandom culture gets a lot of hate thats partially because were all collectivley cringing about our pasts but oftentimes is just rooted in misogyny and homophobia. Fandoms oftentimes had toxic elements (dont want to downplay that either) but most of my experiences with it were incredibly positive and fun even if its cringy to look back on now. So thank you for speaking about it as it was, and not having a snarky, cruel attitude about it like most do. Its helped me be kinder to myself and heped me not cringe at my past self, but instead remember it as the (mostly) fun and immersive experience it was, something that helped me keep going when i needed it most. Lots of love to you and Emily :)
I once heard from somewhere that if you have never been cringe (in like a harmless way) then you are very boring and therefore cringe. But seriously, I think cringy fandom stuff gets way more hate than it should. I was a part of the Doctor Who, Harry Potter, and Sherlock fandoms when I was a teen and for a long time I was embarrassed about it. However, now that I'm in my late 20s, I've started to look back at those times in fondness as I had a lot of fun and it was great to be so unabashedly excited about something. I tried to avoid things that were "cringe" for a long time, but I've started allowing myself to enjoy such things again. Like recently I've gotten into Danganranpa, which I know is seen as peak cringe. But hey, I like murder mysteries and I like over the top dramatic stories, so I've allowed myself to have fun with it (although I usually don't get too far into the fandoms because I'm 27 and a lot of fandoms are made up of people around 16, and also I'm too old and tired to deal with fandom drama).
You expressed this so well! I love learning about fandom stuff since I'm not really in any but I don't love how many sources that talk about it don't approach the topics with kindness. Love this channel because Sarah obviously has experience in the culture herself, is self-aware and can show empathy to everyone involved.
Sarah is right, teen girls get a LOT of shit for things they like. Thanks to Sarah I've been checking myself when it comes to fandoms and teen girl related stuff because lord knows I was just as cringe as a teen boy than any teen girl.
honestly tad strange being just a regular guy is the funniest possible option that could have happened. bill cypher is really pressed about some dude who's just a guy.
In hindsight that's a hilarious joke made better because the fans were expecting the total opposite. It honestly sounds like a joke someone would make in the alternate universe where he is some magical square deity.
That is a hilarious take omg xD I never thought about it like that. Maybe Bill's so pressed because Tad Strange just never reacts to anything in any predictable way, therefore ruining his fun by taking it all in stride (although fanon Tad is still the cooler option imo)? As a note, my favourite part of GF fandom is when we all collectively ignored Alex Hirsch's idea for human Bill.
yeah I mean, chaos demon probably hates some guy who's just normal and boring, and in all honesty I fucking love canonical Tad Strange (and he loves bread)
the fandom was well and truly past its heyday when I tried to get into it, just on the knowledge that so many people had been so very into it, I supposed there must be something there. I did not realize that 90% of the high quality content was just the fandom itself. Made it a couple episodes deep and bailed
@@Romanticoutlawsame experience but I somehow lasted all the way to sesson 4 before realising how garbage everything actually was, and so I felt betrayed
@@Romanticoutlaw I went to check it out because my brother's first girlfriend was really into it and I was making an effort to bond with her, and I was definitely aware of the whole superwholock being a thing that dominated tumblr but I was a bit old for it (having spent most of my actual fandom days in the deviantart era making Harry Potter and Bleach fanart) but I legitimately could not believe that this series with a fandom comparable to this two ungodly long running shows had a grand total of 6 episodes at the time, it really was insane.
My favorite piece of fanon ever formed is the idea that Draco Malfoy smells like green apples because he took a bite of a green apple one time in one of the movies. Absolutely amazing work everyone
Wow I forgot about that. That was a time. Also the Mauraders Fandom blossoming from a few random posts. A bunch of side characters turned to main ones, Dorcas, Marlene, Mary, Hestia, Benjy.... Flashbacks.
@@Emma.Lou1 the marauders/black family fandom literally confuses me so much because of this. i’ve been a fan of hp for YEARS and pride myself on knowing literally every single small detail and character, and all of a sudden i look at fanworks and they’re just casually mentioning some character that i’ve never heard of 😭
I’m really not a big fan of the character so I’m declaring myself unbiased. But wow I truly feel that particular smell fits him perfectly. Like that’s somehow spot on regardless of it originating as being a lil snack he ate in one of the movies. That’s insanely fitting for the characters whole vibes somehow.
"The male/male pairings take up a large portion of the fandom. It's...basically impossible to avoid." I like that I can drop this here and no one would guess which fandom is being referred to in advance.
I am fascinated by that phenomenon! I'm not even into men, and yet most of my pairings have been mxm. I think it might have to do something with how friendships between men are often a lot more developed in media? One is hardly gonna ship women who don't even pass the blechdel test. But I also find there is something interesting about the dynamic between two men, and I generally just prefer men to be into each other over me. I think for people into men gay porn is the obvious answer, and there are some problematic aspects there, but I think there's more layers to it because I know I'm drawn to it as well.
@@CanelaAguila That's a pretty good point actually. A lot of it could just be fetishizing mlm but it is true that men usually end up more fleshed out in stories. I mean I'm a bi man so I have some vested interest in it. But besides that what interests me is that kind of male dynamic of being scared of affection to other men in their friendships. So when two men are showing affection close to intimacy it feels strong. We expect them to be with a woman (which typically is with a female character highly undeveloped), but he has this male best friend with more depth put into his character with a very strong connection to each other. And as authors love to do, they've shoved some queerbaiting in there to top it off. It builds itself with so much potential of something I find myself seeking the conclusion to it in fandom. The porn is really well written too. (My biggest wlw ship is Bubblegum and Marceline and thinking about it, it's 100% because they are developed characters with a great dynamic.)
Guys, "people only ship men because all female characters are flat" is moot when said in the comments to a video which discusses a fandom around a ship, one part of which didn't even exist in canon, and the other had to be heavily rewritten to fit in. This even happens in fandoms around media with well developed and interesting female characters in sapphic relationshpis, because men are that more interesting to this specific demographic. Can't be helped.
I'm reminded of a fannon vs cannon thing that happened in the Good Omens fandom a few weeks ago. Someone DMed Neil Gaiman to say that they didn't like Aziraphalie's past relationship with Oscar Wilde, only for Gaiman to reply with confusion because neither he, nor did Sir Terry ever write such a thing. Someone jumped in pretty quick to clarify that that's a strictly FANNON theory that Aziraphale knew Oscar Wilde and to please not bother Mr Gaiman with it. This kind of thing happens rather a lot with the GO fandom, with Gaiman being on tumblr and people messaging him with fannon theories.
