The one about canon

I’m in a spouting nonsense mood, and the target of today’s spout is the concept of canon. Particularly as the term applies to the concept of the fictional ‘facts’ of a fictional universe, as portrayed in various works of fiction.

The facts of fiction. Right. It’s fundamentally an oxymoron.

Canon in its modern meaning didn’t really matter until properties like Star Wars and Star Trek expanded beyond their home bases in movies and TV respectively, into books, comics, video games and tabletop games. The idea was to ensure consistency in plot and world details, even as you had dozens, scores, if not hundreds of different writers working on different stories in different media more or less at the same time.

The hardcore fans of pretty much anything love it. Love it, love it, absolutely love it. Lap that stuff up like it’s liquid ketamine. Can’t get enough of it. Canon makes the whole phenomenon of gatekeeping fictional properties possible. There are few things that warm their hearts more than telling each other they’re wrong about the canon. Few things they cherish more than pointing out errors and inconsistencies in canon, or endlessly fan theorizing about it, constructing great cathedrals of meaning out of throwaway lines published in, like, a children’s picture book.

And they shouldn’t. By god, they shouldn’t. If you really love Star Wars, or Star Trek, or, lawd, I don’t know, My Little Pony, you should absolutely be against the idea of canon. Reboots, remakes, retellings, alternate and parallel universes, mashups, all of the things that destroy canon mean you get more of the property you love. You get more and more varied stories. You get to experience it more, fresh and new again. You should love it when content creators throw canon to the wind.

Yet we don’t, and I’m not sure why. I don’t think there’s anything inevitable about canon. In fact, it’s a little weird that people cared.

There’s no obvious reason why they would—after all, the one modern entertainment medium where multiple writers had long worked on a shared universe was comic books, where characters live, die, appear to die but don’t, are reborn, reincarnated, rescued from alternate dimensions or future timelines as a matter of course. Spider-Man has been through more incarnations than a Hindu with a death wish, there have been more Batmans in history than there have been presidents of the United States of America and the X-Men’s Jean Grey has been killed and resurrected at least twice a decade since the 70’s.

Looking back at history, there too we find the concept of fictional canon is notable mainly for its total nonexistence. Disney’s efforts to the contrary, there is no one single, canonical version of any of the fairy tales, nor of Achilles, nor King Arthur. There’s evidently nothing inherent in fiction that requires or demands that there be a canon.

Plenty of modern properties also ignore the whole concept altogether—there’s no Mad Max canon, although some have tried to write one, Doctor Who’s time-traveling shenanigans make mincemeat of the very concept at anything but the most basic level, Dungeons and Dragons novels largely get around the concept by having enough alternate worlds to give Schrodinger’s cat an anxiety attack.

While there are sound storytelling, narrative objectives in ensuring consistency among your various story lines, it’s not hard to see there are less pure motives at work, too.

There are obvious commercial reasons for the property holders’ love of promoting the idea canon. Together with copyright, it is one more lever that ensures they maintain control of, and can profit from, the shared universe. Property holders alone get to determine what counts and what doesn’t, giving their own products a seal of legitimacy and banishing all others to the despised realm of fan fiction.

Gatekeeping is another obvious motive. Collecting, memorizing and categorizing facts makes a lot of people comfortable, gives them a sense of order and control that is otherwise often missing from our lives. Knowledge of canon can be used to browbeat other fans and make yourself feel smarter, more important in whatever fan community you’re a part of. So it’s rooted in insecurity and fear, too.

The good news is, I think the idea of canon is going to wither away slowly but surely. The most popular franchises at the moment, Marvel and Star Wars and Star Trek, are all reaching the limits of what they can do within a single, supposedly internally consistent continuity. Star Trek has already rebooted both its movies and streaming properties (calling it a TV show sounds anachronistic now, doesn’t it?) New Star Wars properties sound like they’ll be set in different time periods, precisely to get away from problems with canon. The original actors in Marvel movies are reaching the ends of their contracts.

You see long-term, canon is simply unsustainable. I’m a fan of the BattleTech games that have been around since the 80s, and my God, the canon is a useless mess. It just accretes, gathers more and more mass, weighing down everything about the property until you can’t write anything new about anything in this universe. It calcifies everything, ossifies it, fossilizes it. Nothing new can be done, nothing can grow. It kills the property.

As we move more and more into more oral styles of storytelling, I think this will accelerate the trend. We’ll want the same stories retold over and over, which will kill the whole purpose of canon.

It’s time for canon to end.