Category talk:Fanon Characters

Category Creation Discussion

Conversation posted on Discord 26 June 2022, ported to Fanlore 17 August 2022:

OfMonstersAndWerewolves (talk): Do we have a category or template for fan characters?

Kingstoken (talk): Do you mean like fan created original characters?

OfMonstersAndWerewolves (talk):Yeah, those fan created characters that gain popularity in the wider fandom.
I don't think there's many examples on Fanlore tbf. The only one that came to mind before I created Tanabi's page was Elyza Lex, or whatever the name is.

Kingstoken (talk):We don't have templates for Original Characters, you would just use Template:CharacterProfile, and from what I've seen those characters would be categorized in the fandoms which they are popular, for example Elyza Lex is categorized in both the Fear the Walking Dead and The 100 fandom.
At this point I don't know if it would be worth it to create a separate category, not unless we get a lot more articles on Fanlore.

flyingthesky (reili) (talk): RK900 and Matt the Radar Technician are the two that i know of off the top of my head

quaelegit (talk):I'd probably use the regular character template and just put a note in the "other" section that they are fan-created, or fanon-only, or similar
HAH, just stumbled across another fan-created character by total coincidence 😛 Figwit

flyingthesky (reili) (talk): just remembered the two female characters les mis fandom made up to put in fic and only one has a page but: Musichetta

KittyCesario (talk): I don't know if you meant made up as in the fandom has had to construct a lot of her personality or made up as in she wasn't in the canon but Muschietta was in the Brick

flyingthesky (reili) (talk): i mean, the character as she exists is almost entirely fanon
but also there's a post in the les mis fandom about how there's like no women in the brick so fans created a women out of two sentences and people could not reliably tell if it was referring to muschietta or floreal and we all went "oh........... we did it TWICE"

quaelegit (talk): I can't really help here b/c I don't know anything about Les Mis fandom, but it would be nice if we could fill in the fanlore page about what personality (and other character traits) are popular fanon for her. Right now the page doesn't really convey that fandom has constructed much for her Have updated the page based on the discussion and links shared in here today, but as always if people know more/have corrections feel free to overwrite etc

quaelegit (talk): ooh that post would be great to add to the page if we can find it
lol no luck finding anything like that yet but here's a coffeeshop AU about yet another only-named-once woman in Les Mis, ^{Archived version} 😛

flyingthesky (reili) (talk): it's this post, ^{Archived version}

quaelegit (talk): BRAD WAYNE!! can't believe i forgot him earlier, he came up when y'all were getting BatFam ready for Featured Article status

quaelegit (talk): [reply to reili] thank you!!

KittyCesario (talk): There may have been a few oc ravager crew from the guardians of the galaxy fandom

sanla (talk): Speaking of fan characters do we need a page for mesperyian?
Fanmade greek goddess which has circulated around tumblr at least

OfMonstersAndWerewolves (talk): I think there's enough there to create a fanon character category
Do you think the category should be 'Original Character' or 'Fanon Character'?

Kingstoken (talk):I think Fanon Characters might be a better choice, just because we have a category for original fiction (mostly written in zines), and I think it might be a little confusing

enchantedsleeper (talk): I think that makes sense!
Though Reili's example is a good illustration of how the definition of a "fanon character" can get a bit grey, as there are some characters that are created almost wholesale by fandom but still exist in canon. Daphne Greengrass in Harry Potter seems like a prime example (although I don't know if she ever had a consistent fanon characterisation, I just know she was popular for shipping). We may want to put some guidance on the category page for what constitutes a fanon character as opposed to a blank slate type canon character

quaelegit (talk): yeah i don't feel we've drawn a clear enough distinction in this conversation so far to merit a category, tbh
Like, between Brad Wayne, Musichetta, and... say, Draco Malfoy (a regular canon character with some very popular fanon presentations that diverge a lot from canon), i don't really see why we should make a category of the first two? I see a stronger case for making a category for just the Brad Wayne types -- "You're not going to find anything about this character in fandom wikis because this character doesn't exist in canon at all" (...although I did just find a "Brad Wayne-Prince" on the DC Comics fandom.com wiki.....seems an unrelated coincidence, as far as I can tell :O)