Honestly fannon and cannon have fused so thoroughly in that fandom that they might as well be one at this point, it’s one of my favourite things about it. Like, even in the book there are authors notes where they say that during writing entire passages would just “appear” in their words and neither terry nor Neil knew who wrote them, and isn’t that what fannon fusing with cannon is, in a sense?
Interesting to rewatch this video in the context of Tumblr's recent fascination with _Goncharov._ People are just making up entire plotlines, character arcs, and romances without having ever seen so much as a clip from the Scorsese original.
There is no original. It originated from a sneaker that, instead of having a knockoff brand logo, had the phrase, “Goncharov, written and directed by Martin Scorsese” on it. We saw this and ran with it as a meme, but there’s no original movie.
@@cosmicdust2668 sorry? Not sure what you mean by this. I took film studies in highschool and we watched it TWICE. Spent at least three weeks discussing it in class, too. I’m pretty sure it’s real :-/
"Columbo's wife isn't real" how dare you. That man is so sweet and he loves his unnamed wife so much and you have the gall to claim he's making that all up. tyranny. lies and slander.
I never comment on RU-vid but I wanted to share a funny gay anecdote: pasiphile (of These Violent Delights fame) became a close friend when I was going through cancer treatment bc, while I was not into Mormor, there was a bit of a tumblr community for the small Western European country we both live in and we realised we lived in the same town, so they came to visit me in hospital quite often. I'm not going to share any info about them bc they're a v private person BUT back in 2014 one of their followers translated one of their fics to French, and pasiphile asked me to have a look bc I speak French and they didn't back then. I really liked the translation and messaged the translator to congratulate them. Fast forward a bit over seven years (incl. a first irl meeting in 2015 on a joint holiday with pasiphile, who's still one of our best friends!, three years of long distance and three years of living together) and said translator and I are engaged and will be becoming WIVES in july! So I was never a mormor fan (EDIT: I say, like a hypocrite, bc while I was mainly a johnlock fan I did v much write mormor fic bc all my friends + gf were into it) but the mormor fandom did get me a wife :p
Wild how people say that Moran's character is so complex you can't really definitively call him the "bad guy" when in the one story he was in he killed a man because he beat him at a card game
I cannot stress enough how much credibility you earn by being one of the original fans and shippers of this character. I would not want to hear about this from anyone who wasn’t there in the trenches. The voice of the people
This was the video that made me fully realize that Sarah is doing actual sociology/anthropology here, besides literary criticism, internet history and general humor. It's much-needed work, and I salute you for it.
@@sarar4901 OMG that would be too frickin' cute!!! And for nickname variations, not only is gender-neutral Sam there, but Samily could be "Sam ily" as in "Sam I love you" ♥️🥰 And _also_ that could be abbreviated in, like, texts or contact names or whatever as *Sam♥️* 🤩
as a gay man who has been familiar with moffat's work from a young age, this fandom has always fascinated me... mostly because i've been keenly aware for years that moffat would never write a character for me intentionally. he's *always* been a misogynist, a homophobe, and ultimately a dullard who writes the same jokes over and over again. i really hope all of this kept him up at night, lmao
It's why I was always stymied when people INSISTED that he was really writing Johlock. I was, and am, fine with them liking it, wanting it, but was less fine when being shouted down for pointing out it would never actually happen because Moffat was, and is, teh suck. People were so wrapped up in their head-canon, they were giving passes to the crap work he was actually creating.
@@fuckmylifewtf reminds me of a tiktok someone showed me: "Author's note, these characters copyright ME! This fic should be seen as a direct threat, I am seizing the characters in a violent coup."
Fannon and Sherlock is so interesting because there was so little actual cannon content for years of the show’s peak fandom. The hiatus created so much more lore and content that the actual show never could live up to (and didn’t come close).
@@treeconsider9382 Eeehhhh, some of it did, just cause there were so many people involved that's bound to happen. But in the whole yeah it was way more entertaining
yup yup yup all the fan content was why I remained in the sherlock fandom for a few years and loved it so much. the show itself was just some tiny little seed but the fandom was like... hey let's make an amazing garden from this thing lol
@@Gloomdrake the seasonal rot in Sherlock was just insane. The first two seasons are incredibly strong must-watch stuff (one episode in season 1 isn’t amazing but still overall very good). A great cast, great production design, quite clever and witty scripts (if a bit obnoxious). But that’s only six episodes and obviously people wanted more. Unfortunately after such a long gap before season 3 and a plot twist at the end of two that was impossible to explain well enough, season 3 massively disappointed with its convoluted ideas and a tone more interested in being clever than actually spending much time at all on fun mysteries that the audience could get invested in. I thought the second episode was good, but the first and third were just barely coherent. Then there was a Christmas special that ended up functionally being a dream with some nice production design and then season 4 was by this time totally incoherent and basically borderline nonsense. The writers were too obsessed with seeming clever that they forgot to BE clever and write something interesting for any other reason than shock value. Season 4 repeatedly dropped several strange revelations that the audience could never have guessed and Sherlock could never have worked out. Not because they were good twists, that slipped past the less observant viewer, but because they were random twists that didn’t add anything. It no longer felt like a clever show at the top of its game extolling the fun of solving mysteries by deductions beyond the minds of many (but not impossible), it had the weird vibe of a desperate show throwing sudden surprises at you in the hope that you don’t notice that none of it means much. For such a limited series, it declined so quickly and for no apparent reason. Perhaps they didn’t want to be formulaic, but I think it’d be very uncharitable of someone to argue that the show was formulaic after just six (good) episodes. Arguably, it only became overly familiar in the later seasons, when the writers had apparently run out of sensible ideas (which is a curious concept, if true, given the material obviously remaining in the various books they hadn’t adapted). Sorry rant over. It’s just dispiriting really. I really would recommend series 1 and 2 though, they’re very good and then I’d use series 3 episode 2 as an alternative finale (though that might just be a personal preference).
I think a my favorite part was when Emily possessed Sarah's body and mind and spoke through her in her own voice. That was so epic of her and she should do that more often
Additionally, since the Sherlock Holmes books take place at about the time they were written, Moran almost certainly went on the Oxford-to-military-officer pipeline out of sheer familial trajectory alone. Honestly, the fact that he’s depicted in the books as sincerely dangerous and not merely some foppish dandy is exceptional.
