From Esquire:
It’s the best of times and the worst of times to be a fan. For devotees of mega-franchises like Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there’s never been a more massive glut of new content. We’re living through a golden age of interconnected storytelling, as sequels and prequels explode across film, television, and literature faster than many of us can keep up. Yet at the same time, these mega-franchises are tormented by their most strident fans, melting down into paroxysms of toxicity through petitions, review bombing, and targeted harassment campaigns, among other odious tactics. Toxic fandom is a complex beast, but at the root of its many convulsions, there’s often one sore spot: the sticky concept of canon.
Canon is scripture; canon is king; canon can do no wrong. Its definition is simple—the term refers to a fictional body of work and its established facts—but that’s where the simplicity ends. In this age of massive cultural production, of sequels and prequels and cinematic universes, where does canon start and stop? Do novelizations, video games, or other ancillaries count—and who gets to decide? When new entries to the canon subvert or “retcon” the established universe, what’s to be done with those unruly fictions? After all, when storytellers dare to expand canon, whether by disrupting the narrative or simply shining a flashlight into its underexplored corners, there can be hell to pay. Increasingly, fans have become canon’s militant enforcers; when those seeking to enlarge canon stray across its perceived guardrails, like J.J. Abrams or Rian Johnson, backlash is swift and vociferous. In one memorable dust-up, Star Wars fans petitioned for Disney to erase The Last Jedi from the franchise’s canon altogether. Somehow, canon is at once a collective orthodoxy and a personal totem, inflected with each viewer’s own biases and desires—even their own bigotry, too.
Canon has a big problem, and the call is coming from inside the house. It’s not hard to see how this obsession with canonical fealty has hamstrung Marvel and Lucasfilm, two franchise juggernauts whose every innovation is punished by a fan meltdown. When storytellers are held hostage by their own audiences, it undermines their ability to do what artists do best: explore, revise, play. This is the problem with storytelling in the age of the mega-franchise—all too often, the impulses of abiding canon conflict with the impulses of making art. As Ron Moore, a longtime Star Trek writer who later rebooted Battlestar Galactica, put it, “It’s frustrating to be in the writers room and tossing out stories, then having to stop yourself and go, ‘Does this work? Does this violate continuity?’ And having to call people and check encyclopedias and look up information. You want to have it all in your head and just play. The Trek universe has got to the point where you can’t play anymore.”
How can storytellers possibly play or progress under the weight of all that baggage—and still please today’s demanding audiences, too? Some mega-franchises have found a solution where canon isn’t a restriction, but rather, a foundation. If fans won’t accept stories where canon makes less sense, then by God, these shows will bring the canon to make more sense.
. . . .
Consider Strange New Worlds, Paramount+’s sensational Star Trek prequel set during the captaincy of Christopher Pike, who preceded Captain Kirk aboard the Enterprise. Fans of The Original Series no doubt remember the landmark two-part episode “The Menagerie,” which shocked viewers when Spock abducted his former commander Captain Pike and stole the Enterprise, risking his life and career to transport a paralyzed Pike to a forbidden planet. It’s a fantastic episode, but it lacks a backstory. Just what sort of bond existed between these two men that drove rule-following Spock to steal Starfleet’s flagship?
Link to the rest at Esquire
Let’s not forget that entire season of Dallas that turned out to have all been Bobby’s dream.
And then you get into fan expectations, and what the author says after the book is printed (movie released, re-edited, whatever). See assorted JK Rowling remarks, Han shot first, or some of what Tolkien wrote in letters or drafts that followed the release of LotR.
My personal take is that canon is what got printed. What the author says later can inform, but is at best canon adjacent, and at worst, nonsense.
My kid has bent my ear on more than one occasion about games, and some of what I’ve heard about Final Fantasy VII may apply. There’s the original game. Then the company made a couple prequels and sequels. The fans were expecting one thing for the prequel “crisis core’ – a war story, and didn’t get it, but (says the kid), if they’d paid attention in the original, the character says he joined up towards the tail end of the war, so they should have guessed it wouldn’t be the war. What they got was a completely different story, that fleshed out the world, and informed players of how the main character of the original got into his situation and survived. Nothing they did contradicted what they’d already established. What it did was elaborate and enrich.
