Is the drive for canonicity (or continuity) in fan cu toxic?

[Enosh]

I hate this trend of calling fans toxic

no wanting a coherent story set in a universe that you love isn't toxic

[mc warhammer]

it's not. and the article isn't saying that, thankfully.

[bluntblade]

it's not. and the article isn't saying that, thankfully.

I would actually like the mods to remove that word from the title, it's hampering the discussion.

 

The other thing is that coherence can apply to different elements of a story too. A film or series which is totally logical can lack any thematic coherence. Is it logical for Iron Man to just build another mega-robot and it to work this time? I guess, but it flies in the face of the theme of hubris and consequence.

Edited April 16, 2020 by bluntblade

[drooling blood]

The world itself has changed a lot since Horus Rising came out 14 years ago. Options and ways to express yourself on the internet were beginning to explode and multiply. Along with that is the natural desire to get attention for oneself. So there is now a ready outlet for people eager for attention. And as there are ever more of them, they are forced to get more extreme to get any attention at all. I can think of one YouTube channel that focuses on Star Trek, for example. It is a bitter, angry place, that has easily and demonstrably gotten most of the 'news' it reports completely incorrect. Yet, it still has hundreds of thousands of followers who eat up clickbait junk. That is the era we are living in.

 

Along the way is the rise of more extreme 'gatekeeping', where 'I am super fan; what I say is the law, and other opinions are irrelevant'. As a Trek example - 'Roddenberry wouldn't have done that, therefore it's automatically garbage'. People often take it upon themselves to feel as though they are capable and qualified to speak for the whole of a community, and in 2020 they have the outlets to make them feel justified. 

 

Meanwhile, I just wish Black Library had some better editorial oversight. I don't feel the need for some uber master cracking the whip at every author and book, but failures like The Beast Arises series are especially glaring. And galling. There were seeds of greatness there in a previously unexplored era, but the sloppy, lazy work done editing and coordinating the series overshadowed them, and soured the experience. 

 

The same grots that were in charge of wotb are now doing sot. So things wont, well havent really changed.

 

Have I gone mad?

 

Was or wasn't the Beast Arises tremendously entertaining?

 

(With some particularly odd clunk's, including an entire novel repeated, essentially. And half the series was written before it was started, if memory serves? I Am Slaughter had sat shelved for a few years!)

 

It was blatantly a wobbly experiment from the beginning. That wasn't a surprise, because it was plainly visible.

 

Moreover, the care of it was irredeemable torpedoed by such things as GW's mad "everything must tie tightly to a model release" stance* too, which tripped the whole thing up and - I think - saw Abnett self-isolate from their corporate foolishness. (So to speak. Collaborating with someone whom working relationship is on hold with would be difficult, professionally, I imagine.)

 

But the politicking on Terra, the concept, the twists and turns, character beats, the immense set pieces, the set pieces.

 

For my preferences, it was vastly more entertaining, and engaging, and less repetitive than huge, equally wordy chunks of the Horus Heresy.

 

(And with significantly fewer pages dedicated to bland Space Marine stories of little character.)

 

Thats exactly what it was.

Puturork runs into Dorn. Oi wer yuz goin, i shalt try three more times. No more. No less. Three shalt be the number thou shalt try, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, nor either count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out.

 

 

Edited April 16, 2020 by drooling blood

[Medjugorje]

I dont see that like many of you do. 

 

I want to have facts - and if its not the way I like then I have to accept that. But those open lore is just lazy for me.

And toxic is just one description how people cant handle another thoughts. It must be okay for anybody to critizise things and anybody that they have another opinions. 

 

Its not a toxic fanbase - its a ignorant society.

I dont see that like many of you do. 

 

I want to have facts - and if its not the way I like then I have to accept that. But those open lore is just lazy for me.

And toxic is just one description how people cant handle another thoughts. It must be okay for anybody to critizise things and anybody that they have another opinions. 

 

Its not a toxic fanbase - its a ignorant society.

[bluntblade]

None of us are objecting to having facts. It's the prioritisation of facts over the things that stories are really about.

 

Where toxicity comes in is where this feeds into a gatekeeping mentality, wherein it doesn't matter that, say, Black Panther struck a chord with someone who doesn't care overly for the MCU, they don't know enough trivia about the setting. That's less prevalent than in the franchise I'm really thinking about here.

 

But it's this mentality which means that on a certain wiki there is no discussion on Chris Wraight's page about his skillful homing in on the themes of the setting and bringing them out through the environment, but there is a decade-old gripe about how Bjorn shouldn't have been able to one-shot a Cataphract robot.

 

My mind boggles now that I initially liked Ready Player One.

Edited April 18, 2020 by bluntblade

[DarkChaplain]

Because, say, Lexicanum is only concerned with those facts, not with interpretation. It has been that way since its inception. Whether you think Wraight is a genius or not is purely subjective, even if most folks will agree on it to a greater degree than on other things. Some folks here praise John French to high heavens, for example, whereas I've read enough stories of his that either didn't resonate with me or were just messy affairs that no amount of interpretation and chatter about how he brought Covenant to life will allow me to value him on the same level.