@@roachno.24 There's a prestige to oxford but a lot of wealthier people (particularly eaton boys) get in via nepotism, not merit. The perfect example of this is the fact that Boris Johnson went to both and is the bumblingest idiot there is.
@@roachno.24 they are pretty much full of posh toffs who only got there through privilege and wealth. Most of our ruling class in the UK went to these schools and look at the callous, pathetic, cruel, greedy morons now. Though I'm sure you'll get a different answer from someone more right wing than me.
@@roachno.24 to make a long story very short: yes it's prestigious but in the way that comes with nepotism and more than a fair amount of classism attached to it. kinda like that scandal in the US about harvard or yale or some such letting in rich kids just because they're rich as for eton, as someone else here pointed out, it's basically shorthand for being a bumbling idiot from a wealthy background for lol
This reminds me a lot of the “Young Marauders” fandom within Harry Potter, specifically that a lot of people agree that a young Remus Lupin would be played by Andrew Garfield.
Yes! I'm not a huge Harry Potter fan, but I am a huge Andrew Garfield fan and I would always see people commenting about Remus Lupin on videos of him and I had no clue why😭
I'm truly surprised Sarah didn't cover this! I feel like the Marauders fandom has come up with a TON of fannon that has become really ingrained in people's view of the whole HP universe.
Sarah is honestly one of the only youtubers who can be like “here’s a 75 minute long video essay where I only spend about 20 minutes talking about the thing referenced in the title” and I’ll watch every single second of it.
The phrase "Sarah Z and Lady Emily" brings to mind a comic series about two time travellers, one from the future and one from the Victorian era- skipping around through time and solving Fandom mysteries- and I wish I could draw now
You KNOW Sarah is a fandom veteran by how casually she explains Roxel by saying "A lot of the time it would be via MPreg." Not even the hint of a flinch; that's fandom cred, is what that is.
I sorta wish mpreg wasn't viewed through the lens of 'cringe' in 2022, speaking as a trans dude myself. Of course I prefer it when the guy getting pregnant in these scenarios is written to be explicitly trans, but like... the immediate revulsion and embarrassment at the CONCEPT of a man being pregnant is kinda hurtful. My uterus still works fine, far as I know.
One of my favorite examples of fanon is Link from the legend of Zelda is sometimes written as mute and signs to communicate. No questions asked and lives peacefully with the the other interpretation of Link who is not mute but both characters are still written with the same personality according to their game's canon.
It's also pretty inline with why Link doesn't speak in the first place. It's mostly to let fans be in the shoes of link and if those shoes are filled with people who like him as mute then there's nothing stopping it
ok but based on this description of moran from the books, he would have been a good final villain (would have explained all the weird moriarty stock footage) - could have had him vs watson while sherlock was somehow incapacitated, would have been cool always remember they could have done something exciting and cool and they chose to make the dog a small pirate child
You had 69 likes on this comment when I read it I'm sorry I had to like it myself and ruin that cause small pirate child made me choke and scare my cat
Honestly don't know why they went with "Sherlock has an insane, evil genius sister that no one knows about," rather than just following the books where Moran is the last member of Moriarty's criminal organisation left standing.
Tad Strange’s appearance actually made things more creative, since someone who’s a fan of both the show and podcast made connections between Gravity Falls and Night Vale. Example: Tad likes bread, bread is banned in Night Vale. One thing led to another, Tad was originally from Night Vale and moved to Gravity Falls.
I'd like to imagine he wanted to walk on the wild side and realised he'd only ever get his wheat/wheat by-product/bread fix by leaving. So, packing up and moving to Gravity Falls it was!
27:08 "Fans agreeing on a specific middle or last name for a character who never canonically got one." I know you're not talking about Anthony "Janthony" Crowley but it's what I thought of immediately, to my shame.
Does anyone know any other characters where this happened? Because I want a Holy Trinity comprised of them, Anthony Janthony Crowley and Martin Kartin Blackwood.
I kinda like how the fandom took a underused Sherlock Holmes character and created a new version of him. Since Sherlock is in the public domain, that kinda makes this Sebastian Moran just as canon as any of the other BBC Sherlock characters
Yeah, pretty much. As someone who keeps up with seasonal anime I'll sometimes see japanese anime adaptations of the Sherlock setting such as Kabukicho Sherlock and Yuukoku no Moriarty that put their own new spin on it and in practice it comes down to the same thing.
I will always remember the pre-movie release Frozen fandom naming Hans’ horse Lemon. No clue who started it, we all just called him that. Eventually, Jennifer Lee gave Hans’ horse a canon name: Sitron, which is Norwegian for Lemon. 🥰
Reminds me of when the Pokémon fandom used to call Ghetsis „Dennis“ pre-release because his battle theme was leaked and fans thought the voice chanting his name sounded like „Dennis“. Good times.
I’m in a fandom where an unnamed guard who say sa few things in passing with the fandom’s MC somehow ended up with the fan name Ben Castiel and has a fanbase of his own that the company, IGG, acknowledges now. No one knows how it started or who first called him that. It’s just…always been.
OH I thought this was gonna be like My Little Pony and how everybody collectively made up personalities for every background pony, but its instead like if they got a MLP chararacter from the earlier shows and pretended they were a main character
The most egregious example is when they all renamed Time Twister into Dr. Hooves, despite not being a doctor at all. "But _the_ Doctor is not _a_ doctor, he's just the place the word 'doctor' comes from (or something... I don't watch that show)." Yeah, well in any case they eventually found some stupid reason to give him THE SCARF™ in the actual show, just because fans couldn't be comprehend the fact that someone with an hourglass cutiemark _wouldn't_ be an actual time traveler.
Back when I was into Harry Potter, around 2008-2013, I almost exclusively read fics about the Marauders. And there was so much fanon content, that would repeat itself in almost every fic and piece of fanart, taht I just thought it was actual canon. When I reread the books later and realized most of what I thought I knew about the Marauders was from fanfiction, I was honestly shocked. So much of it was so consistent in the fandom.
