Why Canon Matters

the other day i was perusing the internet in search of deep and insightful commentary on the state of modern entertainment are you serious but instead i happened across this article from several months ago talking about the role of canon in fan bases i'm not going to bore you with all of the details but the basic gist is that long time fans tend to get overly attached to the canon of their favorite franchise whether it's movies tv shows video games even board games and trading cards and they often react badly to any attempts to change that canon like a selfish kid refusing to let anyone else play with his favorite toy and it got me to thinking why is canon actually important does it even mean anything anymore in a world of constant reboots remakes and reimaginings and why do some people guard it so jealously well let's explore this question together shall we first up i want to take a minute to understand what canon actually means just so we're all on the same page with this one well obviously it's a type of large caliber projectile weapon used the truth is that canon is kind of a complex combination of legal ownership and collective fan belief in boring legal terms it's basically the official version of something that's being produced or endorsed by whoever owns the rights to it for example when disney bought over lucasfilm they gained the rights to the star wars brand so that every movie or book they produced from then on is now officially considered canon even though it probably shouldn't be that's the legal definition the other more subtle part of this is the collective belief of the fanbase in terms of storytelling it's what fans consider to be the true version of events something that everyone can agree on and accept as having happened within the fictional world of well whatever franchise they're into so if that's canon then what isn't canon well a nice simple example is fan fiction stories created by fans of a work that take established characters and settings and use them as the basis for a whole new story and some of them can be pretty [ __ ] obscure let me tell you like if you desperately want to read about the ongoing adventures of salacious crumb or the high school dramas of brock rumlow or the love affairs of the fat bearded engineer guy from season 1 of tng then there's probably a lovingly crafted fan fiction lurking somewhere in the dark corners of the internets now that's all fine but because they're not created by the people who actually own the rights to this stuff they're considered non-canonical they exist in their own little universe safe and separate from the official main story sure you can enjoy them for what they are but for most people there's a kind of invisible line in their head that separates them from the true version of events that way if your favorite character happens to die in one of them you don't really have to care about it because it didn't happen for real it's kind of a subtle little trick that we play on our own minds allowing them to believe in something just enough to buy into it at the time while recognizing that it's separate from another fictional thing we've bought into just a little bit more damn this is like inception levels of suspending disbelief anyway the point i'm making here is that there's a clear line between canon and non-canon works even in the same fictional worlds well at least there used to be the problem now is that the line between the two is becoming increasingly muddled and it's happening for two main reasons corporate and social consider the disney takeover of lucasfilm that i mentioned earlier see over the years lucasfilm had produced an absolute [ __ ] son of books games tv shows and comics that gradually expanded on the events and characters in the movies and even moved the star wars universe forwards this became known as the expanded universe they weren't always the best quality and occasionally they would contradict each other in little ways but gradually they solidified around a mostly coherent central storyline and it was kind of cool to know that luke and the others would go off on other exciting adventures after the events of the movies instead of sitting on a [ __ ] island drinking green alien titty milk but when disney took over lucasfilm they decided they wanted to take star wars in a whole new direction and trying to work within the confines of the convoluted expanded universe would have required them to use brains and creativity so instead they just said [ __ ] it the expanded universe never happens and just like that it was de-canonized the stories in world that had been lovingly built up over decades were wiped out in an instance and as you can imagine the fans that had become invested in it weren't exactly happy something pretty similar happened to star trek when bad robot took over the franchise in what may have been one of the most disastrously short-sighted decisions in corporate history jj abrams was tasked with reinvigorating a franchise that had become stale and stodgy and run out of ideas and because he wasn't capable of coming up with interesting new characters of his own his solution was a shitty time travel plot that created a whole new version of captain kirk and the rest of the enterprise crew not only did this avoid the difficult process of having to launch new characters but it also allowed him to leech off the popularity of fan favorites unfortunately it also had the side effect of wiping out absolutely everything that would come afterwards enjoyed tng did you licked yourself a bit of deep space nine or maybe you were one of those weirdos that got a kick out of voyager well too bad my friend because all of those things have been consigned to a different timeline the new world of star trek is dumb frantic violent grim horrific and politically charged and you'll [ __ ] like it you pleb no matter how much money we have to lose in the process things are even worse for the dc universe on film which has been plagued by studio mismanagement and conflicting creative visions since the very beginning the result is an absolute mess where movies like joker now exist in their own separate reality and the release of the snyder cut has fans battling over which