Methodology
The rules this site holds itself to — canon, invention, and real history, never mixed.
The canon-vs-invention policy
Every statement on this site belongs to exactly one of three classes, and every page labels which:
- Character canon — established by the Vizlings app: the name styling “gothic male”, the Nocturnals collection, the gothic-gentleman archetype, the 12-chat count. Nothing is added to canon by this site.
- Editorial invention — lore, scenes, dialogue, household, and backstory imagined by this site’s writers to give the character depth. Always labeled as invention. It is character fiction: internally consistent, never presented as fact about the real world.
- Real history — the gothic literary tradition (Walpole, Radcliffe, Poe, and others), cited with genuine publication facts. Never mixed with the character’s fiction; influence is acknowledged, identity is never borrowed.
Persona lines are not quotations
The twelve lines on Lines & Persona Voice and the ten lines in the Social Content Pack are original persona lines written for the Vizlings character. They are not quotations from Byron, Poe, or any real author, and the site labels each one as such. Anyone resharing them must keep the label.
The character is not a real person
The Gothic Male is an original fictional character. No image depicts a real person; no biography borrows a real life. All artwork is AI-generated dramatization, labeled on every caption and recorded in the provenance file.
Uncertainty and gaps
Where the app is silent, this site invents openly rather than implying canon — e.g., the name “Blackmoor Hall” is flagged as invention wherever it appears. Open placeholders (the owner bio, the permanent stream channel) are labeled as placeholders, never filled with guesses.
Verification
- Literary dates and attributions were checked against standard publication facts at build time (2026-09-27).
- Every image hash is recorded in
the image credits on this page; the QA suite verifies each file exists and each caption carries the dramatization label. - The build’s QA checks (tools/qa_check.py) enforce: one h1 per page, alt text on all images, no hotlinking, working internal links, “Source notes” on every content page, and the mockup labeling on the stream page.
Source notes
- This policy: the editorial standard for this site, set at build time.
- QA enforcement: tools/qa_check.py in this site’s repository.