Mauraders fanon was hugely influenced by The Shoebox Project. I can't say how much of it was original to The Shoebox Project or whether that one work just popularized a lot of it, but it was an astonishingly unifying work in the mid-aughts--well before the existence of Ao3.
the marauders have had a massive resurgence thanks to tiktok and the fic all the young dudes, it’s funny to see the same fan casts as in 2014 even though the actors are now 30-35
@@missybarbour6885 It was a multimedia fanfic project that used (or at least started out with) the framing device of a shoebox full of school memorabilia kept under Remus Lupin's bed. There were two authors who did the epistolary portions of the fic--one who wrote as Remus and one who wrote as Sirius. Other bits are written as traditional fic chapters that accompany and contextualize fanart "photographs." You can still find it in .pdf form by searching it, and I think at this point it has also been uploaded to Ao3
@@mastelsa Interesting! I can't believe I never ran across that on tumblr in 2014. I always think I was super deep into a fandom until I find somebody else chilling at the bottom of the Marianas Trench
As someone steeped in The SCP Foundation, aka “Fanon/Creative Writing Community spawned from a 4chan creepypasta,” it’s super interesting to see how similar things form from more mainstream media properties. Thanks for the video!
God yes, I was into Creepypasta for awhile so the whole fanon thing is second nature to me. So to see it talked about in relation to a legit show is so fascinating to me! Especially with a whole made up character since that's basically what all the Creepypasta characters are.
God this reminds me of the Irene Adler me and my friend fanoned prior to Season 2. She was a model from New Jersey who was very pretty and acted very dumb on purpose, which made it easier for her to manipulate Sherlock. In the story my friend and I wrote, John and Sherlock get contacted by an American senator who wants them to get photos that Irene took of her and the senator during a brief fling they had, which the senator thinks will be used to blackmail him. It turns out that Irene didn’t know the senator at all, and that the photos are actually of her and ANOTHER politician, a kind former boyfriend of Irene’s, who the senator is planning on blackmailing once Sherlock gets the photos for him. Sherlock gives the senator the photos anyway, but it turns out they have an embedded virus that Irene programmed that exposes the senator’s various blackmailing schemes as soon as he publishes the photos. Sherlock admires that Irene was able to trick him and John tries to convince her to join them in solving crimes, but instead she marries her nice politician ex and moves to Washington DC to be a trophy wife who actually is the politically smart one in the marriage (since her husband is a bit of a himbo). It was super silly and CLEARLY written by two fifteen year old girls, but honestly I think it was more faithful to the spirit of the original A Scandal in Bohemia story than the show ended up being. Edit: WOW this got way more of a response than I expected!! Thanks so much for your kind words everyone! We never published it, but the story was called A Scandal in Leonia (which is the name of a township in New Jersey, i thought it was super clever lmao) and the faceclaim for Irene was Paris Hilton.
My favorite 'fanon took it and did crazy stuff' story is the magnus archives- which is odd, because the fanon is pretty close to the show, and all the canon ships are really popular- except one. Peter/ Elias is insanely popular and terribly funny. They are two of the main villians. They are each others only real friends. In fanon they are at least 6 times divorced/ remarried, and absolutely horrible for each other. It's so much fun.
Its great because it would contradict so much of the actual plot, yet the dynamic is apparently 100% intentional, and the marry/divorce meme was started by Peters actor
Ngl I've never seen a more unified fanon than TMA's fanon, especially regarding the appearances of the characters (and also the _entire_ fandom's stubborn refusal to spell Jon as "John" even though that's technically the canon spelling lmao)
oh man yeah i was SO ready to hear this topic specifically around podcasts - even tho sarah and emily didnt end up saying anything about im glad this example in particular is down here LOL
@@aw7145 when sarah started talking about the cas vs cass thing in the supernatural fandom my mind instantly went to the tma fandom's refusal to spell jon's name as john, no matter what rusty quill has to say on the matter
I will say there are two big examples of fanon I see in the tma fandom that often supercede canon there, that being daisy and basira not actually being a romantic couple and the fact that a lot of the main cast is often headcanoned as poc. While it's a really great thing that fandom is becoming more inclusive and open to headcanoned appearances that aren't skinny white people, but it also sort of hides the fact that well, the magnus archives source media DOES have issues with it's poc representation. The only main cast member who is canonically a POC is Basira, who is also a cop who's story is used to explore police brutality, and while there are a few nods to her facing discrimination in the workplace, the fact that she's a poc contributing to police brutality when irl it's often poc facing that violence isn't really touched upon or a big part of her arc, which is where you can really tell this was written by a white writer. All other canon poc characters are villains like Jude Perry and Manuela Dominguez. But it doesn't really get talked about in favor of discussing the queer rep in the podcast.
another tiny example of collectively agreed upon fanon being quietly slipped into the canon of a franchise is the name for shiny Pokemon! They were originally called "differently-colored-pokemon" iirc (or something similar) with the name shiny only being used in official games starting in Gen 5. Until then, the word "shiny" had been a label applied only by fans--it just got so popular that it was made official!
Werent they called "chromatic pokemon" ? Maybe thats just the french translation, but thats always what they were called on the official wiki i used to browse 🤔
17:26 when Nico bought (stole?) a Happy Meal THAT HE DIDN'T EVEN EAT to just throw it in a hole in the ground and everyone just decided Happy Meals are a necessary background object in almost every single fanart of him, my boy can't escape the woobifying
I finished watching this hours ago and I only just realized... you posted this on Lunar New Year... the year of the TIGER. Well played, Ms. Z, well played. **slow claps in astonishment**
"Well, 2022 so far has been a wash - but on the plus side: I never have to hear about or learn anything new about BBC's Sherlock ever again for the rest of my life." *sees the new Sarah Z video has dropped* "Welp. Time to partake in that good ol' fashioned Sherlock bone hurting juice."
oh man bone hurting juice is a phrase i have not heard since... actually since fandom was still watching sherlock unironically i think. thank you for bringing it back into my life
@@jupitermelichios392 quick question for the purpose of internet etymology: what year would you guess that was in? i don’t remember seeing it on tumblr that much but i have a bad memory, so im not super aware of the phrase. but i just checked Know Your Meme, which said the origin was in 2016. I was graduating high school in 2016, and i was most involved with Sherlock fandom tumblr at least 3 years before then. If you remember seeing it before 2016, someone needs to update the Know Your Meme page. Tbh I feel like they RARELY credit tumblr, so that makes sense
I went into this year optimistic but we've already got violent protesters and a war. The 20s keeps being rough, I suppose we're getting some good stuff to numb the pain at least.
My first exposure to Chihiro gender discourse was seeing someone's tumblr dni saying "dni if you use he/him for Chihiro" and being very confused about why people were headcanoning Chihiro from Spirited Away as transmasc. Honestly wish I hadn't figured out who they were talking about, I got so excited for canon trans girl Chihiro only for that to not be the case 💀
I found this comment on a rewatch and still didn't remember there was a Chihiro other than the one from Spirited Away lol (Sidenote: my phone tried to correct 'Chihiro' to 'chirp' and I think that's funny)
@@naikigutierrez4279 chihiro from danganronpa has a funky plot line that makes it pretty likely that it’s him Because he pretends to be a girl because people bullied him for being weak It wasn’t really handled well in canon. Honestly I think trans man chihiro makes more sense than trans woman chihiro in danganronpa. That’s just me though.
