When Canon Gets Remolded in Our Image

About a decade ago, I had this online gaming pal who was only getting into Harry Potter as an adult via the movies and some of the games. They knew I had not only read the books but knew them in pretty intricate detail. It was one of my primary fandoms as a kid well before everything about the IP and its creator went to hell. It wasn’t uncommon for them, during downtime between matches, for them to ask me questions about things that the movies might have left out but were explained in the books. Usually it was plot or lore confusion, and I was happy to fill in any gaps.
Then they hit me with something I couldn’t answer.
“Hey,” they asked, “why is the Imperious curse illegal or whatever but the compulsion spell isn’t? Is that explained in the books?”
I thought through the question before responding, “what the hell are you talking about?”
This time, it wasn’t a movie question. My pal had also been reading fanfiction and had gone down some interesting rabbit holes of content. And apparently some things that had come up were a few different spells that never appeared in the movies. My friend assumed they were simply omissions. I was the one who had to break it to them that they don’t actually appear in the books, either. They’re totally made up by fanfiction writers as a collective..
The more prevalent fanfiction becomes, the more active the fandom creators become, the more that “fanon” starts to intercede with “canon.” It happened in a big way on TikTok after the release of the Fallout television show.
People new to the IP started digging into the lore of the Fallout universe as well they should. It’s the exact right reaction. If you’re not familiar with the lore, the vaults in the game are part of a large scale experiment on the human race. There are a few control groups, but most of them were designed around an experiment. In Vault 68, of the thousand person population only one was a woman. Vault 69 is the reverse of this gender distribution. The thing is, these vaults don’t appear anywhere in any of the games. They only exist as an abstract mention in a comic and in a repository of information that is no longer considered fully canonical. So as far as canon, we don’t actually know what happened in Vaults 68 and 69 an how those experiments actually turned out.
Browsing TikTok shortly after the release of the show, you would not think this was the case. There were a number of videos and comment sections that seemed to emphatically claim some very specific outcomes for these vaults. Claims that the singular woman was held as a queen. That the man was used for resources and left to die. Except these things didn’t happen in the setting. All assumptions of this continued narrative were speculative, theories created within the fandom with no backing by the original text.
So where did this assumption come from? Why so certain of something with no textual evidence? That’s the power of transformative works and fan theory. That it can invade the original IP with its influence. That it can muddle the lines between canon and fanon.
Long term, this affects our collective ability to adequately analyze the source material. If we can’t recall, top of head, what actually happens in the material and what doesn’t, can we trust our interpretation of the text? What about interactions with other fans? What if the information they believe to be part of the source material actually isn’t because they took fanon at face value? How can you have a conversation about something if you’re working off two slightly different versions of the material?
While fan theory has obviously always existed, fandom spaces have changed over the last fifty years to account for the rise of the internet. Once sequestered into smaller arenas, fandom discussion and the associated transformative works are more apt to bleed into general spaces. It’s easier to be a more superficial fan while gaining access to more complex theory. But without a deeper understanding of the source material, it’s harder to pick apart the fanon for supported and unsupported headcanons.
There’s nothing really to be done about it, necessarily. It’s a problem that doesn’t really exist beyond the odd individual interaction and can be pretty quickly resolved should it be an issue. But it’s still something to watch out for if only for its potential to degrade critical analysis.