Obviously it was Jawas

Pictured: all of us as we realize how much
of our lives we've wasted reading Screenrant.

You know how sometimes you're in the middle of something and it dawns on you that there will come a day when you wish you had that time back? Well that just happened to me. I was scrolling--ugh--and came across this, I don't know what to call it, article? Theory? Needlessly padded, possibly AI written discourse heavily marbled with ads? Yeah, that one. It postulated that Michelle, you know, the youngest daughter on Full House? Yes, that sitcom from the 90's that we haven't thought about in years. Anyway, this suggested that she's dead.

"How rude!"

-some kid's catchphrase

The character that is, not Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen, although the fact that they (neither the actors nor the character) appeared on the revival show Fuller House is why they're even suggesting that a fictional character is dead in the first place. I won't explain the theory (you could read it yourself, but, don't), it doesn't matter, the point is that it's pure head canon. That is, backstory or explanations for things in fiction that aren't addressed in the fiction itself. And I can't help but wonder who's sitting around coming up with head-canon that kills off a sitcom toddler? Isn't that the actors were unavailable enough?

But when I examine my own life, I find that I'm guilty of the same nonsense. I mean, I didn't invent gruesome explanations for Judy's disappearance from Family Matters, but we all probably do this from time to time? You know, fill in the blanks?

Carl Winslow's got some explaining to do.

Well, ok, maybe they didn't do
their job but it's a better answer than:
"shut up kid, it's just a movie."

I guess that's what we do with fiction, right? Maybe if all the questions are answered for us, there's less for our brains to lock on to and think about, and the fiction is less interesting. I mean, it's no excuse for lazy writing, or hoping we won't notice that one of the kids went missing, although most of us didn't. But we're inevitably going to have questions about stories. I think someone--maybe George Lucas?--once said that if you're only catching the plot holes in the parking lot after the movie, then the director has done their job, and yeah, I guess I agree with that. 

Head-canon is just us engaging with the material, which is in a lot of ways a mark of good story-telling. So my harsh judgement of anyone weaving elaborate backstories to explain Michelle's absence on Fuller House is not only hypocritical, but missing the point. Well, ok, there are probably more hypocritical things out there. And in some cases the writers do just hope we won't notice. And I suppose the real headline here is "grown adult wastes three minutes of his life reading an answer to a question he never asked."

Speaking of George Lucas, what happened to the rockets R2-D2 had in the prequels?
Well, I'm glad I pretended you asked, because I think the Jawas stole them. Mystery: solved.

(source: head-canon)