Road Rovers STARS Headcanons

Gonna try to get the next chapter of New Dogs out this week, but in the meantime, here's a little something to tide readers over.

-- My stories include moments of levity and humor, and some will be straight-up action/comedies, but my brand of humor is for the most part is quite different from the show's itself. It’s less goofy, dated, and referential for one, and doesn’t rely so much on dog jokes or Blitz being Colleen’s punching bag as well as the butt of some gigantic cosmic joke in general. Humor does not trump characterization either. If it’s going to bother you not to see the show’s style of humor, then you don’t even need to be reading my stuff. If you can deal with it though, then enjoy.

-- Hunter, Colleen, and Exile (on occasion) are not the only cano-sapiens who can understand Shag and normal dogs. This is something the show did that I’ve always found really inconsistent and confusing. All Cano-Sapiens can do this, and the same goes for any other sapient or mutant.

-- The first season of Road Rovers STARS (the canon episodes) begins in 1996 (the same year the show originally aired). The stories pick up from there. The way the passage of time in the show was handled, particularly in “Still A Few Bugs In The System”, was weird. Like, that episode actually spanned several years? I’d have to look around to see exactly how long, but when I saw that I thought to myself “Well, I'm ignoring that.”

Actually, the passage of time in many fanfics makes no sense either. Sometimes things apparently happen over the course of several years, but again, nobody ever ages and the characters literally appear to be frozen in time. I'm going to have a timeline that makes actual logical sense.

-- When it comes to criminals, the Rovers are more like real-life police officers and less like Batman. If a villain is threatening to seriously harm or kill someone and cannot be talked down, then the Rovers are permitted to use lethal force to stop them if necessary. Also, EW bought up the idea of the Rovers specifically being ordered to kill on their missions instead of merely arresting criminals in some stories (something that a ton of fanfics skirt around). 

Also, a villain(s) who goes to prison will stay there for a decent length of time. In other words, it’s not going to be like all the jails we see in comic books where criminals are just continually escaping. If a villain does manage to frequently evade the good guys' clutches, then they will do so in a logical, plausible manner.

-- Since they were so poorly handled in the show, the canon Rovers will be getting some much-needed attention and development in STARS, thanks in part to EW. I feel fans get so impressed with their OFCs that the canon characters get turned into side characters. Hunter will not be the center of the universe here though like he is everywhere else.

-- The Rovers’ owners will also get focus here. The bond between human and animals is a special one, and something I feel deserves more attention then what it receives in the fandom.

-- The STARS-verse borrows characters and concepts from certain other authors, namely Evil Writer and George Aguirre (as far as several of the historical elements go), but many of the original fan characters not made by me/Lilikoi/Fox the Writer have been adjusted to varying degrees in order to fit into STARS better. The same goes for some of the aforementioned story concepts. Also, don’t expect to see many if indeed any popular fanon concepts here.

-- I wasn’t going to even touch on this, but because I’ve noticed so many contemporary Rover fans doing this I feel the need to comment. These fans make the Rovers more like real-life dogs given sentience who often still retain/or want to retain the mentalities and lifestyles of regular dogs (IE: giving their children away to human owners to be raised as pets and only visiting them occasionally, as opposed to wanting to raise them themselves).

I go the Disney route and have sapients being sentient even as regular animals (which is what the show itself even seemed to be heavily implying). They just can’t communicate with humans. I think there’s so much to be explored with sapients that fans don’t seem to care about. It just seems so lazy to go, “Yeah, they still live and act like dogs, only they can talk now! Well that’s all, byyyye!” Would the Rovers not realize that they have the power to do things now that they couldn’t as regular old dogs? You don’t have to obey the alpha dog. You can run the pack more democratically now. You don’t have to basically let your children be ripped away from you to be raised by total strangers of a different species anymore. And so on and so forth.

-- In a reverse of the previous rule, sapients are not reskinned humans either.

-- Something else nu!fanbase does that really singes my biscuits: how Parvo’s Mutants are handled. You get people who want them to have expanded roles and be comic relief, or treat them as being interchangeable with sapiens. But the show always presented them as non-speaking grunts and monstrous, corrupted beasts (granted, they did get nerfed over the course of the series). They also look distinctly different from sapients and have never displayed superpowers in the show. I don’t mind having them being capable of speaking, albeit not nearly as well or as clearly as sapients do, but I don’t need them holding long, complex conversations or doing pratfalls. 

A bunch of fans also have the Rovers killing them, which to me is morally wrong because they are killing innocent cats and dogs that were corrupted by Parvo against their will.

The Mutants in STARS are more primitive and aggressive than either sapients, TMNT-style mutants, and mutates are. They have little interest in the opposite sex or the like. They can be cured and changed back into normal animals with the Transdogmafier, as was shown in canon on several occasions (as hard as the fandom tries to ignore this). Parvo goes on to use other animal species as Mutants, including Furo-Mutants (ferrets), Shark Mutants, Urso-Mutants (bears), and Chiro-Mutants (bats). Other villains will end up employing Melo-Mutants (badgers) and Cheetah Mutants for specific schemes.

ETA: I think this was Usami's headcanon, but I like the idea of the Cano-Mutator being the evil opposite of the Transdogmafier, bringing out the worst traits of animals.

-- Here, there's more of a focus on the Rovers' personal lives and interests beyond them just fighting crime, the lulz, and shipping melodrama. They can't fight Parvo forever. I notice 97% of fanfics make it seem like they just sit around waiting for villains to attack. And if fans ever do decide to have them do something other then go on adventures, it'll be about them starting families (especially Hunter and Colleen, because they're the Anointed Ones). Nothing else.

-- Everyone and their grandma can't just break into RRMC like it's nothing. This is a common trope in fanfics that drives me nuts! In STARS, no villain knows where RMMC is. Not saying that'll always be the case, but as of now nobody knows. And even if someone were to discover its location, there are actual security systems that will alert the Rovers and at the same time stop the intruder. Not a glass door with a bell on it that rings whenever people walk in and out.