(The following contains spoilers for all aired episodes of Supernatural, Torchwood, and The Sarah Jane Adventures, as well as the full series of Harry Potter novels. Also mentions sexual assault.)

So have you stepped foot in Supernatural fandom this week?

Doctor Merlin is not an SPN fan, but is a fan of watching the SPN fen, always with fondness, often with popcorn. (To be fair, she watches most other fans with popcorn ready. Sometimes also aspirin.) This week, SPN canon did a Bad, Bad Thing, and as happens when any show does a Bad, Bad Thing, fans are up at arms on opposite ends of the argument as to whether it was indeed a Bad, Bad Thing, or an understandable thing taken from a certain context, or just more fodder for "those whiners" to chew. This particular Bad, Bad Thing is something large groups of the fandom have been complaining about in the canon for a few seasons now, and as every time something Bad happens in the canon, large groups of the fandom who don't see it as a problem are asking those who do why they don't go find another fandom.

This happens a lot.

Be it something major that changes the canon (see this past summer's flailing over Torchwood) or something that emerges over time as an unsavory theme permeating an otherwise enjoyable series (see RaceFail: Stargate Edition), rare indeed is the canon that doesn't do something to piss off someone somewhere. Doctor Merlin blames Joss Whedon. A lot. Loudly. Joss said that he didn't give the fans what they wanted, he gave them what they needed, and every hack wannabe who read the quote has used it to justify any and every idiotic writing decision made ever since, or at least the ones where they had to run into fans with pitchforks, emails and long, detailed letters to the production company folded up in neat little origami forms that spelled "WTF?" Showrunners who might have spent ten more minutes considering that killing off popular characters, having female characters sexually assaulted, and breaking up the canon couples on the series might possibly be bad ideas in the overall scheme of not pissing off their fanbases, they latch onto the broken logic. "You needed this story." (Really? Maybe I was recovering from an illness and just needed a little brain candy while I was on bedrest. Maybe I watched a cartoon specifically because I was bone-weary of watching people and characters I loved get raped and/or killed. Thanks for knowing that I "needed" to see it in the places I went to hide away from that reality for an hour or two. The horse you rode in on is equally unwelcome.) This is not to say showrunners failed to do those things before, repeatedly and with just as little foresight into the effect it would have on their popularity, just that now they have an excuse card to toss up when the inevitable happens.

Note that word "inevitable," and do not mistake my meaning. It is not in fact a certainty that your canon or mine will fall down on race, gender, or even intelligence issues. Some canons don't. Sarah Connor did well, and to a lesser extent, so did Farscape. Doctor Merlin still adores Gargoyles because it managed so well. No, the inevitable thing is that, should the canon screw up, the fans will complain. We're fans. That's what we do. We're good at it.

The question for us is, what do we do after? We complain, on our blogs and our soapboxes and over the phone to our sympathetic friends and on the shoulders of our SOs, and we take apart the canon piece by piece to see what went wrong where, and we perform analyses of long-term trends by the writers and short-term effects on the ratings. And then we're left with a problem. If canon sucks, how do we stay part of it? The naysayers who meet every criticism with "Why don't you just get out?" have one point: if canon hurts us this badly when we watch, why do we stay?

This gets complicated. Bear with me.

Every show canon is different. (Which is good, because otherwise we'd always be stuck in copyright violation hell.) This means every situation is different. And of course, every fan watching is bringing something different to the party. A woman of color who is also a rape survivor is going to react differently than a Caucasian man who has not been assaulted when the series shows the male lead mimicking sexual violence as he kills a Black female guest star. (Or maybe not. Everyone responds their own way, and generalizations are exactly as useful as the sweeping way in which they're made.) Shorter, what pisses you off might not strike me as particularly bothersome, and vice-versa. More likely, what pisses you off might strike me as problematic but something that can be addressed, fixed, or forgiven in the wider scheme of the canon. Which is to say, my love for the source may outweigh my outrage at the stupid thing it's done this time.