 

It's one of those reasons why Lexicanum used to be so much better than that wikia/fandom site. It cut out the fat, stripped interpretation and flourishes in its articles, and boiled it down to the facts as they occured in the fluff and novels. No matter what you might personally take away from those things while reading the material, these were the framework that could be mutually agreed upon and discussed - discussion of which inevitably involved personal, subjective interpretations, feelings and appreciation for word-smithing. Canon conflicts or odd parts like Terminators doing backflips *should* be pointed out in those articles, contrasting different sources on their described facts, but not on their quality of writing.

 

The real shame is that Lexicanum went down the dumps while the wikia just kept growing, also thanks to being a) a wikia site and popping up in image searches a lot due to using whatever fanart and meme content people felt like adding, while Lexicanum restricted itself to official material as published by GW. After being bought by Bell of Lost Souls, which is still a terrible, :cussty rag of a news aggregator, Lexicanum was basically done for in my mind (and I mostly contributed to the German version of WHFB/40k lexicanum to begin with, way back when, and their policies were more strict but also efficient than the international one).

 

Yes, I'm bitter, even weeks later, which is why I've tried staying out of this discussion as best I could. Chances are I'll never forgive that company for making something genuinely good, killing my well-prepared, self-protective cynicism, before throwing it all in the bin on a whim of the hacks in charge of the project. Who needs to produce a masterpiece when you can be ~subversive~ for the sake of your own ego?

Edited April 20, 2020 by Kelborn
removed off topic

[bluntblade]

I was actually thinking of 1odChan.

[DarkChaplain]

Do people actually take that seriously rather than just as a self-perpetuating meme?

[alfred_the_great]

But in 40k there are no facts - the entire game/universe/IP is based on that.

 

So I'm bemused that a demand for "facts" is suddenly the shibboleth to be a part of this community.

[bluntblade]

Do people actually take that seriously rather than just as a self-perpetuating meme?

I'm using it as a snapshot of a particular side of our fandom rather than representative of the whole.

[Roomsky]

People get their details from 1d4chan / TTS because they're amusing and concise. Lexicanum is barely up to date / rife with personal interpretation, and the wiki is awful for reasons apparent to any who visit there. If I look up an article on say, the Minotaurs, I'm going to get a nice overview of the faction and their contributions to the lore which were clearly written by people who actually like and play them, even if the cost is some accuracy.

 

Not to say people should be reading 1d4chan and preaching it as gospel, but I won't say people have bad reason for going there. But if we need the flipside, the Failbaddon meme is still alive, despite not even being supported by old material.

 

 

(I have to maintain that the idea of creators subverting things for its own sake is disingenuous.)

[Brother Lunkhead]

=][= Let's focus on the discussion at hand without poking sticks at Lex, BoLS, etc. That always goes in a bad direction. =][=

[DarkChaplain]

 

(I have to maintain that the idea of creators subverting things for its own sake is disingenuous.)

 

In the specific case I mentioned above, it's sadly most likely accurate, if past experience is anything to go by; the director on the project has some sort of rockstar syndrome and cannot bring himself to stay grounded; his last major projects were delayed for a decade while he brainstormed over the most redundant nonsense (like outsourcing material from the main product into a theater piece, which thankfully was shot down by higher ups... he got a movie, though). The only other explanation I was able to come up with over the last weeks since finding out how things stood was a late project change in direction for budget reasons, which would allow them to save cash with the follow-ups by cutting lose from what they were supposed to be making - altering the deal retroactively, basically.

 

But then, that is neither here nor there. I could write entire essays over this instance of subverted expectations, and how the writers and director are hacks worse than C S Goto. And I don't say that lightly, I could do it (and kinda already did throughout various conversations I've been having).

 

That's just to say, sadly, this subverting of expectations does happen with some authors. Especially with works treading known ground, I think it's something more frequent; original authors/creators might wish to expand on their original vision, or believe they should depart from something they might've come to regret over the years. New creatives, on the other hand, might feel the urge to stamp their "I was here" on a franchise or work by doing something off-script. Sometimes it works exceedingly well, because it still happens within the spirit of the original (see: basically *anything* by Josh Reynolds on established factions, like the Emperor's Children, Fabius Bile, Lukas the Trickster, Gotrek & Felix, the whole list, really) and sometimes it's so on the nose out of the expected, it starts smelling badly. I'd rather not name examples among BL here, but I think we can all come up with an example or two of our own....

Edited April 18, 2020 by DarkChaplain

[mc warhammer]

i think that projecting motivations onto creators is itself disingenuous

 

But in 40k there are no facts - the entire game/universe/IP is based on that.

 

So I'm bemused that a demand for "facts" is suddenly the shibboleth to be a part of this community.

 

i'd say there are "facts" just not "truths" or, many "truths" if you catch the distinction

Edited April 20, 2020 by Kelborn

[Moonreaper666]

I really don't see why it can't be written off as one immensely situational move which would be prohibitively expensive to pull the rest of the time.

