What's the most petty/pointless/pedantic hill you're willing to die on?

NotNotMike@programming.dev to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 461 points –

For me, it may be that the toilet paper roll needs to have the open end away from the wall. I don't want to reach under the roll to take a piece! That's ludicrous!

That or my recent addiction to correcting people when they use "less" when they should use "fewer"

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Canon is important to science fiction and comic book adaptations because the rules of those universes operate so wildly different from our own that it is important to put more work in keeping things consistent.

A pet peeve of mine is when a work of fiction either breaks its own rules or real physics in a way that isn’t justified.

I’ve had people go “what do you mean X is unrealistic? It has magic flying creatures of course it’s unrealistic!”

A fiction should still follow its own rules, and should follow real physics to the extent it borrows from it! Anything else is just lazy.

I mean to paraphrase Brenan Lee Mulligan: “if you have magic that can teleport things instantly, giving the task of delivering letters to Earth’s slowest bird is animal cruelty.”

This is far from petty, almost foundational.

I want to piggyback on this: canon is super important, but if it isn't published or in the pipeline, it isn't canon.

I love Brandon Sanderson books, but I hated reading the authors notes for Warbreaker. A char does something inexplicable in the book and it is explained by a "fun fact" about their lives that was never written anywhere and the reader could never have known and it wasnt even relevant. It is deus ex machina. It's all made up, I know, but this is like, double made up. Fan fiction isn't canon even of the author comes up with it until and unless it's relevant and published.

It is not canon that rand al'thor puts baked beans in his shoes on cold days to warm up. It's just shit you made up lol.

But the question becomes: Who dictates the canon?

The original creator or the IP rights owner?

Gene Rodenberry's Andromeda would have been amazing if they hadn't fired the first season writer and remade the show for syndication.

He posted a 'It's not canon but if I were still an employee it would be' post and it was amazing and so much better than all the seasons that came after.

So in my mind, the original creator's vision was the true vision and the bastardization of corporate greed that resulted is an abomination and all involved should be whipped.

By that logic most of Star Trek isn't canon. Lemmy would be in shambles!

So then let us agree that some rights holders take better care of their IP than others. Earth Final Conflict is another example of this terrible trend.