It can be pleasing to inhabit a fiction where all the pieces are smoothly bolted together, working in lockstep. But teaching people to favour the consistency of imaginary worlds may also teach them to vilify disagreement and the entire practice of interpretation.

I can sometimes feel this pressure when running a tabletop game in a big setting like 40k or Star Wars. Can’t imagine how magnified that is when you’re working on something thousands of people with play, let alone in a fan base with such obnoxious reactionaries in the mix