41:13 - never forget: when Capcom collaborated with Material Crown to make Ace Attorney themed jewelry, they literally MADE A PAIR OF RINGS FOR THESE TWO. you speak the absolute truth
It's important to remember in Japan, young women are seen as a highly desirable demographic and appealing to them and their interests is 100% a thing. Capcom made Sengoku Basara (Samurai Kings in English) as a fighting game in '05. The assumption was, that guys were going to play it. Instead they found out the people buying it were women, who were pairing off all the male characters. Capcom went with it and made a lot more games, anime and stage shows. (And like Ace Attorney it got a Takarazuka Musical.) I'm truly not surprised to hear about themed jewelry for Ace Attorney. I use to have the Edgeworth official tea cup and saucer, but the saucer broke in a move.
i mean the ace attorney development team literally researched and read a bunch of BL manga to build their relationship after seeing how many people shipped them
@@rachelk7784 It's interesting because the demographic is treated no more or less seriously in Japan than any other with the combination of easy-to-meet standards and ample disposable income, but it comes across and bizarre pandering to the West, simply because it's a fandom of young girls and teens that is taken on their own merits instead of being regarding as the Official Punching Bag of all other media subcultures.
One thing that I love about your content is, that you still celebrate beeing invested in these Storys and fandoms. Often beeing a fangirl or shipper or consuming fanfiction and loving it is rediculed or labled as cringe. I don't have the words for this but it means a lot to seeing someone embrace their teen obsessions instead of condemning them.
NGL, I thought the title card said ‘Mormon and Fandom’ and thought it was going to be a deep dive into Christian fandoms, with a focus on Mormons in particular
As someone who wrote well-known MorMor fanfiction in not one, but multiple languages, something that greatly fascinates me is that while the English-speaking fandom eventually died out, the much smaller German and Russian communities continue to persist as part of the Sherlock fandom to this day. This definitely plays it's part in the way fandom culturally exists online.
a lot of fandoms actually persists in other languages even if they're smaller. i think most of it is due to the fact that what is "discovered" or the trends in the English fandom take longer to get to the other languages
This reminds me of my time in the Detroit: Become Human fandom. We were given like 2 non-verbal seconds of a character (RK900) and before long we had pretty much collectively decided on his personality and there were TONS of fics shipping him with various characters (Reed900 for life). This character didn't even exist in some playthroughs of the game if memory serves, like you had to get certain endings to even discover that he was a thing. And then all he did was stare. For literally 2 seconds. And said nothing. What was especially funny to me is that everyone ran with the idea of him being taller than the main character, Connor, even though they were very nearly the same model of android and there was zero height difference. Ahhh, I miss that fandom.
LMAO this ship is now one of the most prevalent parts of the whole fandom, the characters of RK900 and Gavin Reed are now fully fleshed characters with high quality fan-films about them. it truly is a strange phenomenon lol
@@elynotarobot3813 YEAH HAHAH I haven’t watched the big fan movie made about them yet but I want to 😂 my RK900 fic in AO3 is still my most popular fic on my whole account, I love it
this was in my brain the entire video!! it really says a lot that the entirely made up pairing Reed900 is the second most popular ship in my bookmarks (but who doesn't love two assholes joining together to find love?)
It’s videos like this, specifically describing how they decided everything about this character, that just makes me so happy that fandom culture is a thing. It’s rare, very very rare.
Fun fact: 'Macavity' from 'Cats' is clearly referencing Moriarty. He's the criminal mastermind and the description of him in the poem and song fits with Moriarty's description in the story.
They both are also referred to as "the Napoleon of Crime", iirc. There were zero attempts at subtlety. Macavity is Moriarty's fursona and nobody can convince me otherwise.
In a roundabout way, this makes me wonder about the existence of Les Mis in the Sherlock universe. Cats obviously could not exist in the same form, because Macavity is a blatant reference to Moriarty. If Cats didn't exist at all, would Cameron Mackintosh have still had the success and clout to produce Les Mis 4 years later? Obviously it _does_ exist in the Sherlock universe, Mycroft evidently pissed off the front of house staff by being on his phone in the auditorium, but _should_ it exist?
@@Seal0626 I'm not sure whether Cats would exist in the Sherlock universe. In the Sherlock universe, T.S. Elliot would not have had Doyle's canon to base his Macavity upon, as Sherlock Holmes would not have existed that early. There might be a collection of poems about cats, but the poem about Macavity would not be a reference to Moriarty. Thus, Cats would be a different musical if it existed. It might have been turned into a movie or not. Les Mis is not bound to the existences of Doyle's stories, so as long as Victor Hugo existed, Les Mis can have been written that way and can have become both a musical and a movie as in our reality.
love sarah's delivery of the entire dbz fandom bit, you could tell there was no gears turning behind the eyes, she was reading off the script in her mind and had no prior knowledge to inform it. absolutely amazing 10/10
This whole thing reminds me of that time the Danny Phantom fandom took a background character that was on screen for maybe 2 seconds and gave him a name, a backstory, a personality, a role in the narrative, dynamics with the main characters, 2 brothers, a dad, etc. He ended up being characterized as something of a conspiracy theorist who was the only person in Amity Park that understood that Danny was Phantom, but no one believed him, so he develops this mostly one-sided hatred for Danny as he tries to prove somehow that Danny and Phantom are the same person. It wasn't for shipping purposes, people were just having fun making a more compelling antagonist than Butch Hartman could ever write. We stan Wes Weston
I don’t know how best to describe it at the moment, but I must say that you are the uncontested QUEEN of this strange sort of fandom anthropology, and that I hope that it gives you as much joy to create as it gives me to listen to.
@@ha_des in Latin America, AKA where the hype for AF was strongest, instead of super saiyan it was translated into "Super Saiyajin" because saiyan sounds weird in Spanish
One of my favorite fandom canons is that Stiles Stilinski's dad (Teen Wolf) was named John. He was only ever called Sheriff or simply Stilinski in the show, and fanfiction authors needed a proper name. It was universally agreed to be John, and when his actual name was revealed to be Noah in season 6 at the very least the majority of authors took one look at the name and said nah. Second favorite is definitely the Harry Potter fandom having its own tag on ao3 declaring a fic would be ignoring the heavily disliked epilogue of book 7.
