Thanks. I'm glad people found the comparison interesting and useful. I don't know whether Buffy will have the longevity of Superman and it likely won't as few modern myths have had that kind of success, but it does, I can see something equivalent to Smallville in 2020, dealing with the origins of Buffy in a different way. Will Willow and Xander remain as canon sidekicks like Jimmy Olsen or would they make up new characters like Smallville did?

Returning to fan fiction, we can see that entire evolution of canon all at once in a single fic on Pens: wiccachicca's Cataclysm Cafe. The interpretations of Willow and Tara within her fic range from that of a batman-like heroine Winna and the cop Taryn to the Two Gay Wicca in the Big Rainbow House, where Willow and Tara are puppets with hair of yarn, Dawn's a ball of light, and Giles is a British mouse. It's interesting to look at this fic to see which elements of Willow and Tara's story and characters are preserved within each story, giving us enough data points to see what wiccachica sees as canon.

As for the division between fan fiction and canon, is a story fan fiction any longer once it becomes canon, i.e. scripts submitted by someone outside the writing team once they're accepted? What is something that was once canon but now isn't any longer?

p.s.: Here's a difficult work to classify: Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead. Is the play a fan fiction of Shakespeare or not? What would it mean if someone wrote a TV show focusing on two minor characters on BtVS, calling it say, Rosenberg and Maclay are Alive? Well, besides them getting sued by Fox.

I would consider Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead to be a Shakespeare fanfic now. Before I would have just said some sort of knock off. More to the point, if someone did do Rosenberg and Maclay are Alive, it would have to have Josswad's approval to get on the air. That would at least give it some legitimacy and take it a bit closer to canon. If he gave it definite approval, than it's canon. Josswad is the creator unfortunately.

Now it is possible that in such a series that once again W/T would be re-evaluated and maybe they might decide that they were never soulmates, and that they were wrong for each other and such. That would suck, and probably lead to the end of the show, but it could happen. Would it still be canon then? Yes, but much like season sux and severed, canon that no one accepts.

Smallville does seem like an AU fanfic. They are so far from the normal superman model as to have little in common with it. On the other hand, once so many different versions of a story do get out, and published in some format, they tend to dilute the canon. Since the published works do have the DC approval, one could say they are all a possible version of the true canon. They seem to stand between what would be just a fan fiction, and what would be the original creator's intentions and vision.

Garner

[quote:4d190d3c92]Quote:

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Yes, but much like season sux and severed, canon that no one accepts.

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[/quote:4d190d3c92] Garner: Too true. Though only the creator can do official "canon" IMHO if many don't accept it, then it may be official but it loses something as canon. If Joss did do another series with Willow and Tara in it, I doubt that I'd want to take the plunge since I sincerely doubt that he would change much of his "canon".

I've only see a couple of eps of "Smallville" but I agree on the AU bit. I'm not a big Superman fan but was a big Legion of Superheroes fan and read alot of Superboy. "Smallville" seems very AU to me with more of a teen show flavor than the superhero flavor of say Birds of Prey. I think that "Lois and Clark" was more in keeping with the comic canon for Superman but with a romatic emphasis (yeah that had a really bad patch the latter part of season 3 but I still enjoyed most of it).

I see Willow/Tara fanfic as giving us something extra beyond series canon: Willow and Tara together as a couple despite all. This to me enriches canon rather than dilute it. Willow and Tara "will always find each here" in fanfic unlike canon.

ETA: I want to thank Xita and all the pens moderators for keeping this board going to give us Willow/Tara fanfic beyond "canon".

I'm glad we can still discuss this topic despite our disagreements on how canon is defined, Garner. Your last post made an interesting point about getting a fan fiction on the air, which led me to make some speculations.

Despite the fact that the free market is one of America's core ideals, it's one that has never been implemented in practice. There have always been government restrictions on trade from tariffs to environmental and labor laws to the laws permitting the existence of corporations (something Adam Smith was against) and laws expanding and restricting corporate power. Some of these restrictions are good; others are bad.

One law in particular, permitted specifically by an Article of the Constitution, is copyright. Copyright grants the creator of a work a limited monopoly on its reproduction in order to encourage people to create new works. It's a good idea, though it has expanded far beyond its constitutional origins in recent years. For more discussion, see the Politics thread on the Kitten.

What if power had been transferred in the other direction, from corporations to the public? In particular, what if the restrictions on derivative works were removed?

What would be the result if fan authors could publish and sell their creations? Would they be able to drive Joss' novelizations off the market, and could they even displace the TV shows by selling a version that would interest another production company?

How would Joss fair in a free market?

In an attempt to get some quick numbers on how much fandom has influenced canon, I performed some googleshare calculations to get an estimate of who owns how much of the mindshare of Willow and Tara on the web. Googleshare is a simple concept, simply calculating the percentage of Willow and Tara (or whatever you choose) sites that reference a particular person.

As expected, Joss comes out on top, but not by too much. Here are the numbers:

Name	Googleshare	Notes
Joss	5.92%	(down to 4.02% for "Joss Whedon")
Little Willow	5.52%	Owns several W/T sites
fic	2.96%	Sites that mention fan fiction
Near Her Always	2.23%	Willow fanfic archive
The Bear	1.15%	Fanfic author (avoid if you like W/T)
Kitten	0.71%	This may not always refer to this board
Extra Flamey	0.37%	W/T fanfic archive
Xita	0.15%	Operates the Kitten, you might have heard of her
Hunter Ash	0.14%	Fanfic author
Rainbow Writers	0.12%	Fanfic author
Lisa Countryman	0.08%	Fanfic author
Tommo (Ruth)	0.07%	Fanfic author

Less than 6% of the W/T web mentions Joss, but a little less than 3% mentions fan fiction so canon is ahead of fandom by a 2:1 margin by those numbers. Interestingly, no single site or person has anywhere near a majority share of the W/T web and, as expected, most fan fiction authors are represented by a small number of sites.

If you're interested in calculating your own googleshares, go here.

ETA: sorry about the spacing preceding the table, but ezboard adds that and I can't remove it.

I don't think Smallville represents AU so much as an attempt to modernise an existing canon; not to mention some elements that would work in one genre wouldn't in another. Superhero comics seem to have been most prone to this. All the X-men outfits were extensively altered for the movies, since on real people they would have looked silly. Spidermans original spider is gentically engineered not radioactive. And lets face it Supermans read and blue looks odd in the real world, and the notion he simply takes off his glasses and no one recognizes him? Oh please! Some canon just need a rewrite every so often to avoid going stale.