Nanni

One of my least favorite things is when people use what I usually call peripheral canon to verbally smack or demean other fans or try to interrupt their creative play.

Peripheral canon is stuff that is by the canon's creators or their authorized proxies, is the same continuity as the canon, and is official, but is not part of the central piece of the canon text. So things like tie in comics, tie in novels, novelizations, video games, design books, toys and toy bios, officially sanctioned wikia, and things like Pottermore if there is ever a thing like Pottermore that is not Pottermore. Sometimes creators' interviews fall under this category, depending on how the fandom treats them, but usually those are more Word Of God/Creator type stuff.

Peripheral canon is great! It offers such gems as the really creepy entry on centaurs in the HP verse in Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them, and Mabel Pines from Gravity Falls calling Wendy a Warrior Princess From The Moons Of Venus, the existence of minicons in the Transformers Animated universe, and Big Finish's Doctor Who audios. Great stuff! Truly great stuff!

But people are not obligated to engage with it. (Honestly, if people contradict the actual mainline of canon with their creative play, that is okay too, but people getting shirty about people not having read/listened to peripheral canon is even more annoying to me.) Reading more of this stuff does not make you a better fan. If, say, someone writes a Transformers Animated story in which there are no minicons, they are not contradicting show canon, and that story is not automatically an au. Scolding someone for writing Susan Foreman as childless and not having encountered her grandfather again until his uh - - - Twelfth or Thirteenth depending on how you're counting - incarnation for contradicting canon is dumb. Telling someone that Elita-1 can't have been Orion Pax's good friend before the war because there's a throw away reference in a tie in that says she wasn't and by wanting that the Elita fan is hetwashing is - Obnoxious beyond the telling on several levels, actually. My point is, peripheral canon does not trump the central text, and it does not trump fans' creative play with that central text. Not everyone can access that peripheral canon (it's often expensive) and not everyone is gonna want to - it may not be in their favorite media, or they might want to play with the elements that canon leaves open or whatever - and you don't have to to be a fan!

People reeeeaaally need to stop invoking it intending to shut down other fans' creative play, instead of using it to widen that creative, collective play up.

Jerks.

Not anyone reading this. Just you know. General jerks.

I. I don't actually know what I think. Except of course that Cleopatra lived into middle age. She was a grown woman when she died, so... ... ....

Yeah, I dunno if the production team realized that and did it on purpose or not.

She also very definitely left a body.

( Cut for (extremely vague) spoilers. Mostly this is about tropes. )

Yes, a link on metafandom, which I should not have clicked! And, uh, can't link to because I closed it and reading it in the first place was a bad idea, if I go back, I will read it again, even though I don't know why I read that poll about expectations of response to comments once I had it open: I should have clicked away so fast.

But I did, and therefore here we go:

Dear everyone who expects or wants a response from me when you comment,

I sympathize, I really do. I know it's rude to ignore people. I don't fail to respond because I don't like you, or because I think I'm better than you, or because I just don't care.

I might, under some circumstances, not be responding because I didn't see your comment, but probably what happened?

Is that I wrote that post because I was having a good day, and I could talk and interact and felt confident and not like the worst person in the world. And then I had to go to bed or I walked away from the computer and you commented and I came back and tried to write back to you. Maybe I even got a paragraph down before I erased it and tried again. Maybe I tried again after that. Maybe I couldn't get anything written in the first place and just stared at the box and felt terrible. There might have been crying because I was just so tired all of a sudden, and I couldn't do it. I was too scared, even though maybe I know you and like you. Possibly everything I could put down just sounded egotistical and over sharing. Maybe I told myself not everyone wants to know about my writing process and I don't even know this person to know if they do.

Who knows? It might have been all of the above!

So I gave up because I felt awful, and you know, maybe in a week or so I'll have a good day again, and I'll come back and be able to talk to you. If you still want to maybe we can have a slow motion conversation that way.

I'm sorry, I know it sucks. I know it feels bad, when people don't answer you. I know you start to wonder if you're just being annoying.

I'm so sorry. I really do try.

But a lot of the time I just can't. I really, really, really can't, and if you are commenting on a story in particular it's not that I don't enjoy concrit (I do!) or lengthy comments or anything like that, but the thing is: I often put up stories not when I feel good, but when I already feel so bad it's hard to breathe. I will try to answer, I will! But it will take a while, and if it's been weeks I might never manage it. I'll feel bad about that, and I know maybe you're feeling bad too. I'm really sorry. But I spent a very long time basically not talking at all because I didn't know if I'd be able to respond, and believe me, that sucked worse.

From my end, anyhow. I bet plenty of people didn't care.

God, I'm trying, but it's so damn hard. I hate saying so. I feel like Whiny McWhinersen making excuses, and I know it doesn't help because people still get hurt but. There you go.

Apologies,

Me

ETA: I should probably add that this is not exactly about people who are subscribed to my journal, one way or the other, although I often wish I could manage to interact with you all more, because I like you - I generally figure that if you haven't taken me off by now, my brain's habit of dumping me on the side of the highway to walk back to down is something you don't take personally. But it. Is part of why I have trouble talking to new people, and why sometimes stories sit on my journal for months and never get promoted anywhere.

*handwavyhandwavy*