version of justice league is actually canon ghostbusters 2016 straight up ignored the previous two movies in a vain attempt to kickstart its own rebooted franchise and when that proved to be about as successful as a ship-flavored breathman a quick change of management at sony resulted in ghostbusters afterlife which wisely ignores the existence of ghostbusters 2016 altogether it's like a constant tug of war between different factions and producers and caught in the middle are the increasingly exasperated fans who just want to enjoy their favorite stuff without constantly having to worry whether it even still exists or not because let's be honest it's kind of disappointing to realize that your favorite stories and characters are only ever one corporate merger away from being wiped out of existence the second problem is more subtle but also far more insidious and it's usually driven by the most destructive force in modern entertainment politics take doctor who the long-running british sci-fi show about a time-travelling alien who occasionally regenerates into a different appearance mostly because william hartnell the original actor from the 1960s was too ill to continue so they needed an explanation for replacing him but since then it's become kind of a tradition it's happened 13 times over the years and every time the character's been played by a male actor well until the bbc decided the show needed to be more diverse so they shoehorned in an untalented actress that was totally unsuited to the role and forced heavy-handed political undertones into most of their stories but that still wasn't good enough for them because there was just no getting around the fact that 12 out of 13 versions of the doctor had been played by men or was there the episode the timeless child changed all of that by completely retconning the doctor's backstory and revealing that there were literally hundreds of previous incarnations that the character had just kind of forgotten about most of which were carefully chosen to be as ethnically and sexually diverse as possible unfortunately it also undermined the history of a show that's been around for almost 60 years completely changing the backstory of the main character and alienating longtime fans in the process but really that's just one example of many ridiculous changes sweeping the entertainment industry in recent years there's been growing calls for the iconic spy james bond to be played by a black man or a woman or better yet a black woman the latest movie assuming it ever actually gets released will apparently see bond as old retired irrelevant and no longer able to seduce women at all because that's offensive now i guess so basically they've removed the very traits that made the character so compelling and timeless genius and believe me that won't be the end of it why can't james t kirk be rewritten as bisexual the blue-haired bloggers demands why can't we have female space marines in warhammer why can't han solo be a black wheelchair-bound lesbian the answer for me is simple that's not how the characters were written you might not like it it might not gel with your current social climate but that's just the way it is and it doesn't give you the right to go back and retroactively change someone else's creation especially when your reasons for doing so can be boiled down to it needs to be more modern no it doesn't by all means create your own new characters and worlds that take as many boxes as you want and see how well they stand on their own merits but stop trying to reshape the ones that already exist stop taking things that people love and twisting them to suit your own selfish needs if you're genuinely passionate about an entertainment property subculture or hobby then you'll have enough humility to fit in with it instead of expecting it to change to suit you jesus is it any wonder that fans get pissed off about this kind of thing when they see the creeping demands for bigger and bigger changes gradually taking over their hobby until it barely resembles what it once was but drinker you loquacious lithario i hear you say if it's all fictional anyway then what does it matter surely everyone can just take whatever version of the story they like and stick with that well that brings me neatly back around to the question of why cannon actually matters for me it's more than just who holds the legal rights to an intellectual property it represents the collective belief of the fanbase in the world they care about it's what unifies them around core ideas events and characters but if those core elements are subject to constant change and revision then what the [ __ ] is there to unify them could you imagine a bunch of star wars fans meeting up at some convention to talk about their appreciation of han solo only they each have a completely different version of the character in their minds because he's been retconned so many times over the years how are they supposed to relate to each other when they might as well be fans of completely different properties ultimately canon for me is like the foundation on which you build your understanding an investment in a fictional world the more solid and stable it is the more you can feel comfortable to lose yourself in a bit of much needed escapism but every time some [ __ ] changes some aspect of the canon it undermines that foundation just a little bit more until eventually the whole thing collapses and you end up saying [ __ ] it i just don't care about this anymore that my friend is how hobbies die but don't worry there's always new things to lose yourself in well until you start hearing those small but growing calls for just one little change anyway that's all i've got for today go away now

Channel: The Critical Drinker

Views: 881,368

Rating: 4.9415927 out of 5

Keywords: star wars, lucasfilm, star trek, disney, kathleen kennedy, bob eiger, feminism, SJW

Id: mAmJ52dtQl0

Length: 11min 24sec (684 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 15 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/lecherousdevil]

I think it's my favorite non movie review he's produced so far.

[u/dadmda]

Watched it yesterday, a great video

[u/Holy1To3]

Excellent video from our favorite drunk Scotsman.