So, over on Pillowfort, SakuraNoMiko had a great post about reading fic without being involved in the canon that I responded to, and I'm posting my response over here because I really enjoyed the process of thinking about it and would love more of people's thoughts!

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Quick note: I have no idea how to format html beyond the basics, so there are parts of this that are formatting in keeping with the post on Pillowfort and I am leaving them for now. Let me know if it's showing up wonky for you!
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That said--has anyone gotten really into a fic without knowing the canon? Read fic before seeing the actual show? I'm curious if it influenced your opinion of the show when you finally saw it.

I have actually read a lot of fic without knowing the canon!

So, I can actually date nearly precisely when I decided that, not only could I read fic beyond the part of the canon I already knew, I could read fic with no intention of ever learning the canon! I lay the credit on this post  from 2006. - https://thefourthvine.livejournal.com/63288.html

Allow me to steal a quote from that post by theFourthVine: 

"[Me and TV] is never going to be a pairing of legend, unless the legend involves a lot of headaches, stupid questions, avoidance, and humiliating misunderstandings.

But I was learning that most major fandoms were TV shows. I felt - well, hampered. But in November 2003, I clicked on Out of Whack. Some careful reading later, I learned a great truth: fan fiction can be canon-optional. Later, I learned that I am actually much more likely to enjoy reading the fan fiction if I don't know the canon when I start, and TV fandoms became my happy home. "

See, this seems really obvious to me now, but the reality of the situation was, I really did need someone to give me permission to treat fandom as a worthy effort in and of itself, without having to have a relationship with the canon beforehand. 

Which I was really happy to find out! Because I had a lot of fic writers that I loved who were writing in fandoms that I didn't have access to because they were TV series from before the era of automatic DVD releases - The Sentinel, Due South, etc. And while I've seen a few episodes each from each of these shows, and I can see some of the appeal of the original canon, it's just been so long and I'm so divorced from the standards of normal at the time, that I'm fine with just giving up on the canon and enjoying the fic for what it is. 

SakuraNoMiko wrote:

A possibly secondary question: of course, fanfiction wouldn't exist without some sort of canon source, but do you think it's necessary to know the canon to fully enjoy a fic? Like, do you think a fic should be able to stand on it's own, or is that kind of  stupid idea, given that fic is made to be alongside canon? What about AUs that have very little to do with canon? Fics where people are acting out-of-character?

Somewhat obviously, I'm going to land on "Nope, you don't need the canon to love the fandom!" Good writing is worth it, even if you are going to miss some of the context or you have to check in with a fandom primer to get. Good writing is an experience worth having, even if you end up not knowing the exact lines between canon and fanon.  And like you mentioned, you can pick up a lot of canon just from being in the community. 

In some ways, reading without canon does mean that you are more vulnerable to getting confused about the facts of the canon - like you mentioned in watching Supernatural, you'd picked up that demons were really common, well before that became true in canon.  I've definitely picked up some elements of Transformers fic and assumed it was canon, only to read stuff that made it clear, whoops, that's just one author's headcanon! Or a common fanon that not everyone agrees with! 

One tactic I have used for getting familiarity with fandoms I know I am never going to connect with canon - I read a lot of meta! Episode summaries, or primers, or Youtube videos talking about the show - they are all usually very explicit about what's canon, and you can pick up the main facts about things. On tumblr, meta posts took a lot of that role!

To be fair, when I think about the fandoms I read in without knowing the canon fully, I usually have a barrier to the canon that prevents me from engaging with it. For The Eagle fandom, I have seen the film, but I can't get my hands on the original books by Rosemary Sutcliffe, so I rely on fandom to flesh out the details from the books. For DueSouth, The Sentinel,  and X-Files, those are all TV shows that are pretty time intensive, and for a while they were difficult to get access to (unless you invested in your own copies of the DVD's) - since the time and money involved were a high barrier, I formed an attachment that was mostly free of canon. Transformers and some other continuing comics series - I like comics but I find continuing series hard to follow outside of collections, and often difficult to find without buying for myself. 

And then there are the fandoms where I was engaged with the canon, and then, welp, to quote Nick Fury: I recognize the council has made a decision, but given that it’s a stupid-ass decision, I’ve elected to ignore it.  Some fandoms, I will read the fic, and I will love them from afar, but holy shit I am not doing that to myself again.  So, Once Upon A Time,  I'll read some of the fic about the characters I love, but I am never ever going to watch another episode.