So, sometimes I’m nervous about what will happen in upcoming Canon for my fandoms, because of what it might do to fandom discourse and the overall dynamic of who’s a fan and how they interact…

BUT I am… pretty apathetic about it from an in-universe perspective.

because… Canon is, in my mind, just as fictional as fanfiction. Bad Canon means, to me, that a really popular big-name fan wrote a fanfic I don’t like. If lots of fans are treating this writing as having More Authority on everything in the made-up world than the fanfics I like… well I’m just gonna ignore that and keep reading the ones I like, ok?

the oldest and most natural form of fictional storytelling… the form that our minds are arguably best suited to engaging with… is the in-person, spur-of-the-moment making-shit-up-for-the-hell-of-it. Children pretending. Elders telling tales around the campfire.

Grandpa tells the story of Paul Bunyan and says the Great Lakes were formed from the footprints of Babe the Blue Ox. Dad retells the story and says no, the ox is even bigger than that, the Lakes are its sweat drops. hell yeah! the kids each pick which version they like better. neither is The Truth.

honestly if you try to find this form of storytelling in Tumblr fandom, it’s in Goncharov, and it’s in the space adventures of Stabby the Roomba.

there’s a person who was the first to introduce Stabby the Roomba! we can find this person’s tumblr account with only a little digging! but do we run to that account’s askbox to confirm whether each new story about Stabby’s adventures is true or not?

NO. we do not. It’s STORYTELLING.