Sometimes that works. Sometimes we can set aside our annoyance, and calm down our anger, and remind ourselves that just because every Black male character on the show has been killed violently does not mean the writing staff are racist pricks. It could mean that they are attempting to make a metatextual statement about the racist overtones of the genre, and by doing it so prominently, attempting to draw attention to the matter to foster debate, discussion, and ultimate change. It more likely means they're clueless, didn't notice what they were doing, and will respond to feedback on same with flabbergasted horror (which will then be followed up by either "I'm so sorry and didn't realize and I'll try harder next time," or far more likely "I'm not a racist, how dare you say that I am, some of my best friends … " and continue to miss the point). Sometimes we decide that the things we love about the canon --- be it the characters, the ideas, the relationships, the history --- are important enough to us to hold onto the rest, and hope for change.

Sometimes change happens.

The Whoniverse has been a central location for Racefail in years past, and for good reason. (I could go into a long list right now. Suffice it to say, they screwed up a lot.) However, to the surprise and delight of people who are me, the canon seems to be righting itself. This year, only The Sarah Jane Adventures is getting a full complement of episodes, but in this season/series (pick your Pond side), the character of Clyde has been put into the forefront instead of kept as the oft-maligned comic relief (the comic role is now filled by Rani's parents, but sympathetically, and with bonus "not an obnoxious mother figure for once, holyshit," added in). It's been a welcome change in tone. Sure, the show might crash and burn next year, and it doesn't mean the other two shows won't captain the failboat all the way into the iceberg, but it's a start.

Faith can pay off. And sometimes, faith just means getting slapped down again.

See: most of our shows. See: most of our showrunners. See: why those of us who latch onto strong female characters spend a lot of time being pissed off. See: why people GAFIATE and get their cable shut off. See: Potterdammerung.

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Bring a fan can suck. A lot. Because as much as we love our shows, time and again, we get reminded that for the most part, our showrunners wish we didn't. They wish we were compartmentalized in a nice demographic box who tune in at the appropriate times and buy the right products and purchase the officially-licensed tie-in materials and never, ever register any actual opinions on their work. Not even flattering opinions. Not even fanmail. That fanvid you made as a labor of love over weeks? They don't like it. Ditto those fanfics, that fanart, and honestly, they like getting paid to talk at conventions but really wish we weren't there, either.

(Doctor Merlin would like to take an aside right now and point out that the above is not a universal truth. Some showrunners do like us, some are us only with bigger budgets. Some are Greg Weisman, whom we adore like pie. This rant is directed at the other guys. Just sayin'.)

They don't mind us, most of the time. The few fans who get in to the inner circle tend to be the positive ones, who honestly like the work and how it's presented, and hey, that's all of us at least part of the time or we wouldn't have become fans in the first place. But while you'll find the occasional showrunner who likes the status of having a cult hit, know that most of them would trade in every cosplayer, fanfic writer, and icon designer for double their numbers in the 18-34 year old male demographic. (Feel free to substitute the demo for your own series. My last fandom wanted 7-12 year old boys. Good times.) We're just loud people on the Internet who scare off the normal viewers. Don't be lulled into thinking we're anything else.

So canon is going to cater to the largest demographic grab they can get. Star Trek: Voyager, touted in the beginning as so progressive and female-friendly because of the female captain, gets retooled with a hot blonde in a catsuit. Why? Because women were watching it instead of the men, and men are the ones supposed to be watching Star Trek, duh. If ratings jump when female characters die in a disturbingly sexualized manner, guess what's going to happen a lot? Related: If your fandom is one of the rare ones that caters to the cult in "cult hit," and the fandom complains every time a new female character is introduced until she's written off, that's not going to bode well for the estrogen levels on your series, either. Feel free to apply this to non-Caucasian, non-straight, and non-conforming characters on your own show, but the story is the same in the end. Sometimes the writer(s) will claim this was the plan all along. The cast will change, the stories will change, and sometimes it will pan out in the end if you keep faith and sometimes it'll lead you to ask yourself why you ever got involved in the first place, because you're embarrassed to call yourself a fan now.

What do you do?