enchantedsleeper (talk): My thought was that yeah, we should just use it for wholesale original characters, because otherwise it may become difficult to know where to draw the line - how much of the character needs to be fanon for it to count? However, I'm not sure how many of those we will actually have

quaelegit (talk): i could probably make pages for at least three or four more from ATLA fandom if I feel up to it 😛
However, I'm still confused about what is "original" enough to count. Like, Figwit that I linked above... the character literally exists in the movie, in that there's a character playing an elf there, fans just filled in all the details about him, including (some of?) his names. Matt the Radar technician was made up wholesale... by SNL, and played by Adam Driver. Does that count as fan-created?

MarineHaddock (talk): I think it's also a case of having a canon character page with a sub category about how the fandom characterises them and why they're significant in fandom does the job to the same effect

quaelegit (talk): i'd rather just read about that in the "fanon" section of the page than try to figure out what the subcat means, personally

enchantedsleeper (talk): Do you mean subcategory or subsection, MarineHaddock?

flyingthesky (reili) (talk):on matt the radar technician there's the snl character that's actually kylo ren and then there's the wholly fanon character of "matt the radar technician" who exists outside of kylo ren
so the better example is rk900 who shows up for 5 seconds in one ending of a game with multiple endings and is like. hardly better than a background extra.

enchantedsleeper (talk): Still though, as little canon as some of these characters have, they still have some canon and so I can imagine there will be inevitably be questions like "well how much canon is enough to make a character not fanon?"

enchantedsleeper (talk): RK900, Figwit, and Musichetta are all solid examples of characters who are 95% fanon. But what about Arthur from Inception? Or Hux from Star Wars? And yes you can argue they're also kind of the same character because of the Fandom Ghost

flyingthesky (reili) (talk): hux has an entire novel about him at this point

enchantedsleeper (talk): Ok, but he's also pretty infamous for having next to nothing in the films and so fans just gave him a personality

MarineHaddock (talk): I meant section my bad

enchantedsleeper (talk): No worries, I figured that was it!

OfMonstersAndWerewolves (talk): The character I categorised as such, Tanabi, is a fanon character in the sense that whilst his original creation seems to have been to explain the cub at the end of the first film, the history of canon's explanation of the cub means that he's basically his own thing, and literally nothing was given to us in the film itself, not gender, not name. When the Kopa books came out, the cub was unofficially Kopa, when Simba's Pride came out the cub was implied to be Kiara by Disney, now I believe it's established to be Kion? Either way, it technically means Tanabi is purely fanon at this point, and whilst he's not as popular as he once was, he will occasionally be used every now and then. Another example that I would like to include is Nancy, apparently a fanon character in the OUAT fandom who never appears. Literally just completely made up. But I don't know enough about her as of yet to make a page for her. Just so you know where I was coming from.

quaelegit (talk): yeah, that sounds pretty similar to Figwit! It seems a pretty common method for developing OCs in fandoms with visual source texts, to take a character that is seen on screen (or perhaps in a panel of a comic) with no information given about them, and invent your own character details

Category Guidelines Discussion

My takeaway from the quoted discussion above is that, while several of us editors feel that there is an important distinction to be made between fan-developed characters and fan-elaborated characters with some canon basis, none of us feel confident trying to draw a clear line between the two. Which is fine, I think, a lot of things on fanlore are up to editor judgement. If people DO have more concrete/actionable suggestions for guidance on what to include in this category, I would appreciate seeing further discussion in here.
Right now, my intuition would be to include characters that are technically in canon but have very little info (such as Tanabi, who prompted the creation of this category, or Figwit). I would also want to include characters like Therin of Andor who started entirely as fanon but later got incorporated into canon -- particularly, in that particular case, it seems like most of the fanlore-relevant discussion of the character was about the pre-canon activity around him. But Musichetta or even movie Hux are over the line of feeling "canon enough" that I wouldn't include them in this category. That is just my personal judgement, based on what I've read about the canons they belong to. I would definitely be open to more discussion on either of them, or on trying to lay down more extensible guidelines for what to include in this category. -- Quaelegit (talk) 08:29, 18 August 2022 (UTC)