First off, I wanna say that I’m a meganerd, I get that. This is something really dumb , but bear with me.

As a teenager mumble mumble years ago, I was super into Star Wars, and as such was super into canon. I always kept up with canon, and what was going on behind the scenes in all the movies, books, comics, and TV shows.

I took the cancellation of the EU pretty hard, but was excited for what was to come with Disney’s new trilogy and all the exciting other content that took place in the already existing timeline, which was promised to flow better with the overall narrative presented with the six main films.

But now, it seems like they’re changing what’s considered canon so much to the point that it’s confusing (looking at recent Kanan comic and Ahsoka novel retcons and others), and I’m starting to get to a point where, I really just don’t care enough to worry about a gospel truth of a nonexistent world.

It’s frustrating to get invested into a franchise where at any moment, your favorite comic, novel ,game, or TV show can just be written off as never having happened in universe. For people who take these works of fiction seriously, it’s exhausting!

So I’ve found my solution, one which I maybe should have had long ago- I just don’t care anymore.

This started with Star Wars but has honestly just gone off into all my favorite works of fiction, to the point that the only thing I care about is whether its a great work of art and whether or not I have a great time with it.

Does anyone else have any thoughts regarding canon in fiction, and whether or not you actually care about it or whether you don’t care about it at all?

  • LvxferreEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    This is not dumb. Far from that - people discuss this stuff in unis, in Literary Criticism classes.

    I think that there’s no such thing as a universal canon; all canons are headcanons. Each reader/viewer defines one’s own, based on

    • internal consistency - e.g. if in one event the character dies in 1900, and in the other he’s alive in 1905, then at least one of those events is not canon
    • enjoyment - people are more prone to include works that they like within the canon
    • how other people define the canon - e.g. if Alice and Bob consider different works as part of the canon, and they talk about it, one of them might change the canon based on what the other says
    • the authority associated with those other people - e.g. the author is often held as authority, but by no means absolute

    As such you’re pretty much free to disregard what the copyright holder considers “canon”.

    (Now, for some mindfuck: what I said about canon also applies to genres.)