Comment on Updates to "No Fandom" Additional Tags, September 2026

  1. theomegapoint Thu 24 Sep 2026 04:54PM UTC

    i'll be upon you by the moonlight side

    "Characters Haunting The Narrative" refers to characters who have a lot of importance on the story, but do not necessarily appear for very long and/or are dead. This trope is sometimes known as "Dead Girl Wrapped In Plastic" after Laura Palmer, who is dead by the time Twin Peaks starts, but is the catalyst for the entire plot. The character doesn't have to be dead, though! They can be a past lover who is haunting a new relationship or someone who's gone missing, for example.

    "Doomed By The Narrative" refers to characters who are in a narrative situation where something bad must happen and the audience knows it will happen, but they hope it won't anyway. So, for example, in Wicked we know that Elphaba is going to become the Wicked Witch because Wicked is a prequel to Wizard of Oz. She is doomed by the narrative to become the Wicked Witch.

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    1. xxmarvian Fri 25 Sep 2026 05:18PM UTC

      bcs the other commenters explained "haunted by the narrative", i'd say another great example of "doomed by the narrative" are charles xavier (professor x) and eric lehnsherr (magneto) from marvel's x-men! i'm talking about the movies specifically, but if eric hadn't wounded charles and made him paralysed, it wouldn't have kicked off the rest of the story that develops later and (subsequently) we wouldn't know charles as the man in the chair

      same with viktor from "arcane". he is doomed by the narrative in proxy to his ascension to godhood. it's just that, in the series, he finds resolve in that one singular timeline from "all timelines in all possibilities" (because c'mon, they weren't gonna end it on a bad note where everyone's puppets, dead etc). if we disregard that tho, he's an entity which fate has been sealed from the beginning and he (not necessarily the audience) knows that explicitly

      i see this tag being used (primarily) in canon-compliant fics because it's closely related to what happens in canon itself. the narrative can't be changed and it's a done deal for everybody, or else it'd take away from its essence or those of the characters entirely. yet, attempts could be made or the situation could be explored further once the The Thing That Changed Them Forever has happened

      as for non-canon compliant... i suppose it's up to the author to decide what The Thing is. maybe it's a time travel fic where the characters know how the story ends. or the concept of the fic itself makes it so that the characters cannot change the ever-evolving story because they're unable of change themselves

      i love both tags very much and i'm glad they've become canonical! they're perfect when you pair them with "character study", "heavy angst" and/or "hurt/no comfort"

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