5:45 Omg I thought that was going to be a disclaimer about how Andrew Scott did something terrible and you don't support him or something. The fact that it was just gushing about how great he is and how he has a whole career not just Sherlock was such a wholesome surprise
I'm not involved in any fandoms, I've never had a tumblr, and I stopped watching Supernatural like a decade ago. But I still physically recoiled when you said "Cas" is canonically spelt with two Ss.
I still remember when they first spelled out "Cass" in one of the episode promos... I was still in the fandom on tumblr at the time, and every single person I followed was viscerally uncomfortable and refused to change from Cas
I've never watched Supernatural, so I shouldn't really have an opinion, *and* also I'm not really a prescriptivist... But I have a slight dog in this fight because the contraction of my name is very similar. "Cas" would usually be pronounced /kæz/ to rhyme with "as", while "Cass" would be pronounced /kæs/ to rhyme with "sass"
@@voland6846, eh. English is rarely consistent. And seeing as his name is Castiel, I think it's understandable that people would shorten it to "Cas" without adding an extra letter.
In the vein of “Fanon as course correction” I think one that’s hilarious is the Magnus Archives spelling of the main character “Jon/John”. The author (Jonathan Sims or Jonny) named the main character after himself (rip), he wanted to distinguish the character from the person in some way. So the official name is “John”. It’s in the transcripts, the wiki, etc. But the fandom collectively decided, “No, it’s Jon.” and ran with it. But this lead to the hilarious side effect that newcomers to the fandom knew that “One of the Jon’s is supposed to have an H in it” saw that the entire fandom called the main character “Jon”, so they would then misspell the *author’s* name as “Johnny”. The Magnus Archives fandom is also a fascinating look at consistency in fanon and characterization across a large number of people, especially where the main characters are concerned. Additionally, because it’s a podcast where the author chose to not describe the main characters appearances beyond details like “looks really tired”, all the main characters appearances were up to interpretation. But Jon’s appearance in particular was so consistent that I had to look through the wiki to see if him being from the Middle East or something was canon. It’s not. Same thing with him being nonbinary, and Martin being trans. Also not canon. But if you took a brief look through fandom circles it appears so often you’d be convinced that there was some sort of text behind it. It’s really fascinating!
I still remember when promotional material for Disney's Encanto came out and the TMA fandom took one look at Bruno and shouted THAT'S JON without even needing to consult each other
I agree! Even in academic literature, it is rather agreed upon that taking an example and generalizing it later is a much more organic way of approaching a subject. (For the math nerds out there, an example could be studying permutations as an example, before discussing Group Theory in Abstract Algebra!)
One of my recent fav fanon’s is just that Dean Winchester isn’t dead/completely ignoring the spn finale. They killed him and so many people just said no
I remember coming across MorMor when I was in high school and for some reason I thought Sebastian Moran was Sebastian Stan, but I didn't really know who that was except I'd heard the name in relation to Marvel stuff, so for a long time I thought people were just shipping Moriarty with the Winter Soldier.
I think an interesting case study when it comes to fanon is Blaseball. Blaseball is a surreal baseball simulation, where player get to vote on potential rules, but cannot interact with the actual simulated games. All of the characters in blaseball are randomly created, the names are drawn from a name pool. All the canon info we get on a character is a name, how they like their coffee, what team they play for, & their pregame ritual. However, as each team is kind of a mini fandom inside the wider Blaseball fandom, each character has their own entire fanon & headcanon. When characters switch teams, the members of those mini fandoms get together & share what the main ideas of that character is, how they could change when switching teams amongst other things. I think it's really interesting how some characters or ideas become so popular that they become canon. my favorite example comes to mind. When very popular character Landry Violence was incinerated, players started to say Rest in Violence instead of Rest in Peace when characters die, leading to fandom members saying things like "RIV to you but I'm built different" for example.
Theologian here. Watching this, I found it remarkable how similar Fandom type 3 is, and indeed fandom in general, to different denomination or whatever. Sociologically I recon the processes afoot here are identical. There's a genuine real life application for studying fandom here; analyzing and developing psychological/sociological theories to explain these phenomena could be used to help better understand religious conflicts and more. There's at least an essay waiting to be written here... Buck-wild innit?
Oh totally. 'Fandom' is very much a tribal phenomenon and describing something that Officially Happened as 'Canonical' is not a coincidence. Would you say that religions are a fandom, or that fandoms stem from religion?
I was really struck by how much it resembles pagan myth, but the parallels to Christian doctrine vs. the Bible are even more striking. Like how the modern conception of Satan seems to be almost entirely the product of extra-Biblical tradition. It's debatable if he's even in the Bible as anything other than a translation artifact, but if he is, he's clearly not that big of a deal.
In the thumbnail I misread "mormor" as "mormon" and it took up to minute 15 to realize the mistake, up until I kept asking myself "I wonder how the mormons tie into all this"
While I was watching this video, I wondered how many many people misspelled mormon on tumblr and ended up in a very different part of the internet than they were looking for.
One of the wildest fandom moments in the last few years for me was re-watching a show from my youth (Danny Phantom) and realizing half the things I remembered from it (save for plot beats) we’re actually things the fandom made up back when I was in it (ten years ago). I popped back in to see how that fandom is doing these days, and they’ve only collectively built from it (including completely making up a character that everyone just accepts as being a part of the story). Hilariously enough, the most prominent fanon I’m seeing in my fandom (MCU) is that, no matter how many times the films insist it was called ‘the Blip’, all fandom works I have seen just ignore that and continue to call in ‘The Snap’. It’s like stop trying to match the blip happen, it’s never going to happen lol.
i remember someone making a quiz to see if you could identify if something is canon or fanon and the majority of the phandom got more than 50% of it wrong haha
fun fact! tad strange is voiced by Cecil Baldwin, who also voices Cecil palmer from welcome to night vale! there's a whole bit in wtnv about how wheat and wheat byproducts are outlawed, and tad strange's line was about him being normal and enjoying bread. fun little easter egg and collab from two great medias! :p
My personal favourite Fanon is Literally the entire King Arthur mythos. What a plot people have come up with based on a couple lines in a 1000+ year old history book. And people are probably even more judgy about it than that Mormor person.
@@captainstabbin5374 I think Chaz is more refering to how some parts of the King Arthur mythos itself was just a few sentences or paragraphs, but have been enlargened into its significance as a sort of of Fannon while lots of other parts have remained fairly dormant.
