LHM: Love the characters, hate the canon.

Yeah - I like to think of Van as both a powerful narrator and also an unreliable one, and a lot of people seem to miss that; Fanon Lendel is the Lendel who Van always pretended existed. I honestly think it's something canon does well, the way the developing plot makes it clear that Lendel is actual murder-suicide bugfuck while Van keeps on unconditionally adoring him even after everything went down. That fic I just linked seems to take the view that Lendel is seriously mentally ill and everyone knows it, including Van. (Uh speaking of recs post, I don't know if you got an alert for my most recent comment there? Because I found something actually good.)