Fanon

I would have finished the previous post last night but I got distracted reading comics-related articles at Wikipedia. Fanon held my attention longer than most. It describes a fact or an ongoing situation related to popular fiction that has been used so much among fandom that it has more or less been established as happening in the fictional world: it's a portmanteau of "fanatic" and "canon".

In Star Wars, for example, it's fanon that Han Solo was a lieutenant in the Imperial Army until he liberated Chewbacca from enslavement. It doesn't contradict anything on film and provides fertile ground for spin-off stories. Some believe that Jar Jar Binks died when the Death Star obliterated Alderaan in A New Hope and I suspect that's motivated less by admiration for the original work.

When elements of Enterprise didn't marry with a whole host of widely-accepted fanon facts about the origins of the Star Trek universe, a portion of its core fanbase were anti- it from the start. It can't be pleasant to be crucified by the monsters you created based on stuff they made up. Enterprise visibly shifted its focus - for the second time - in its fourth season and began to use people and places from the original series more but this was, to detractors, just further evidence of a lack of clear direction. (Anyone who watched faithfully til the end was rewarded with one last slap in the face: a final episode where the main cast are seen only in recordings watched by characters from The Next Generation. Burn!)

Cf. fanwank and retcon, but only if you're fascinated already.