I’ve been thinking a lot about what qualifies as part of the “canon” of my Vilous lore characters because I’ve talked about a lot of random ideas to people over the years. As I've been releasing a lot of stuff with those characters lately, I felt I should set rules for what counts as part of their lore.

First, I see things I discuss in DMs and VCs (and perhaps IRL conversations) as not necessarily being canon, but rather ideas I *might* implement. And in the case of VCs, I often won’t even remember what I said. On the other hand, I try to keep most of what I say about my characters in public chats part of their lore.

Also, I sometimes discuss Vilous head-canon/fan-canon ideas in public chats (such as theorizing about what the population of the Vilous universe is), but just because I discuss them doesn’t make these ideas' canon to my characters. I treat my characters as existing in the same continuity as the Vilous manga (I have nothing against people who create "non-canon" content though!).

However, when I decide not to use an idea I discussed about my characters, rather than fully de-canonizing that idea I like to imagine instead that it just happened to someone else in the Vilous universe. Or, if I come up with a character idea but don't use it, I see that character as still existing within the universe, even if the specific events I had in mind didn’t actually happen. This “partial canonization” may not apply to some random fancanon ideas though.

This might not be coherent at all but I felt like laying out my ideas. This is probably more for me than anything, as most people probably wouldn't care about stuff like this, but I tend to get very invested in my characters which makes things like this feel necessary.