 

Just like how we once had an argument on this forum about why the Imperium doesn't physically drop a battleship on every problem world.

 

But at the end of the day, the dramatic moment resonates with me so hard that in comparison, one broken made-up rule about physics in a setting dominated by a soft magic system doesn't bother me.

 

Edit: Incidentally, I actually recall a scenario in one of the Battlefront Games in which a formation of ships jumping at close-range to the enemy fleet was considered very dangerous for the ships who'd be on the receiving end.

Is it wrong to have the Horus Heresy novels retcon the fight between Horus and the Emperor, like have the Emperor lose badly until Ollanius Pius makes the ultimate sacrifice which saves the Emperor?

Edited April 20, 2020 by Kelborn
removed off topic

[bluntblade]

Erm... the Emperor does lose badly to Horus until that mysterious someone intervenes. If it's Oll, then that simply confirms one fan-theory. I suppose they could subvert that expectation and have Kestros/Archamus take the hit, which would be itself the evolution of another fan-theory, but I would judge that on its thematic and story value. NB: I don't think that would be better than having Oll fill that role.

 

Edited April 20, 2020 by Kelborn
removed off topic

[bluntblade]

Anyway, I'm gonna try to move the discussion forward a little. Particularly with regard to the dreaded List of Demands Approach.

 

Which means it's confession time, in that there are a number of BL stories I have come to wanting things to go a particular way. I'm one of those who object to the Ferrus Manus book because I don't think it's the right story to tell about the Iron Hands and their Primarch. And I recognise that those are the same grounds on which lots of people object to, say, Spiderman being groomed to be the next Tony Stark or Luke Skywalker ending up a grumpy, guilt-ridden hermit. Likewise I've been vocal about my wish that Leman Russ had confronted Horus at Beta-Garmon and wounded him there.

 

The basic thrust of this is that... I guess I think we need to remember that we have certain hopes and wishes for instalments in series we're attached to. 

[Brother Lunkhead]

=][= Well.... I think we've kicked the latest installments of the Star Wars franchise enough. So, unless you are using it to make a specific point in your argument (which is not at all obvious to me) and not an excuse to kick it one more time (which is obvious to me), let's not do it. =][=

[bluntblade]

I feel like there are some worthwhile things to be explored here, but I don't seem to have a handle on them.

[Kelborn]

=][=

 

Removed some off topic talk about other franchises. If you want to make a point, fine, focus on that point alone.

 

Otherwise it will be viewed as off topic and thus removed.

 

Comparing with other franchises is a good way to make your point. But avoid exagerration or divergence.

 

Thanks.

 

=][=

Edited April 20, 2020 by Kelborn

[bluntblade]

Because stories are primarily about the meaning and emotional resonance they carry rather than the sum of their events. There's no correct way to consume, for want of a better word, stories, and I know I'm just asserting a preference here. But I don't like the pyramid of trueness which this very prescriptive approach to fandom can create and I think it becomes limiting to the kind of stories we can tell. We lose room for allegory, metaphor and ambiguity.

In my sport hobby, I defer to expertise on some fronts. A more experienced kayaker or one who knows a given river better than I should lead the group. But fiction is something very separate from that for me.

Edited April 26, 2020 by bluntblade

[Moonreaper666]

Erm... the Emperor does lose badly to Horus until that mysterious someone intervenes. If it's Oll, then that simply confirms one fan-theory. I suppose they could subvert that expectation and have Kestros/Archamus take the hit, which would be itself the evolution of another fan-theory, but I would judge that on its thematic and story value. NB: I don't think that would be better than having Oll fill that role.

 

 

In the old lore the Emperor was kinda holding back against Horus for certain reasons invalidated by the Horus Heresy novels

 

I feel that in the final Siege of Terra book, the Emperor shouldn't hold back one bit against Horus from the start (Sanginius did not wound Horus in this version). However, Horus has the advantage throughout the entire duel and to make it even more tense, the Warmaster can permanently kill Perpetuals

 

As Horus was going to land the fatal blow on the Emperor, Ollanius Pius intervenes and shields the Emperor and stab Horus with an upgraded Athame knife. Olly dies for good but Horus is wounded. That is when the Emperor kills Horus

 

This version of the duel highlights just how dangerous Chaos can be that it can empower a Primarch to become powerful than the Emperor. And that it can elevate a Space Marine to the same level (Abaddon becoming more powerful than Guilliman, Lion and Warp-Corax combined)

[Brother Lunkhead]

Well.... we haven't gotten to the E vs H duel yet, so we don't really have a good lock on how that will be played out.

 

In the old lore (my favorite days) the Emp held back from ending Horus as he was trying to bring him back to the right side of things. In those days we could still hold out the idea that the Emp still had some human feelings and he had genuine love for his sons. As the current lore has almost completely disabused us of that notion, it will be interesting to see how it all plays out. Personally, I'm girding myself to be hugely disappointed...... I like Emp version 1.0 the best...... sigh

[bluntblade]

I still think that there are in-text suggestions that the Emperor still regards His sons as that. Admittedly you can read His silence towards Horus in a couple of ways.