If a third-party observer's perspective helps: your preferences seemed sufficiently predictable to me that I'd tentatively understood Wei Dai's question as primarily a rhetorical one, intended to indirectly convey the suggestion that it would have been better to give such a response.

I was wary of making that suggestion because that would mean the whole "avoid a lot of the subsequent side-track into whether 'fictional' is a sensible answer or not" was more overtly insincere and hypocritical than I expect wei_dai to be. If I hadn't given Wei this benefit of the doubt I would not have answered straightforwardly as I did and instead had to evaluate how best to mitigate the damage from unwelcome social aggression.