Life continues to not be great, so I’m going to grumble about something to make myself feel better (although, hopefully, it’ll be enlightening as well).

In the past I have complained at length about the problems inherent to canon. Recently I’m been thinking about a tangential concern, but one that doesn’t get nearly enough discussion: when fan theories become so established that attempts to push against them are seen as inherently problematic. To borrow another religious term like “canon,” let’s call this “fan orthodoxy.” To illustrate, I will once again go to Sherlock Holmes, which I continue to believe spawned all modern fandom.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was reasonably good at keeping his stories more or less aligned, but he made mistakes that modern writers wouldn’t get away with. Sherlockians (or Holmesians, whichever you prefer) enjoy playing with these mistakes and coming up with their own theories. But given how long the stories have been around, some of these theories have existed for decades, and sometimes they can have just as much weight as the words Doyle himself wrote.

A great example of this is Dr. Watson’s married life. Aside from the explicit reference to Watson marrying Mary Morstan from The Sign of Four, all future references to his wife are either just “my wife” or “Mrs. Watson.” In attempting to sort out the inconsistencies of his married life, it has been generally assumed that Watson has had more than one wife. Two seems to be a common number, although some theories want to give him as many as six wives.

Recently I listened to Red Letter Day, which is the first of a series of audio drama adventures focusing on Holmes in the 1920s. In it we have a widowed Dr. Watson, and he explicitly refers to his only wife, and having never remarried. When I heard that, I had two feelings in quick succession: “That’s wrong,” immediately followed by “Wait, why do I think that’s wrong?” Even though nothing in the original stories indicated Watson had more than one wife, the orthodoxy of “Watson had more than one wife” had taken hold in my mind.

You see this a lot in prequels and other projects that attempt to fill in gaps in an established (and older) narrative. Two quick examples from Transformers fandom:

• The Transformers toyline, cartoon, and comic “Generation 2” led fans to immediately (and obviously) refer to the proceeding version of the franchise as “Generation 1,” a term that Hasbro has more or less accepted. Except that the characters, continuity, et al of Generation 2 is now considered part of Generation 1.

• In 2020, there was a four-issue comic called Transformers ‘84: Secrets & Lies which was intended to be about the events before and around the comic book issues that came out in 1984. While introducing characters that weren’t part of that continuity is part of the exercise, it also introduced terminology (like “spark” and “alt mode”) that wasn’t coined until many years later, purely because those terms (one coined by the much later Transformers: Beast Wars and another a fan creation) already exist in the fan parlance.

I can hear the rebuttals now. “Well Mr Smarty Pants, if you say that canon is toxic and shouldn’t be a straightjacket to creativity, so why is it a problem if fans contribute to continuity?” And you know what? It isn’t a problem, conceptually. I feel that when fandom is at its best, it’s adding to the things they love instead of subtracting from it. I love a good argument about who could beat up who in a (comic book) fight, as long as everyone involved knows it’s just in fun. These things are all good.

The issue comes with these fan theories become so commonly accepted that they either take on the weight of canon (as in the example of Watson’s wives) or actually become canon (as in the adoption of the term “alt mode” for Transformers). Adding something to something you love only to tell other people they have to accept it or else they’re bad fans is just as bad as companies doing it. If people don’t accept the commonly-accepted fan orthodoxy, they’re heretics and cast out of the fandom.

Fuck all that.

I’m glad there are writers who decide to stick with Watson’s One True Wife. I look forward to Transformers media that values the existence of laser cores and warrior modes. Hell, bring back Warhammer space marines with beaks!

Stories are more interesting when they have rough edges. Things shouldn’t always line up neatly, because life doesn’t work that way. And when we retell the stories we love, details will change. That’s great, because that’s the beauty of telling stories. But don’t tell your story the way you want to and tell someone else they’re telling it wrong.

News

Thanks for putting up with another rant. As a reward, here’s some news!

First off, Lair of the Rat Kings did well in crowdfunding! It made nearly 400% of its initial goal, and had exactly 300 backers! It certainly wasn’t the largest campaign we’ve done for Realms of Pugmire, but to be honest our goals with this campaign were pretty modest, and it exceeded those expectations. Now it’s off being edited, and I’m already kicking around ideas for more Realms of Pugmire projects.

Next, copies of They Came from the RPG Anthology are ending up in the hands of crowdfunding backers! I wrote They Came from the Steel Dragon Tournament, which is a parody of fighting games and fighting game movies like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and so on. In fact, when someone posted the trailer to the new Street Fighter movie to the Onyx Path Discord, someone remarked “this trailer feels like [They Came from the Steel Dragon Tournament], which really shows how well it captures the raw essence of Fighting Videogame narratives.” Which I take as a high compliment!

Finally, some of my material that was cut from Night City 2045 has appeared as a free PDF: Night City Hook Book. Get it now to get some story ideas on things to do in Little Europe, as well as the rest of the city!

Finally, here are all the latest episodes of Masks of Nyarlethotep.

• #70: Safe within the fragile sanctuary of a shattered mind, a broken survivor must decide whether to cling to the comfort of oblivion or answer the door when the past finally comes knocking.

• #71: Haunted survivors and wary newcomers unite to honor the fallen and untangle the threads of a terrifying global conspiracy.

• #72: With the horrors of the outback behind them, the investigators sift through the ashes and trace a paper trail of madness directly to the Pearl of the Orient.

• #73: Touching down in Shanghai, the investigators barely have time to shake off the exhausting flight before dark portents scatter them across the city in search of answers.

• #74: Initial inquiries in the city's underbelly yield violence, conflicting leads, and whispers of unnatural horrors stalking the night.

My Media

Since I got my second bone-anchored hearing aid, I’ve been listening to a lot of audio drama to give them a good testing. One that I really enjoyed was Aldrich Kemp.

It’s actually three series/seasons of the show, each with five half-hour episodes (I listened to them through BBC Sounds, but you can get them as a digital collection as well). It starts off as a fairly typical spy thriller with a protagonist (who is notably not Aldrich Kemp) speaking to the audience.

But then it gets weird. It begins hitting a lot of spy tropes in rapid fashion (including a brief homage to The Prisoner), but the relationship to the fourth wall becomes blurrier. It’s funny, fast-paced, and completely over-the-top, and it’s pitched somewhere between the earnestness of a modern day game of Trinity Continuum and the complete satire of They Came from [CLASSIFIED]. I’m definitely planning on getting the whole collection to listen again at some point in the future.

Okay, time to dive back into the suck. See you next month!