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The case of the fan's explanations becoming Canon.

Fanon is "promoted" to Canon mainly because the theme or subject of the fanon had not been planned out by the author beforehand. Whether it's officially adopted into canon is another matter, but most of the time the author sees some minutiae they hadn't thought too much of themselves as a decent enough explanation that they don't mind and don't want to joss it into oblivion. This is much more common in amateur works, such as fanfic and webcomics, which often aren't planned from the start.

Small Doujin companies are infamous for this sort of thing, as their characters are designed and occasionally modified accordingly to appeal to their fanbase.

If a particular work has a long and continuous run, fanon may be promoted to canon because a Promoted Fanboy is now calling all the shots.

When this happens between fictional characters, it's a Sure Lets Go With That. Compare with I Knew It, where the crazy fan explanation happens to match the one the author had planned all along. Contrast Jossed, when popular fan theories are explicitly sunk by Word Of God or onscreen events.

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Examples

Anime

• The author of One Piece has a question and answer column, but half of the time when someone asks about a fact he'll agree with any reasonable guess the writer makes (for instance several of the main characters' birthdays).

Comic Books

• Marvel Comics would often get reader mail that would try to explain away some of the continuity or logical fallacies in the stories. A sufficiently clever explanation would win the fan a "No Prize". When some apparently-not-so-clever fans started writing in asking when they would recieve their No Prize, Marvel responded to them by mailing them... an empty envelope. Sadly, this practice has fallen to the wayside, though oddly the empty "No Prize" envelope is considered of some value by the more hardcore fans.

Film

• Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End featured one of these when Keith Richards was written into the film as Captain Teague, Keeper of the Code after, as Terry Rossio put it, "the world collectively woke up one day and decided that Keith Richards was going to be in these films." This was likely due to Johnny Depp discussing it in interviews, since he was an influence of Depp's portrayal of Jack Sparrow.
  • It happened again in the same film with Barbossa's first name becoming "Hector," an idea that was worked out privately with Depp and Rush while filming Curse of the Black Pearl, and caught on with fans after Depp mentioned it in the DVD's commentary.
• In the live-action Transformers, a very common fan theory was that Starscream was among the F-22s that fire on Megatron in the climax. The producers haven't said definitely that it's canon, but their stance so far has been "Sure, why not?"

Literature

• In one of the books of Piers Anthony's Xanth series, Prince Dolph (who is still a child) manages to find himself engaged to two different women, both of whom have to marry him Because Destiny Says So; one, Nada Naga, because of a prophecy, and the other, Electra, because she's under a curse that will kill her if Dolph doesn't go through with the marriage. Obviously, he can't marry them both, and to make matters worse, although Dolph prefers Nada, she would much rather be Just Friends, while Electra really does love him. Piers Anthony's originally planned resolution, to occur in a later book in the series, was to have him marry Electra, divorce her one day later, and then marry Nada, who will get around the whole "not in love" thing by voluntarily drinking a Love Potion. However, a reader spotted a loophole in the prophecy — to "marry" someone can also mean to perform their wedding ceremony. After reading this fan's letter, Piers Anthony quickly rewrote the ending, and Dolph and Electra lived Happily Ever After. (Anthony has openly allowed the Xanth fandom to run the asylum through write-in submissions for years, so there are many other examples of readers' suggestions becoming Canon.)
• In later Harry Potter books, after The Movie makes "I never said that!" into Hagrid's Catch Phrase, it become one in the books as well.
  • Also in the Potterverse, J. K. Rowling revealed after the publication of the last book that Dumbledore was gay. This troper knows many people who believe this was an example of her conceding to fan theory, however it is more likely that this is an example of I Knew It. (Flamboyantly plum velvet suit, anyone?)
    • Some, more cynical, people (like this troper) suspect that she simply thought she hadn't had any press coverage for a while and thought a "startling revelation" about Dumbles would give her a week's worth of column inches...
    • This troper has to agree; if Dumbledore was going to be gay to help highlight the books nearly anvilicious message against discrimination, it would probably have been a bit better if anyone had actually thought he was gay. Besides crack pairers, I mean.
    • Or that she thought parents wouldn't buy it if she revealed that before it came out. Of course, those same parents probably wouldn't be buying anyway; they'd rather be burning it.
  • This has also been used for more minor errors, like when it was brought to her attention that Marcus Flint seemed to have repeated a year. Her response: "Either I made a mistake or he failed his exams and repeated a year. I think I prefer Marcus making the mistake." [1]
• Terry Pratchett has, in the past, used the example of football as being a fan-suggested topic for a Discworld novel that will probably never be written. There is now (Aug 2008) a DW novel in the pipeline that is reportedly going to be about football.

