5 Interesting “Fanons” in the Buffyverse Fanfic Community

I know I haven’t updated in over a month. School’s hard and stuff. After writing 10+ page lab reports a week on top of school and work, this site has not been my first priority. Bite me. That doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about posts I could make in the meantime. Here’s one of the shorter ones.

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I’ve been reading Buffy fanfiction for many years now, but incredibly periodically. One thing I do notice is that the fanfiction community has seemed to carve out its own reality in terms of the Buffyverse that mirrors but differs slightly from details in the show. These details may be small and insignificant, but what happens is its written into one story, which is read by many other ficcers, who unknowingly incorporate it into their fic and soon the entire community believes something happened in the show when it never really did. These are called “Fanon” (fan-canon). While reading this webpage that summarizes several canon vs. fanon, I thought the following common mistakes in fanfiction are worth note to all you fanficcers out there.

5 Reasons Why Sunnydale Is NOT a “one Starbucks town”

Sunnydale is one Hellmouth of a town (ahahaha…ok, not funny). It’s the perfect horror-movie cliche of the quiet little innocent town which is either secretly or eventually overrun by vampires, demons and/or the forces of darkness. With all that brewing in and beneath the ridiculously expansive sewer system, stats like Sunnydale (pop. < 40,000) being home to 42 churches and 12 cemeteries seem about right.

However, early on in the series (re: Welcome to the Hellmouth aka the Pilot), Xander establishes that “not much goes on in a one Starbucks little town like Sunnydale.” Maybe it was because Xander didn’t get out much or read the local news, maybe it was because he was just so lovebly naive back in the day, or maybe it was a throwaway line in an episode that has its continuity shattered again and again as the series progresses. But if you watch the whole series, I mean really watch it with a magnifying glass, you may find subtle details that seem to contradict that very statement. Or, if you have optical nerves which connect to your brain, you may notice these 5 pieces of evidence that hilariously fly in the face of Xander’s claim.