I woke up on the salty side of the bed this morning so this is probably 9000% less diplomatic than I would usually word things, but…
…what the fuck is the trend in kin/fictive circles to
a) replace canonmates as if they’re interchangeable identikit slot-in-here pieces when a friendship or relationship doesn’t work out
and
b) assume that if a friendship or relationship doesn’t work out, it must have been because they weren’t “from your canon”?
I’m not sure if “dehumanizing” is the right word for what’s going on here, exactly, but it does seem to treat people as if they’re part of a narrative rather than…you know, living breathing beings with feelings and ideas of their own. Oh, a Minnie Mouse fictive doesn’t actually feel like dropping out of college to follow Mickey Mouse into the Peace Corps? Let’s find another Minnie who will! Oh, Goofy broke up with Donald because things weren’t working out? Well, clearly he wasn’t the real Goofy from Donald’s memories after all, because as we all know relationships never ever break up for mundane reasons!
Look, I get it. When your life is turned into a story, or when you resonate so strongly with a story, it’s tempting to see your life now as if it should follow the rules of a story. True love lasts forever. Heroes never die. Evil gets its comeuppance. The power of friendship conquers all.
But a life is always more complicated than a story, even when it is one, if you get what I’m trying to say. It doesn’t run on tropes. It doesn’t leave out all the boring bits. It doesn’t fade to black on a convenient dramatic moment–it keeps going, and maybe Minnie and Mickey end up going to marriage counselling, or maybe Harry and Ron stop talking to each other for years because of something one of them said over butterbeer. Or maybe everything does work out and you die happy surrounded by your loved ones and then you come here and have a whole new mess of complications to deal with–complications that will probably end up meaning that even if you meet “your” person again, things aren’t going to magically go smoothly forever. Maybe, despite someone being your canonmate, you actually need to treat it with the same care and respect as any other relationship? Give it the room to grow slowly, give it the option to turn into something it might not have been before?
Or maybe you can’t work things out. And maybe that’ll hurt like Hell. But if someone felt right to you, resonated beautifully, felt like the person of your memories, why would you pretend that didn’t happen and…trade them in for someone else? It just completely boggles my mind.