@@captainstabbin5374 I think they're referring to Historia Regum Brittaniae, a semi-historical account of the kings of Britain which is the first extant document to mention King Arthur.
i can't believe i was today years old when i found out Cas is a fanon spelling, and that you and emily stabbed me in the heart by bringing roxel back up from the depths of my memories
If you ever see scripts for the episodes, Cas is always written Cass. On a funny note, some German supernatural fans have been making fun of the way it's spelled and are kind of calling Cas Cheese because of how Cas/s can sound like the word Cheese in some German dialects (Käs/Käß)
the sherlock fandom creating a character honestly reminds me of the Marauders fandom (of Harry Potter, like Sirius and all that), I'm not part of it but there's this really big fanfic they all love-All The Young Dudes- and I swear they have all created at least like four new characters and collectively they have all decided they just exist. It's kind of cool because quite a few of them are like POC and LGBTQ+ but it's just so strange as it's just fanmade.
I watched a marauders cosplay livestream once and a lot of the comments asked sirius "do you know Grant Chapman?" (One of the main OCs from all the young dudes) and it felt really weird because Grant is literally just from this one fic. Not all fanworks have to be set in the same universe. It was a *marauders* cosplay livestream, not an *all the young dudes* cosplay livestream. I personally like all the young dudes as a standalone story, but I don't worship it as universal marauders canon.
this is exactly what i thought of! and the fact that the fandom has just all collectively agreed on the fancasts for the marauders and they haven't changed since tumblr 2014 lmao. I've seen people say their favourite characters from harry potter are ones that don't even exist in the universe (eg grant chapman from atyd). i honestly sometimes forget these things arent in the original story
im gonna be honest. i was in the sherlock fandom. i would see moran in fics. i would have no idea who he was. now you're telling me i didn't miss an episode, he was FUCKING IMAGINARY THE WHOLE TIME????
Religion and Fanbases work essentially the same way in their core after all, religion is just a more serious larger scale form of fanbase in many ways.
I would go further and postulate that the internal episode premise is directly "how religions form" and then they decided to tell that story through a lens they have experience with.
Fallout equestria? That sounds rad. Maybe the same thing would have happened with me and my friend's teenage project, Grand Theft Animal Crossing, if it ever had gotten traction ^^'
Listening to these videos by Sarah Z feels like listening to a professor talking about textual transmission and narrative drift of Greek myths or Indian epics, which goes to show that the writings and art of online fan communities, often treated as something trivial and frivolous is just as rich and complex as any “classical” text and could be a good analogue to how culture and communities form and change throughout history. If one day fan culture and online communities become an area of historical study, I’m sure Sarah’s videos will become foundational secondary sources.
Absolutely! While listening to the whole thing I was thinking what an interesting comparison this all makes to the formation of the original forms of "canon" i.e. religious and mythological belief systems.
@@voland6846 Definitely! While watching this video I keep getting reminded of discussions regarding the inconsistencies and alternate tellings of the Mahabharata or the Trojan Cycle, and how as stories and myths get told and retold, things get added on, left out, while new characterizations and story arcs become "accepted" and formalized as part of the mythology (e.g. did you know that the characterization of Achilles as a "beloved" and Patroclus as the "lover" is entirely the invention of later greek writers and nowhere did Homer mention their roles?). It's just now that everything is in the hyperconnected, lightning-fast world of the internet, and as the result, we get to see narrative drifts and in-group cultural fermentation take place in real-time, instead of years in the pre-internet age. It's like looking into a bacterial culture under a microscope and it's fascinating. I sometimes wonder if any of our modern mass media, given enough time and narrative drift will become the basis of the next Epic of Gilgamesh or a new Poetic Edda.
i can't believe no one in the comments has mentioned Wes Weston from the Danny Phantom fandom (the Danny Phandom?) yet afaik, Wes started as a background character with no lines (and may have only showed up in one episode) who looked similar to Danny, which many fans used as an explanation for why nobody notices that Danny Fenton and Danny Phantom have the *exact same face*. (his name comes from another episode, where an inscription on a ring that's meant to read 'sam' is read upside-down as 'wes' for most of the episode.) a fandom in-joke then started that Wes was the only person in Amity Park who could see through Danny's half-assed pallete-swap secret identity, and he grew into a sort of Cassandra Truther conspiracy theorist who nobody believed, with a lot of headcanons doing the part of fleshing out his character and backstory. (having an older brother named East Weston, who also sees through Danny's disguise, but is chill and just doesn't care, is a popular hc and one of my favourites) Wes shows up in so many fan works you'd be forgiven for thinking he was a canon character, and many newcomers to the Phandom do. but he was constructed completely by a bunch of fans and fic writers desperate to get some sense out of a B*tch H*rtman show. anyway, tl;dr, i think Wes Weston is Neat :)
And if you search for 5 minutes you'll find a LOT of lore about Wes and his family, a lot of writers really expand on him and his background in fanfics for no other reason that it's fun. Wes is an unavoidable part of the Danny Phantom Fandom
YES I LOVE WES!!! Some other common things i see is "everyone instead thinks wes is phantom" and "wes' brother doesn't believe in ghosts but he's a huge stoner that believes strong in aliens"
I was WAITING for him to come up. Fandom created and agreed upon a whole ass character with a family that doesn't even exist in canon just because it's funny. And with that, it's a common occurrence and joke that we have no idea what's fanon and canon anymore. I guess that's what happens when a fandom continues to thrive despite the show ending in 2007...
@@ellenlisser5385 yeah, i remember learning that ghostly cores aren't really actually a thing in the show; frostbite mentioned Once the word core in reference to danny but its nothing like anything about ghost cores we have in fanon, its fucking crazy
Interesting Fanon fact: the Ben 10 fan-created wiki occasionally had details that weren’t included in the original shows added to it, usually the names of alien species or their homeworlds. Then, when the creators of Ben 10: Omniverse created the master brief for the series, listing information about the universe the series took place in so writers for the show wouldn’t conflict with each other, they obviously pulled some details from the fan-created wiki, as some of these fan-created details were put in the master brief, and therefore canonised. For example, one of Ben’s alien transformations, Eye Guy, wasn’t given an official species name or homeplanet. An anonymous user edited the fan wiki, claiming he was an Opticoid from the planet Sightra. Neither of these words were mentioned in canon works. Then, another user created a page for the planet Sightra on the wiki. Finally, when the Omniverse brief was written, the series creators pulled these details from the wiki, and canonised them. This is a rare instance of fanon *becoming* canon. Somewhat unrelated, but Ben 10 also has a *huge* fanon extension called ‘10 Years Later’, and it’s utterly fantastic.
