Friday DE

[bjornwilde]

Yesterday I got to read a preview chapter to one of my canons and got an answer to something that's been bothering me. With this in mind, what are some details you really want from your canons? Are you okay with the vaguest of hand waved details? Do you find it's different for each pup?

Feel free to expand with any questions I haven't thought of.

Also, be sure to take a gander at the long weekend test drive post and maybe take a pup for a spin. 

Comments

[heartbeneathastone]

I like extrapolating from canon to fill in gaps, especially given that I have historical pups, so figuring in what details to borrow from real life can be fun.

However, there is one question I would desperately love to have answered:

How did Marius, dreamy goober who thought that 1830 went pretty well, end up as a person who Enjolras somehow thought might a) show up to a meeting and b) be a person he could trust sending to go gauge the sentiments of other radical republican groups.

[wings_of_a_swan]

Hee! Hey, Courfeyrac likes him and lives with him at that point! And he's, uh, pretty good at giving passionate speeches, undeterred by whether or not his audience is already on his side, which was the job in question.

[heartbeneathastone]

HAHA that is so true? But where did he get the idea that he'd be willing/able to give a passionate speech on that topic??

[likeroaringlions]

one time enjolras thought to ask how that friend of his was doing, the one who was so excited about napoleon, and courfeyrac, flustered, made up a very hopeful report

it was so hopeful that enjolras remembered to ask about marius again a month later--how's that friend of yours, the one who's been getting so interested in politics. so, you know, another hopeful report was invented.

enjolras starts asking, you know, why can't marius come to meetings, and courfeyrac explains about marius's numerous other political engagements

[wings_of_a_swan]

There was also that one time in canon where Marius passionately hugged some random dude because he was feeling lovesick about Cosette.

Maybe that dude was like some major radical or something.

[wings_of_a_swan]

The serious answer is that the narrative tells us of all kinds of political awakenings that Marius has, even if he still thinks 1830 was pretty good, and so probably Marius did share his increasingly-radical-if-still-confused opinions with the Amis at some point, and sounded more encouraging than he really was. After all, Courfeyrac did ask him if he was going to Lamarque's funeral, as if he expected Marius to understand.

The funnier answer involves hijinks, like Marius hiding behind a bush because he's scared of pretty girls laughing at him, and Enjolras happening upon him and thinking he's hiding from the police or something.

[heartbeneathastone]

Oh, right, of course! It's still just such a leap to me-- and possibly this is just my imaginative failing-- from "sharing confused but increasingly radical thought" to Enjolras thinking not "oh, Marius is here, he'll do" but "oh I had sort of counted on being able to send Marius to this very important location to stir up opinions he only confusedly shares."

[maid_of_tarth]

Oh, it's totally a leap. It doesn't surprise me because I feel like Hugo consistently describes/assumes Marius is more committed than he actually shows us, anyway, but...it's a leap. Hence the usefulness of hijinks.

[bjornwilde]

I'm pretty good with playing loose with details, but I need serious internal story consistency.

Timelines, at the very least clear ones within the story, are things I love; especially if it is a canon that is near our present time. For examples, the canon I mentioned in the post was for Amelia. She leaves canon some 100 or 150 years before the books start. The books are set in the near future, or so I had thought, so did that mean she'd have left the prime material plane around 1900 or 1950? Now I know present time in the books is 2096, so I have a better idea of what tech she'd have know and what humans would've been like when she left.

I still would like to know if Selina's mother is alive or not, but that detail seems to have been left behind. I'd also like to know what life was like for Selina before she ended up on the streets.

[i_am_your_host]

I once asked Alan Cumming what he thought the Emcee was like off-stage, personality-wise, because that's never depicted in the show. He said he never thought of the character beyond what we see on-stage, that he's only a tool for storytelling. And I thanked him for his answer but inside I was like dammit throw me a bone!

[crocodilejazzhands]

That would be one of the things that's super frustrating about Steven Universe: the combination of the show's slow pace (and slow airing schedule, seriously Cartoon Network what the hell) and the fact that the story is told from Steven's perspective means that we only see tiny bits and pieces of the world and its backstory. It's part of the reason I chose to roleplay Amethyst. If I were to play, say, Pearl or Peridot, it would require me to make up a bunch of Homeworld lore that would probably be contradicted by canon later on.

[bjornwilde]

This is pretty much why I've stopped playing pups from comics, especially ones from the big two. Things change too quickly for me to keep up, and assumptions I made about the character's past get proven wrong or retconned.

[onceaviking]

I would have liked to have had an explanation regarding Eric's family and the fact that he is an adult with a baby sister and no siblings inbetween.

Regarding Elrond I would have liked to known more about his relationship with his brother.

[student_of_impossibility]

I feel like entire tomes could be written about Elros and Elrond's relationship.

[student_of_impossibility]

Eriond: There are holes, but I am willing to handwave, it's Eddings.

Lois: It's Smallville--to some degree DC any-form-of-media altogether. I've given up.

