I really love it when an AU gets so popular that it develops its own canon. It’s such an interesting phenomenon. It’s Goncharoving at a way more local scale and it’s been happening forever. Certain aspects of the AU get so popular that they’re treated as canon within the bubble they were created in and you get new head canon that is compliant with the new lore. I’m calling it fantext but i don’t know if it has an actual name.
Danny Phantom has built an extensive fantext, from Wes Weston to ghost biology and anthropology to Infinite Realms Politics. Most recently the Coltland Gentry/Coltland Twins AUs have built up a huge cache of Fantext. From Seavers being a stage name to Sierra Six never contacting them to the timeline of the three movies matching up.
I love fan text because it’s different from fanon. In my head, fanon is a popular headcanon that influences the way people view the character as a whole (see: Tim Drake and his coffee addiction) but fan text is a whole, intricate canon derived that almost acts as a separate body of work only sort of connected to canon at all and is accepted as “canon” within it’s own bubble.
Fan text becomes so ubiquitous that any major deviation from it starts sounding “out of character” or “detached” because it doesn’t follow the accepted canon anymore even though the canon they’re deviating from doesn’t exist.
I think it’s such an interesting part of healthy fandom culture that we can develop and maintain our own, new versions of stories from the ones we love. We really are all just sitting here playing with our Barbie dolls