Fun fact, there's another Sherlock reference in Cats where Macavity is described as "the Napoleon of crime", which was also a nickname Sherlock gave to Moriarty in the books
C'mon Sarah Z, you gotta know you can't just say "Incredibly popular ships like ... Cooper X Harry Truman." That's how, months from now you find yourself making another video explaining the fan subculture that ended up shipping a character from Twin Peaks and the 33rd President of the United States.
the whole "fanon so popular ppl forget its not canon" reminds me of oikawa's knee injury that everyone just accepts and genuinely felt tricked when someone pointed out that it really wasn't mentioned in the show
Omg yeah!! everyone (myself included) saw the knee brace in his design and just latched with the idea that he had a knee injury, also it didn’t help that it tied in nicely with his character backstory and the angst
Also can we also appreciate that the mormor fandom gave way into an even more niche, very specific ship of “what if Jim and Seb also had twins and also what if those twins were also dating?” Iconic. Shipper minds never cease to amaze me. Also this just made me want to draw Mormor in 2022 so thank you???
"Bramblepatch Cinderpelt" took me out for what, looking at my handle, are probably obvious reasons. Also, thanks for the Chihiro gender discourse war flashbacks LMAO
I just had a flashback to the time fanart of someone called "Sebby" appeared on my dash paired with Moriarty, much to my 15-year-old confusion. Mystery solved 10 years later!
as a trans person i am happy to see even the most slight mention of chihiro gender discourse was immediately followed by a screenful of repentance. thank you zarah and lady emily, bastians of the community
"...the anime best friend/rival trope is basically guaranteed to generate ships. (Narumitsu is canon btw.) But following behind..." On one hand, I'd love to see an in-depth Sarah Z video on something Ace Attorney-related someday... but on the other, it would be very cool and very, very funny if this was the only comment on the series across the entire channel
Oh that's ace attorney? Thanks! I was confused what Naruto ship this was supposed to be 😂😂 (note: i never enjoyed either of these franchises. But I know Naruto gets married someday)
Oh my god I’d love this! I was literally thinking it would cool to see a deep dive from Sarah about the history of the Narumitsu when she said it. It has consumed the last 2 years of my life, and it’s great to see the community thriving still :)
I would commit a wacky ass ace attorney murder if it inspired Sarah to make an AA video. I wasn't around the fandom much til two years ago and I'd love a history lesson
I was trying to think of an example of honest-to-goodness fanon in the Fire Emblem fandom (my main squeeze), and almost came up empty before I remembered that time we accidentally gaslit everyone reading about Norse mythology on Wikipedia into thinking Odin had a cool multishot bow called Ichaival, to the extent that this lore started appearing in other pieces of Norse-inspired media.
I know that in the Chrom x Robin fandom, it's a very popular scenario to have Robin become injured/incapacitated in some form while defending Chrom between chapters 10 and 11. This has been so thoroughly established in chrobin fics that we've all just developed a false memory of that happening in game? I literally had to check game footage and my "Art of FE Awakening" book just to double check it wasn't real. If I recall correctly, it originates from a very popular tumblr fancomic from 2015.
@@Notfallkaramell Not OP and I wasn’t in the MLP fandom but one example I know of is “Derpy Hooves” a background pony in the first episode who became a fan favourite due to an animation mishap giving her a lazy eye. She featured heavily in fanworks and the crew eventually made her a reoccurring background character (now intentionally crosseyed) and eventually even gave her a minor speaking role in one episode, along with official merch.
@@onyona MLP:FIM went so far as to have Rainbow Dash address her as "Derpy" in the original airing of "The Last Roundup", but then because the name was perceived as derogatory, the line was cut from reairings and it seems merch of her has settled on calling her "Muffins" (fanon being that she's obsessed with muffins because "Muffins!" was her only speaking line before then).
@@Notfallkaramell as another example, there was a male pony (stallion?) with an hourglass cutie mark who vaguely resembled the Tenth Doctor from Doctor Who who ascended from fanon to canon expy. His name was Time Turner, but everyone called him "Doc." He had a long multicolored scarf like the one the Fourth Doctor had and 3D glasses like the Tenth Doctor to name a few of MANY hints he was an expy of the Doctor. I want to add that in Doctor Who, the Doctor had a companion named Rose, who the show implied to be his girlfriend. The two were tragically separated and both were heartbroken. In MLP, Time Turner began appearing in the background with a pony named Rose. The two never had significant interactions on the show until TT was established as an expy. After that point, the two were always shown together whenever they appeared. In the last season, TT and Rose were seen showing romantic affection like handholding (hoofholding?) and hugging. Putting the two unrelated tertiary characters together was clearly motivated by Who fans to fill a void Ten/Rose shippers felt. To further emphasize fandom's influence, when TT finally got a speaking part, he was shown to be Derpy's good friend. Derpy and TT were heavily shipped in the fandom simply because both were two of the most popular background ponies. Despite apparent initial plans to write the two together, the writers wrote him interacting with Rose instead. That was how powerful the influence of Doctor Who fans were on the MLP show. It displayed a fandom favorite ship at first and overrode it with a VERY popular Doctor Who ship.
@@Notfallkaramell also, two ponies, DJ PON3 and a... classical music pony were huge in the fandom despite being background characters, and because they were both music ponies with different styles fandom shipped them. Then way later, an episode came out where the show DID write them to be roommates (oh my god they were roommates etc etc). Iirc it was the same episode where another fanon became canon, the one where time turner was revealed to be a literally doctor who reference and a friend of derpy hooves. And if im not mistaken, derpy hooves working at mail was ALSO a fanon creation that became canon.
The whole "fanfiction in which the characters of organization 13 are put in a WW2 setting don't read it if you know you know " part gave me the same feeling as when you see lava and it's really pretty you kinda want to stick your hand in it. I wanna know.... But do I ?
As someone who does not recognize that fic but has read many, many fics involving the Organization and other KH characters that I can unfortunately never unread, no, you do not.
This is why I think the next gen Harry Potter book failed. We had already come up with established appearances, personalities, and dynamics for ever single next gen character, going so far as to create our own (shout out to Frank II and Alice II)
“Frank II and Alice II” WAR FLASHBACKS. (God I hate that this made me feel nostalgic for the TERF books but at the same time I’m SO relieved to hear I’m not the only one to have come up with that)
