I just had the immense pleasure of reading an absolutely fantastic fanfic. It was called The Secret Key to the Meidou-seki, for the Inuyasha fandom. You may or may not know that for many years I’ve been an enormous fan of the Sesshomaru and Kagura pairing (I’m even the maintainer of the Livejournal community, which is how I came across this fic in the first place), a semi-canon (think Neph/Ami) pairing that ends pretty tragically in the series; but, being Inuyasha, a series where death doesn’t really spell the end very often, there’s always a lot of room to plausibly resurrect characters in fanon. This fic does just that in an exemplary fashion, because it was completely believable– it didn’t read like a work of fanfiction. It read like Rumiko Takahashi (artist/writer of Inuyasha) said, “I think I will draw a short epilogue story for Sesshomaru,” and then someone with master skills then transcribed that comic into amazing descriptive prose. I totally believed every line, so much that I feel like my mind has now accepted this as truth, and I feel like when The Final Act fiiiiinally comes out on DVD here and I see it, at the end I will say, “And then this happened,” and I will be so very very happy.

And this is what leads to my point: what I love about fanfiction is when you stumble across those rare really good ones that fill in a gap in your universe so well that you mentally consider it canon. This has happened to me only a handful of times, but each ones has been worth the search. For example, A New Era, a fanfic for The Oracle Prophecies book series, wraps up the Seth/Mirany plotline so incredibly perfectly, with writing so perfectly spot-on to Catherine Fisher’s style that it feels like Catherine herself wrote it. I’ve read a lot of really good Seth/Mirany fanfics (well, there’s only like 10 total, but they were all good), but that one has been entered into my mental canon.

And when I find a fanfic like this, it’s amazing how it can change my feelings about series. Now I’m overcome with this urge to re-watch Inuyasha, and I feel like I’ll see the ending in a whole new light.

This is the kind of feeling I hope my PGSM fanfics (particularly the newer ones, like “After the End” and “Reunion”) might give to someone, anyone, when they read them. Because I realized recently that just because certain things (like the fates of the Shitennou, or the true story of the past life) weren’t spelled out clearly in the series itself, it’s not cause for distress. Those gaps in the series are what allowed me to invent the stories that I hold most dear. Especially “Guardians.” I know it’s taking me a very long time to finish this fanfic, but the story that I have in my head is so real, it to me is my mental canon. It’s just as true to me as the PGSM episodes themselves. If you’re patient with me while I take the time to tell the story, I hope that maybe by the end, it could become your mental canon, too. 🙂