#or in other words: i'm...not sure you really want an essek book people who are being cranky about this; it might be a blessing.

[utilitycaster]

I will say: as someone who does make a habit of observing fandom trends and fan behaviors in parallel with fandom, I actually am rather hesitant about novelizations of PCs on the whole.

I cannot count the number of times I have seen this exact cycle:

People gravitate to a character or ship specifically because there's a lot of wide open space on which they can project their own traits/desires and create their own transformative works.

Those same people often, however, clamor for more canonical material, because those transformative works/projections are ultimately from within them (ie, there's nothing new), and fanon ends up having the same narrowing of possibilities as canon does as one person's headcanon takes off and becomes accepted as the truth (the fandom monocropping, as someone else once put it).

If they get the canonical material, and it does not validate what they already believed to be true but not confirmed, they become unhappy because those projections and headcanons are now not just unconfirmed but actively contradicted.

Either they begin actively rejecting canon after this breaking point, which tends to isolate and stagnate oneself in a fandom; or they move on to a different character (or ship) still rich with potential and possibility having lost interest in the one that they once loved now that it isn't what they wanted it to be. A few people manage to accept it, but especially if their initial motivation was that open space, this requires a profound and drastic shift in how they engage with fiction.

This happened with the Lucien novel: a lot of the people I recall being very excited for it hated it because it (in my opinion, very reasonably) introduced new characters they couldn't have possibly forseen to his backstory and contradicted their own works and headcanons. The people who liked it (myself included) were often people who didn't like Lucien much as a character, but were interested in how he came to be.