Agreeing with hS.

How to translate Neopets canon to a mission setting? by Winsela on 2022-12-13 07:02:17 UTC Reply

Apologies if this is confusing: I'm hoping to someday write a mission in a Neopets fic and realized there are certain aspects of the continuum that make doing so more complicated than expected.

For context, Neopets is an early example of a virtual pet website that has somehow survived to the present day. Its canon is interesting in that it's a bit of a hot mess.

When the site initially started, the canon was that Neopia (the game's setting) was a land inhabited by humans and Neopets. There was no real distinction between things that happened on the user level and things that happened in-universe. Feasibly, you could write a fic about a person living with a quartet of Neopets in Neopia and not have it be terribly contradictory to canon.

After a few years, however, the site moved away from depicting any in-universe humans and retconned the ones that were already there into Neopets. The official stance on the matter is that the version of Neopets that closely reflects its nature as a pet site is different than the version of Neopets portrayed in various site events

In other words, Neopets is both of the following:

A pet site with several items and terminology referring to humans owning the creatures.
A world inhabited solely by anthropomorphic versions of the above creatures, with humans being completely nonexistent.

What I'm curious about is how the official stance on what constitutes Neopets canon would affect the "snap-back" that occurs at the end of a mission. If a pair of agents were to assassinate a Suvian in a fic where Neopia is a world that attempts to translate all the aspects of the pet site 1:1, would the setting revert to the "world of funny animals" version of Neopets or remain an interpretation of the pet site version?

Agreeing with hS. by Neshomeh on 2022-12-13 19:07:53 UTC Reply

I'd treat "Neopets where humans exist" and "Neopets where humans don't exist" as two distinct but valid versions of canon, like the bookverse and the movieverse are two distinct but valid versions of Lord of the Rings canon.

If a fic blends the two versions somehow, I guess it's a judgement call on which has more weight in that particular fic.

Also, I love their explanation for the "fantasy world" version of Neopets:

We don't think Jeran or Lord Darigan would take it well if we told them that they were Flash images owned by sillyusername123_20.
Haha, yeah, nobody really likes getting that meta about their own existence. {X D

~Neshomeh used to run Pern role-plays on Neopets way, way back in the day. Ah, nostalgia.
I would say "remains interpretation". by Huinesoron on 2022-12-13 10:37:27 UTC Edited Reply

I would call the "1:1 interpretation" setting an ancillary canon of Neopets proper - it's not the (or a) main canon, but it has enough of an existence that people can justifiably write stories in it.

An actual example: this mission takes place in John Boorman's script for a Lord of the Rings movie. It's not a primary version of the canon - it was never filmed, and the complete script only came to light in 2022 (it is wild). But there's enough there that you can write a story where the characters are "in character" to the script - and so the fic snapped back to the script when the agents did their job.

Other examples would include early drafts of canons - Tolkien has these in spades, but there's also things like the original The Star Wars script (which I think was actually made into a comic!).

Ultimately, if the fic is written in a version of the canon which can in good faith be assumed to exist, it should probably snap back to that.

Unless it's funnier not to.

hS