This is what I saw:

ALTAVERSE WARNING - This is an ALTAVERSE. Events,
characters and the like may not resemble canon. People who are
rabid canon-thumpers beware! (and eat a Dragon Slave while
you're at it)

So what is a canon anyways?

Canon is what the creative team behind whatever series you're writing about
has come up with. It's what someone who has never read a fanfic in their
lives but seen every episode/read every volume of the original series will
bring to your story.

In addition to that, it can also be considered to encompass some of the
things a fandom in general finds worthwhile in a particular series. This may
be the source of the "rabid canon-thumpers" comment - often times, people
who read fanfic of a particular series _really, really enjoyed_ the
original, and expect fanfics to be, if not _exactly_ like it, at least
close; anything else is just the author grafting some foreign material onto
a damn good original, and is dealt with appropriately.

Often times, two people will have differing concepts of canon - this is
sometimes due to personal interpretation, but sometimes due to the fact that
anime and manga often depict entirely different events - Akane seems to slip
a lot more easily into rage in the Ranma 1/2 anime, while Usagi and Mamoru
have had much more intimate relations (they're married and quite possibly
expectant at the close of the series) in the Sailor Moon manga.

Canon also provides a framework from which to build your story - a pre-built
set of justifications for events, as it were. A story that opens with Ranma
and Genma stumbling across an odd temple on a training journey doesn't
really need much more setup than that - it's happened before. A story that
opens with Ranma and Genma going bowling for some father-son bonding, on the
other hand, probably needs a little more in the way of explanation.

Note that breaking canon does not, by itself, have to be all bad. As long as
your story is consistent with _itself_, it's still a good story. The
problem, of course, is that if you include canon at all, you need to work
the parts you're writing as new _into_ canon, otherwise you have two (or
more) story parts that don't mesh with each other at all.

And, of course, if you're writing a universe where everything happens
differently, well, what's the point of writing it as a fanfic? Your
characters are entirely new people in perhaps familiar situations, but all
that makes them anything like the original characters is a name and
description. If anything, people are going to find them harder to understand
(because of the aforementioned set of preconceptions) than original
characters.

If you want a good example of how to diverge from canon and still maintain a
coherent and faithful story, have a look at some of M. A. MacKinnon's stuff.

--GF

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