This is an excerpt from a Wikipedia article (I think?) that my friend sent me about the emails

No offense but Wikipedia isn't always the most reliable source of intel, they put plenty of misinformation there all the time. It's best to just go by what you yourself see.

That is fair, Wikipedia isn’t fully a reliable source but the fact it does say the emails are suppose to serve as a e-sequal for the books, it should at least raise an eyebrow . Plus saying Wikipedia is unreliable isn’t completely true, as there are a lot of moderators that keep a close eye on pages

I read the entire page of emails, and I've managed to find literally zero info about them being related to the book. This is pretty much all I've been able to find about which universe they're related to, so either I'm blind or there's something someone's not telling me.

Here’s another article from Dangerous Minds that affirm the statemeny of Ellis approving the emails/it being a sequal to the novels

Point is: Yeah, Bateman is a heinous and irredeemable and everything, however these emails and these articles are pointing to it being actually canon.

Ultimately would consider this separate from the book.

Separate? I kinda sent proof that does say it is canon. Why do you think it isn’t?

Wait, hold on a second can we talk about this for a second. If there is literally nothing in the emails itself that say its canon to the novel and the only ones you can find are articles quoting second hand with as I can tell no citation that is not good enough proof.

You seem a tad eager to propose a removal for Bateman.

Lunar Park—a 2005 metafictional novel by Bret Easton Ellis and the actual closest thing we have to an American Psycho sequel—to my knowledge portrays Bateman as the same vile villain in the original book (albeit primarily presented as hallucinations that haunt a fictionalized Ellis) who is still rumored to have recently committed a string of murders and with no mention of Jean or his “son” whatsoever, despite the fact that these would probably be quite pivotal to his character if those emails were canon to Ellis’s universe; he is ultimately written off by said fictionalized Ellis to have died in a fire on a boat dock, alone, as a means of overcoming the character. Sounds like a rather abrupt, brutal end to someone who could apparently atone for his actions and love his family (and hell, has family who loves him to begin with), and I don’t believe he is explicitly given any redeeming qualities or sympathy in Lunar Park; I’ll have to read it to find out, but from research alone, there is no mention of any character development or even family.

Even with that aside, Bateman learning to love anyone just like that sounds not only horribly cliché but also at odds with the point of his character as a shallow and hyperbolized caricature of yuppie culture dehumanized by his environment (and himself, really) yet desperately trying to be human; I don’t think that’s how Ellis, who personally hates the character and doesn’t seem to have done anything with these emails beyond greenlighting them once (and it is apparently unclear as to which version of the character they’re written for, nor is there context as to why he greenlit them), would go about writing at all. Even if he did approve of them and explicitly declare them canon to his literature, Lunar Park appears to retcon or at least totally disregard them, which (while speculative) would at the very least suggest that Ellis didn’t find “family man Bateman” satisfactory—an unsurprising scenario seeing as the core of his character is a sort of shadow archetype to Ellis himself encapsulating his own worst aspects back when he was similarly slipping into a sort of consumerist void (albeit with less serial killing and sexual deviance, obviously).

This is too much of a gray area and so I doubt that Bateman’s PE status is going anywhere for the time being—and given his role and ultimate fate in Lunar Park (which, again, is subsequent to those emails), probably ever.