So the reason I love fanfiction is intertextuality. I love allusions to canon woven into a new narrative, and building in my mind the complex web of references that all contextualize each other. It's those links that add depth of meaning to a fanfic, metatextual weight to characters and locations. I think the better the transformative process of fanwork, the more of the original it carries inside, the denser and richer points of reference to the story on the other end. If you think of a canon fact as a color, the more vibrant the fanwork, the bigger thrill I get from it. It lights up more of my brain.
There's this thing I like to do where I will find a media property that I know nothing about but has a sufficient high quality body of work, obikin, geraskier, merthur, etc. I will read thousands of fanfics and build up a mental map of the series in my mind, noticing things referenced by multiple stories in different ways and trying to extrapolate back to an original event in the canon story. The more references to an event, the more specific and real it is, whereas other things referenced by one or two people exist in a quasi real state, smaller nodes in the network as it were.
Once I've built up a robust mental map of a story, I will watch the series. I will watch the Clone Wars, the Witcher, Merlin, etc., and compare my expectations with the reality of the canon narratives. I will observe the ways in which fandom skewed the story via emphasis, or where it improved the story via giving interiority to characters in traumatic or intimate moments. Once I've finished watching the series, and have canon fixed in my mind, I reread all my favorite stories with a richer mental picture of each one, really savoring the work of the author in engaging with a story I love.
I genuinely think this is a sort of wish fulfillment from my time as a classicist where all we could do was build up a mental map of the extant texts, but there was no way to ‘watch the original’ as it where, no way to check how historians and poets transformed their experience. It's a guilty pleasure to apply the same conceptual mapping skills I learned for antiquity to pop culture, one degree removed from reality, but I enjoy it so much and spend way too much time doing it (when I should be writing). I wonder if other people do this though, it's kind of a tumblr ass hobby lmao
