for a while i've been using "wookiepedia mindset" as a term to describe the broad tendency in fan spaces over the last few decades to obsessively catalog the "lore" of a story, and like,
a lot of digital ink has been spilled about why treating fiction like historical fact and acting like made-up cartoon characters are real people is bad for art and people
but i do think the worst part about it is how it inoculates people against any non-literal thematic reading of a text. the only way anything can be "canon" is if it comes down through word of god or if a character turns towards the camera and specifies it exactly. pointing to implicit signifiers, analogies, metaphor, references, coding, character design or anything else that can't be reduced to a superscript link to the references section of a fandom dot wikia page becomes utterly impossible. and that doesn't only suck but also makes me wanna rip my hair out
