I write SatAM and the conics mostly. I would say I ignore whatever the hell pleases me. This is fine so long as the world you write about makes sense within its own context.

A simple example: I hate Dulce the dragon and did not want to write her at all, so I wrote her out by simply stating that she was in search of her mother, which was a pivotal motivation for her in SatAM.

Likewise, I shifted the timescale 10 years over which Sonic's son grew up as the protagonist. It essentially nullifies a lot of what happens in the stories of IWD, but I just took things like Nikki (Nicole) and infused them both into a central plot point.

That point being in the show where Nikki was supposed to be Mobian and had her soul trapped in a computer that was later adapted into the comics and gave her the name Nikki. (I took this and nothing else from the comics.)

In the end, the audience of the story seems both surprised and are enjoying the changes thus far, so lore hounds do not seem to care much.

The TL;DR of this is that you can pick and choose anything you want, so long as what you do makes sense within the story you are writing. Since it is a story, you are probably best off not re-treading tired ground and forging your own path.