#duke thomas in the corner with literally 0 canon that fanon knows...

[casscainmainly]

there's a good couple things about popular fanon that I really hate but the things that always sticks out to me is what they choose to keep from canon for instance, morrisions Talia Al Ghul, some fanon only fans who very proudly say they've never read a comic sure do love to bring up how Talia was portrayed in Morrisions batman run like they've actually even read it

God this is so real. Evil Talia enduring for so long is a testament to how most fanon demonises characters of colour to prop up White favs. Evil Talia exists to prop up Good Dad Bruce, and canon is a convenient excuse to justify that. (This is an issue for canon fans, too; there are some very ungenerous interpretations of characters based on 1 badly written moment or run).

But yeah for most popular fanon 'canon', it's either villainising a POC or victimizing a White boy. Fanon's love of Red Robin 2009 is a good example of this - it's the ultimate White boy victim/evil POC story. Of course it's not, because anyone who reads it knows that neither Tim or Damian are written as unilaterally right or wrong, but that nuance is lost in vague Tumblr posts and out-of-context screenshots.

Everyone picks and chooses canon, that's inevitable given the medium. But where most canon fans pick and choose based on characters they love, fanon seems to choose canon based on who they don't like/who to exclude. So you have Damian cutting Tim's line, the weird endurance of cop!Dick/the 'Tim and Arkham' thing, evil Talia, Cass being in HK... all of this canon centers on removing or villainising characters of colour.

Not all fanon fans are like this, a lot of them genuinely love these characters. But if your love of a White character is predicated on tearing down a character of colour, especially when you've never taken the time to understand anything about them, that's when it stops being harmless fun.