But that’s harder than producing EFP (extruded fantasy product).
I gather the company behind the Elder Scrolls games also does good continuity. With allowances for variable endings of games, even. They’ve made it part of the world building. That I can respect.
Yes, Bethesda has done good work in managing the mythology of the ELDER SCROLLS series but not quite as good with their FALLOUT series. Part of it is they *bought* the rights of the IP (whereas Elder Scrolls was theirs from day one and its creators remain at the company.) and toned down the black humor to a pale gray. And then they ignored big chunks of the canon (even from their own games) for the FALLOUT 76 software as a service prequel. The best excuse they have is 76 isn’t really an RPG but an online multiplayer looter shooter in RPG drag. (Still fun. And profitable, though. It found a different audience than expected, but still tens of millions of continuous players. It is practically a metaverse.) Amusing, really.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0wccxcmrlA
BTW, I agree with your view that canon is what was first printed or aired.
Han Solo shot first because he was a crook and killer. The trilogy was his redemption arc.
Changing that minimizes his character evolution.
Three words:
Han shot first!
OK, if that’s not enough to make you snort coffee on your keyboard, consider this set of three words, which sort of explodes in the canon’s breech (breach?):
Director’s Extended Cut!
The main example I’m thinking of here is Apocalypse Now! — my first reaction after seeing the various “extended” editions was that all Oscars should have been given to the editor of the original, theatrical release, and that reaction has only gotten stronger since. Let’s not even think about a Director’s Extended Cut of Jupiter Rising… darn, we just did.
Better yet, just consider how Galaxy Quest engages with the problems of “canon” — because it actually does engage.
I read this piece and found myself having less than charitable thoughts about the writer.
I would offer The Orville series as an example of taking the spirit of a franchise and re-imagining it to deliver a better version than the current official canon versions of the voyages of a utopian space exploration ship.
But what do I know?
Of course, it can be argued that The Orville had Seth MacFarlane’s channeling the vision of Gene Roddenberry, but that all seems a bit too like creating a church of Star Trek etc. Just saying.
Good points, A.
Sometimes the people writing/directing the sequel may have better ideas than those who came before them in the history of the canon.
I’m not certain quite why, but in my perception fantasy/sf readers/viewers seem to be more persnickety than fans of other genres. I could be wrong about that, however.
Not wrong.
SF&F followers as a rule respect deep backlist *as written* as a product of its time.
For example the protagonist of the classic SKYLARK space opera series would be decried today as a genocidal racist. Taken as written, though, his approach is just a preemptive golden rule. 😉 Readers used to suspension of disbelief will as readily accept the mores of past decades as those of fictional alien societies. So while presentist critics decry the “militaristic” tone of ’40’s SF, knowledgeable readers will shrug. “The stories were written in wartime. What did you expect? It’s still a fun read.”
Most other genres, meanwhile, tend to ignore the bulk of the deep backlist, with rare exceptions. (Chandler is remembered but most of his contemporaries are long out of print and forgotten.) SF&F remembers even obscurities as Seabury Quinn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_de_Grandin
This respect bleeds to other media: “what happened happened”. Retcons are despised.
So yes, Han shot first. And good for him.
Likewise Indy had no respect for the fool that brought a knife to a gunfight.
Real life is harsh and creators willing to show it are respected.
Edits aren’t taking today, so:
Note those Roaring 20’s covers. By a female artist.
For newstand distribution.
Different times indeed.
The OP title is missing one word: “corporate”, as in “The problem with corporate canon.”
Because the lack of consistency and disjointedness that characterizes the example franchises all stem from the power of non-creatives over creative projects delivered by different contributors look to establish *their* vision over what came before.
Such problems don’t exist in well run projects controlled by the creator.
(Whether it be Conan Doyle, Tolkien, Heinlein, Niven, Zelazny, or Jakes, their canon hods together because it responds to a single vision.)
Whatever you might believe of their visions, Roddenberry and Lucas respected their own work. Those that followed looking to “update”, “extend”, or “reboot” the material in most cases diminish the original because for the most part they have no vision of their own or promote an incompatible vision. At best they produce pastiche, at worst a bizzaro distortion.
Something for creatives to prepare for when surrendering control in return for a corporate check.
Good points about the suits getting into the creativity business, F.