Live Action TV

• Star Trek: The Klingons' gaining forehead ridges between the original series and the movies and later series has long been a subject of fan speculation. In a Deep Space Nine Time Travel episode, two popular fan theories are brought up by two non-Klingon characters, but are told by Worf that Klingons don't discuss the situation with outsiders. Eventually, the prequel series Enterprise, which had ridged Klingons, had to tackle not just the "how'd Klingons get ridges?" question, but "how'd Klingons lose their ridges and then get them back?" A multi-part episode shows it happening in a way that actually incorporates both theories.
• Doctor Who The popular fan theory about a series of unaired adventures known as "season 6B" that is used to plug up continuity holes has been used in some of the spin-off media.
  • Eve Myles' characters Gwyneth and Gwen Cooper were originally meant not to have any relationship to one another, but fans continued to speculate about it. The Series 4 finale briefly explains the resemblance as "spatial-genetic multiplicity".
• Canonically in Torchwood, after thousands of fan fiction stories, Ianto Jones now makes the best cup of coffee in the world, to the extent that it's one of the reasons he got a job at Torchwood in the first place.
• Jack O'Neill and Samantha Carter of Stargate SG-1 were originally not intended to have romantic feelings for each other. Only when the fans began the Jack/Sam ship did the show writers realize that, indeed, the chemistry was there, and began working this into their story. Whether or not it was actually to the benefit of said story, though, is another question.
• A version of this is said to have happened on Friends. Chandler and Monica were not originally intended to be a couple, but after a few (quite innocent) hints at flirtation between the two characters a large fanbase grew on the Internet sometime during the third season. The two characters ended up marrying, after having a one-night-stand in the fourth season finally.

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer 40000 had the Eye of Terror campaign, where three Disorder players advised other players where best to attack. They called themselves the Triad. The next campaign newsletter detailed the lore of what happened, especially the Galactic Conqueror ... and his advisers, the "mysterious group known only as the Triad." Another fan, on the Tau Empire Third Stage Expansion front, posted messages as "Sa'Caea Sally", a human sympathizer urging the citizens of the Imperium to join the Tau. This also got a mention in the newsletter.
  • There was also one particular Order player, Canoness Astra, who had a Sisters of Battle army that coordinated the defense for one of the sectors of the war and got special mention in the game newsletters and in the summary at the end of the war.

Video Games

• Silent Hill 3's plot, which explains what was going on behind the largely Mind Screwy first game of the series, bears a remarkable resemblance to several of the predominant fan theories with the same purpose. Whether this was a case of Sure Why Not or I Knew It has never been confirmed by the developers, but the original Silent Hill really is trippy enough the writers may not have known what was going on.
• In a case of one hand of a company doing this with another, Super Mario Bros 2 was really a different game in Japan that was modified into Mario characters. Nevertheless, many enemies from it have since become part of the "real" games.
  • This is less of an example than it might seem, since all the games in question were made by Shigeru Miyamoto; he was just re-using his creations elsewhere (and, in fact, Doki Doki Panic — the game that was modified into Super Mario Bros 2 — already contained many elements from the Mario series before its conversion, such as invincibility stars, identical coins, and POW blocks.)
    • Actually, they had originally turned it into a Mario game just so Doki Doki Panic would sell in the United States. Japanese fans were upset that the US would be getting a Mario game when they wouldn't and started complaining. This led Nintendo to re-release Doki Doki Panic in Japan as Super Mario USA. In other words, Nintendo got to sell the exact same game twice due to fan demand. (Well, not quite exactly...)
• The DS originally stood for "Developer's System", and was just meant to be a code name. But the press kept insisting it stood for "Dual Screen", so Nintendo just made DS the official name.
  • This troper thought it was a pun, and it meant both... The two screens are the most obvious new feature of the system.
• This is more or less how the Touhou characters Koakuma and Daiyousei got their names: they originally had no official names, so fans called them by descriptive terms (respectively, "little devil" and "great fairy"). Then series creator ZUN started referring to them by those names in interviews ...

Web Comics

• Penny Arcade's Gabe and Tycho are commonly confused for actual avatars of its two designers, fueling a common joke that artists will never draw characters who actually look like them. Both real life creators mention this was never their intention; very early strips even give the characters different names, and in podcasts they talk about them as distinct people. Eventually they got tired of correcting people and decided to roll with it, incorporating more of their personalities into the characters, though at this point any real similarities are The Artifact.
• Many fans claim that Order of The Stick's author originally intended Vaarsuvius to have a specific gender, but deliberately made it ambiguous after a few fans started bickering about V's gender early on. The author confirmed this in the first compilation book.
• Mega Man's Crouching Moron Hidden Badass behavior in Bob And George was originally just an unexplained joke. Then some continuity-minded fans noticed that an earlier strip gave a surprisingly plausible reason for this behavior, and Dave Anez ran with it.
• This page of Darths And Droids shows the process in action. So that's where the midi-chlorians came from.

Western Animation

• The Decepticon's ship in Transformers: Beast Wars was unnamed, but Terrorsaur once told Cheetor "Welcome to The Dark Side" when he ended up on the ship. Though he was just being theatric, fan use of the name lead to the name being used for the Bot Con 2006 (convention run be the officially Hasbro-licensed fan club) exclusive toys and the accompanying comic book (as Darksyde), and thus the official name.
  • Similarly, Marty Isenberg like the Fan Nickname for Lugnut's exploding-rocket-fist-thing ("Punch of Kill Everything") so much he had the name used in the fourth issue of the comics.
• Many fans of Kim Possible theorised that Mrs. Possible's first name was "Anne". The name was used the series two-part finale. Of course, to make this work, one must mention that the creators would occasionally visit fan forums.

Real Life

• A strange example: In the You Tube debate during the primaries, Barack Obama was asked if he would meet with the president of Iran. His response? Sure Why Not; a variation of that proposal eventually became a plank of his campaign in the 2008 elections.

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