How it works

Six questions, three answers each, and none of them is about you. Each one asks the same thing from a different angle: when two accounts of a story disagree, which one is allowed to win? A licensed novel against the broadcast. A scene shot and cut against the hour that went out. A writer explaining it afterwards. A performer explaining their own part. A continuation made years later. An episode that overwrites an earlier one. Underneath sits a single switch for the case the six do not cover — when two sources you have already admitted contradict each other, does the older one hold or does the newer one replace it?

Nothing is scored against a right answer, because there is not one. The page adds your six answers up into a shape, names the policy that shape describes, and then does the part that is actually useful: it applies your rule to seven contested cases and tells you what you just committed yourself to. Two people can land on the same policy name and get different rulings, because the rulings come from the individual answers and not from the label.

Your six answers and the switch are the last eight characters of the address bar. That is the whole of what this page stores — nothing is written to your machine, nothing waits for you between visits, and copying the link is the only save button there is. Open somebody else's and you get their policy and their rulings, with a line at the top saying so until you touch something.

The four places authority can sit

Every answer here leans on two of four sources, and the one your six answers feed most is the policy you get.

The broadcast — authority is in the finished thing as it went out, and nothing that was not in it can be used to explain it. The tightest position and the easiest to defend in public.
The makers — authority follows the people who made it, wherever they say it afterwards: a writer's later account, a performer's reading of their own part, a scene that was shot before somebody cut it.
The licence — authority follows the rights: whatever the owner has signed off and put out, in the order it was put out, novels and companion volumes and continuations included.
The room — authority is not delegated at all. Nobody outranks anybody; a claim is worth what the argument for it is worth, and a contradiction is a fact about the record rather than a problem to be solved.

Why the cases are shapes and not episodes

The seven cases the page rules on are described as shapes — a licensed book giving somebody a relative the screen never mentions, a cut scene that fills a hole the finished hour leaves, a later series that gives a character more past than the original can hold. They name no episode, no year, no count and no character, and that is deliberate twice over.

The first reason is that a case list which grows episode summaries stops being an argument and turns into an episode guide, which is a different thing with a different legal footing and is not what this corner does. The second is plainer: a page about who is allowed to assert things has no business asserting one it has not checked. Every specific claim worth making here — a date, a run length, who said what at which convention — would need a primary source in front of it, and the honest move when you have not got one is to leave it out rather than round it off. So the cases are stated generally, and the reasoning is the content.

That has a useful side effect. Because nothing here depends on a particular episode, the rule you leave with is portable. It works on the next series you argue about, and on the one after that, which is more than most fandom arguments give you.

Where you disagree with yourself

The part most people find worth sending is not the policy. It is the audit underneath it. Certain combinations of the six answers pull against each other, and the page names them rather than smoothing them over: admitting a cut scene because somebody made it while refusing a licensed novel written under the same signature, or letting a newer series overrule an older one while refusing to let a newer episode overrule an older one, which is the same move at two different scales.

None of these is called a mistake. Each one has a real defence and the page states it, because a policy with a seam in it that you can see and describe is worth considerably more than a tidy one you have never tested. Rather more than a third of the ways through this page trip at least one, and when one fires the honest response is to go back and change an answer rather than argue with the page.

What it will not do

It will not tell you which policy is correct, rank the four, or hold one of them itself. It takes no side in any of the seven cases; it only works out what your stated rule says about them. It sorts nobody, scores nobody, and returns nothing at all about your character — you came here with a rule, and you leave with the same rule and a clearer view of what it costs.

This is fan-made, and unofficial

This is an unofficial fan tool about how fandoms decide what counts, written for the Supernatural wing of this site. It is a free, unofficial fan tool — an unofficial fan tribute, made for fun. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Warner Bros. Television, The CW, or any official rights holder of Supernatural.

Every question, ruling and policy on this page was written for it. No dialogue, scene, episode summary or wording from any television series or tie-in book appears anywhere in it, and no case below names an episode. Iron Realms — the strategy game the rest of this site is about — is an original fantasy world with its own map, its own houses and its own art, and has no connection to the world of Supernatural. This corner is kept separate on purpose, and nothing in it should be read as suggesting otherwise.

Where the rest of them are

The wing's other tool runs the opposite way round: it makes something up and gives it to you, where this page only ever tells you what you had already decided. The Supernatural section lists every quiz and tool in this wing, and the fan tributes hub has the rest of the corner. If you would rather play something than fiddle with a tool, Iron Realms is free and runs in a browser tab.