But there’s also something else going on here, which is “What happens when a narrative fills in a space you were using?” It’s an occupational hazard for audiences, particularly for audiences of big corporate-owned meta-franchises, particularly if you are in part of the audience whose story doesn’t usually get told.

The oldest and most obvious example is probably the solid foundation of Spirk shippers the entire Trek fandom is built on – a legacy that continues today with many fans headcanoning Lower Decks’s Tendi as trans. In both cases there, the Word of God has stepped in to explicitly not deny or confirm that headcanon, Roddenberry in his strange and horny Star Trek: The Motion Picture novelisation, Mike McMahan in an interview with Jessie Earl a couple of years ago.

But it also cuts both ways. When the Terry Pratchett and some other guy novel Good Omens was adapted for TV, it went a long way (although probably still not far enough) to make Crowley and Aziraphale’s relationship an explicit romance. Which is great for people who love that, but for people who read that relationship as two largely asexual celestial beings in a relationship that was much more likely the professional comradeship of spies on opposite sides, that reading is now never going to be seen on screen and is going to be a reading harder to find in fandom going forward (assuming anyone can find a way to enjoy Good Omens now that it’s got the other guy’s stink on it).

Our family, like many others, is currently in the midst of a house-wide Kpop Demon Hunters obsession, and a sequel is coming out in 2029. Ella, my partner, has pointed out to me that one of the mysteries that sequel is almost 100% going to lean into is “How come Rumi is half-demon?”

It is a mystery that immediately presents two possible readings, one considerably darker than the other, but the thing is, both of the readings are valuable. Both of those readings have audiences, frankly, children, who can look to that reading and see something of themselves in it.

Now, a lot of people (Ella included) will argue that this is a by-product of an increasing corporatised and franchise-driven media. When every story has to have a “universe”, by necessity the specific has to expand to fill all spaces, collapsing all the waveforms where headcanon, interpretation and nuance live.

And I’m not going to say that’s wrong, but I also think it’s a natural consequence of all storytelling. The verb is “telling”, and even when jazz is about the notes you don’t play, playing the other notes is how you show where they are. (I hope so anyway, or this metaphor doesn’t work. I don’t really know much about jazz.)

So the question becomes “Is this worth telling?” Is the specific I am about to chuck into this world better than the billion different imaginings of anyone who might hear this story and see that gap?

That isn’t a call to not lob those specifics and fill those gaps. As Stephen King once pointed out, nothing hiding behind a closed closet door is going to be scarier than the maybe in your reader’s imagination, but your job as the writer is to turn up and shine a torch in that closet anyway. That means that you need to make a real case for introducing that specific – which is harder to do when the one you’ve picked is the obvious one.

And when someone working in a story you love decides to collapse a waveform that you’ve made a home in, that’s fine too. Because all stories – not just books, but movies, games, TV shows, song lyrics, all of them are self-assembly, not matter how pretty the box art is. You can discard the parts that you don’t need.

Which is why I’ll be deep in the cold ground before I acknowledge the Alien vs Predator movies, Predator: Requiem or any Alien movie that thinks Prometheus is real.

And now I think about it, that big desert compound in Badlands was probably just the local equivalent of like, a paintball arena or weekend hunting lodge. Over the horizon I’m sure the was a metropolis of Predator geography teachers, nutritionists and web content creators…