Evelyn: oh my god so many BUT at least Dragon Age is reasonably good at filling in holes--just with later canon and usually going BY THE WAY EVERYTHING YOU THOUGHT WAS WRONG IN SOME FASHION.

Anakin and R2: Star Wars is another canon that either it answers questions now that someone other than Lucas is writing it or else is inconsistent enough that I have just given up.

Tavi: . . . . . . . . .
Whose journal I am logged into because, quite frankly, I could fill a notebook at least with questions, theories, logical extrapolations, wanting to know things about history to positively Tolkien-ian levels of detail, and frankly knowing I can't actually ask Butcher any of it because I do not want to be a creepy fangirl, even though it is just that I adore the world but the holes are so large I could crawl through some of them (admittedly, that's not saying much; I am pretty tiny). It has resulted in plans for fics, OOMs, at least one AU, and overthinking details far more than I should because I apparently cannot deal with hand-waving them. So on the one hand, I've given up getting Word of God answers on most of them (but only most! I totally got a couple at last D*C including muahahahahaha yesssss one literally no one but me cares about). On the other: vagueness of detail is reserved for things I don't want to bother with. If I do, I will hack at them until they make at least a facsimile of sense.

[angry_friendship_wolf]

Um. Yamato and Gabumon are probably a comment in and of themselves, so here goes. Er, heavy Tri spoilers - which I'm usually not all that concerned about, but a dub was just announced (yaaaay), so. That's a whole thing.

At the moment, the only detail I really want is 'what do the 01 kids think happen to the 02 kids?' For context, 02 has a mostly separate team ('mostly' because Yamato's brother and Taichi's sister are on both teams, and because the 01 kids take a vaguely mentor-ish role), and the opening five minutes of Tri's first episode shows them being violently defeated.

They are then not mentioned again until episode eight - for episodes one to four, this didn't seem too weird, because they take place over a few days, but five to eight take place weeks or months afterwards. Nobody (with the exception of one computer screen) references the fact that four members of the team are missing - not in their strategy meetings, not in casual conversation, not at all - or even acknowledges that these characters exist until one of them (or seemingly one of them, presiding fan theory is that it's some kind of copy) shows up, and then their only reactions are "Ichijouji? How can he be here? How is that possible?"

At the moment, fan theories are running the gamut from 'the 02 kids have been missing since the gates shut, and the 01 kids know that but not what happened to them' to 'everyone is suffering from amnesia and they literally only remembered who any of these people are in episode eight.'

So yeah, I'd moderately like to know that particular detail, because at the moment I'm having to have Yamato kind of skirt around talking about them or anything that happened in 02, but in a way that doesn't make it seem like he's doing it deliberately. This becomes deeply awkward any time Omegamon's fusion breaking down comes up (and it often does, because that's one of Yamato's major sources of strife and conflict in Tri, and also just because it gives me a chance to make him awkward and surly and self-hating, and I love doing that), because it's super-difficult to have him talk about that without mentioning Imperialdramon, Shakkoumon, or Silphymon.

[bringspeopletogether]

Oh, god. Okay. So.

Templars need to take lyrium to activate all their magic-dispelling skills, right? We have seen that you can't just go "lol, no more of that," quit cold-turkey, and be fine. You also supposedly don't even take your first dose of lyrium until you take your Official Templar Vows.

Alistair left the Order before taking his vows. He also says he was never addicted to lyrium.

SO HOW THE HELL CAN HE USE TEMPLAR-SPECIFIC ABILITIES IN ORIGINS, FFS.

I've seen fan theories that say, "well, he said he wasn't addicted, not that he never took it," and apparently an interview with one of the creators said he did take lyrium -- in which case, the question changes to HOW ARE YOU NOT IN THE SAME SEARING AGONY CULLEN'S CURRENTLY EXPERIENCING. To save my sanity, I've established he never took it and mentally handwaved that some templar abilities don't truly require lyrium (which also explains why Alistair can teach the templar specialization to the Origins player-character: it's like Templar Lite), and the lyrium sort of...activates a second tier of abilities plus acts as a strengthening agent on the don't-really-need-it abilities? I don't know. The contradiction drives me crazy, and if Bioware would just offer some gd clarification on the matter, that would be awesome. Ugh.

(Meanwhile, elsecanon, the worldbuilding in Snowpiercer -- being more allegory than anything -- falls into a shambles if you poke at it too long, but I actually have a lot of fun spackling over the gaps to make it work. The questions it presents make me go "ooh! HM. Let's figure that out!" instead of making me want to rip my hair out like the lyrium question.)

[feminine_menace]

I want to know what YT's relationship with her dad was like when he was around, and how she feels about him since he left. Her canon just kind of makes a passing reference to the fact that he left her and her mom. That seems like it would be a pretty big deal, but it's never mentioned again.

I have kind of filled in the details on that subject myself, which is mostly okay, but I find myself wondering sometimes.