Well, just like finding out what will be your personal final straw of suck, how you deal with canon screwing you over is going to be individual to you and your own needs. Maybe you do still love the characters, at least as you see them, and you love the friends you've made here. Maybe your outlet will be to write fixit fics, and denial fics, and create art specifically set before everything went to hell, and create vast, shared spaces of AUs to set yourself apart from the canon proper. According to the folks over at When I Kissed the Teacher, Snape never died and he and Hermione got together when she was legal. The Harmonians have their own private spaces close by. And of course that old stalwart from days of old, Beauty and the Beast fandom still has a whole wide swathe of the fandom who don't acknowledge anything past season two, and it's been twenty years now that they've had their contentedly non-canon-compliant worlds put to paper and electrons. Canon can be optional if you find enough friends to share. Maybe you jump ship before you absorb more canon and concentrate on the old stuff that brought you joy. Leave those later seasons and books to the whippersnappers. You can do that.

Maybe you stick it through, hoping things will get better anyway and despite all evidence to the contrary. You chose to commit, and what the hell, even if you just outlive the damned show, it means you win. How many seasons this will work for you is only and always up to you. Personally, Doctor Merlin gave up on Battlestar Galactica over a year before it ended, mocked the show mercilessly ever after, and still tuned in for every single episode until the bitter end. It's also possible the thing that broke the show for you happens right before the series ends, and by then, it's just a matter of collecting the last of the set to put it all to rest properly. (see: half of Potter fandom and the reaction to Book 7)

Maybe, and this is the hardest thing to do sometimes, maybe you just go. Maybe the misogyny finally kills the last spark of love you had. Maybe the loss of your favorite character makes the headdeskery of the rest of the cast too much to bear. Maybe it's more painful to stay and have it rubbed in your face with every episode how little the things that matter to you actually matter to the people writing the show. Maybe you need the sanity break. Maybe you're too old for this shit. And this can feel like the naysayers have won, and it can feel like the Bad, Bad Things on the screen have done their work and eliminated you as an audience member in lieu of someone Better. Don't let it.

No one can tell you when you should leave except you. Doctor Merlin keeps running into a fellow fan who takes every possible opportunity to complain loudly that she hates everything canon has done on her show since the middle of the first season. The fan hates the canon pairings, hates the fandom's favored pairings, hates the storylines, and hates most of the characters. (And will say so at length in reviews to stories. Doctor Merlin's Guide to Fandom Etiquette suggests there is an important difference between "I don't normally like this pairing but I like how you've written it," and "Die, Canon/Pairing/Character, Die Die Die!" and that difference is knowing when to hit the Back button.) So why doesn't she find a fandom where she'd be happier? That answer can only be provided by the fangirl in question, just as it can only be provided by you for yourself.

Do you despise what the canon has become? Do you hate more of the storylines than you love? Do the canon and fanon pairings make you want to vomit? Speaking of vomiting, do you become physically ill when you consider rewatching parts of your own favorite show? (Doctor Merlin actually hyperventilates and gets chest pains thinking about a particular episode of a certain unnamed series of which she was once a fan. Consider her making an obscene gesture at the episode's writers right now. Consider her making the same gesture on your behalf if the same thing happens to you.) Do you take more pleasure in yelling at your fellow fans for enjoying things you dislike about the show than you do in indulging in rewatches and fanfic writing and creating fanmixes and squeeing and speculating and metaing? Would you rather be somewhere else? Or is it all still worth it, for those moments of awesome? Is it worth it to wait canon out to see if, by some miracle, things improve after all? Is it worth it to lurk in the past when things were less sucky (or at least less obviously sucky) and create your own space with your friends to blot out The Dumb and celebrate what was The Excellent? What are you getting out of your fandom experience, your chosen hobby, and is it enough to keep you going? Don't let anyone else decide whether you go or stay. Don't let the Stupid choose for you, but instead choose because it's the best thing for you to do. And if you go, remember you can always come back later, when your head can handle it and your heart too, and maybe when the writers have finally caught a clue.

Canon sucks. Yours, mine, everyone's. Little ways that flit like a neverending series of papercuts on the soul, big ways that make you feel like you've lost a limb, or a lover. Stay and make the best of it, or walk away with your pride intact, and spend a lot of time either way sopping your woes in Ben & Jerry's and/or well-written porn. Make your choices based on what you really need, not what other fans or some dumbass showrunner tells you that you need, and change your mind if you need to do that, too. We're fans. This is how we roll.