When someone tells you to "respect the canon"

 

Can you believe that someone, in a limping grammar and with a punctuation that, generously, we could call "wrong" just tagged us in a post about ships that "allows" (who allows? Is there a ship police?) writing that we can't ship (yes, us personally, there was a section aimed at us) Maddie Fenton and Vlad Masters because it's not a canon ship? 

Oh, apparently we have to respect the canon. We have to adapt, you know, hehe? We have to see things from the point of view of Butch Hartman, the criminal who scammed all the people who invested in his alleged network (which never saw the light of day), the homophobic, sexist one, the one who told a voice actress that her colleague's suicide was her fault, the one who didn't want to pay an artist who animated an entire pilot for him... we have to respect the canon of his work. 

But... no? We don't have to?

Transformative works are just that, transformative, they serve to create something that has a different appeal, a different plot, a different world. And a work like Danny Phantom, a cartoon released in 2004, directed by Butch Hartman, with more plot holes than Swiss cheese, is deliciously good mainly for this purpose: to be transformed. 

The fandom, creative and restless, was not satisfied with the broken half-answers about the world of ghosts, it was not satisfied with the two-dimensional characters, it was not satisfied with the ending. Everyone does their own thing, and this is the beauty of Danny Phantom: not the "canon" of Butch Hartman, but the way in which each fan manages to project a part of themselves into the story. 

So no, we don't care at all about "respecting" the canon. The canon doesn't exist, it constantly contradicts itself, it has a timeline that wouldn't work in reality, dates that mean nothing, unclear abilities of the protagonists, and many, many characterizations sent to hell by the series itself.

What we write (or draw) could potentially be perfectly canon-compliant if we look at the way the series changes its approach to its characters in an unstable way. 

And there's also another thing to keep in mind: even if the original writer of a work was perfectly respectable, even if we loved the original canon, we could still try our hand at transformative work, because creating other universes with the same characters is a love letter to the original. Always and in any case. 

To answer the very long original question (can you believe that... blah blah blah... is there anyone who bothered us with these silly things?), we're almost certain that you do believe it.

That, in a way or another, this happened to you too.

There are a lot of people nowadays who bother you (and us) on the internet, netiquette is just a distant memory, and rudeness and lack of "media literacy" reign supreme. Don't be like them. 

Create, change, ship, have fun, love what you do. 

But remember to never bother people about stupid things like canon adherence, especially if the person you're bothering never had any pretensions of canon adherence! Otherwise you'll end up in a world where no one wants to create stuff for your favorite fandoms anymore, and then you'll be left without art, without literature, without color. And then you can sit there and admire your canon, forever, unchanging and often unsatisfying.

Without art, without literature, without color, without coffee shop au, without rare ships, without ever exploring things from the other characters' point of view, without ever enjoying the fantastic transformations of a world that, without fans, will die. A story is contained in itself, if no one continues it, and it will never come out of that box. 

Be the people who make it come out of the box... and make it live forever.