What is the current philosopohy of canon?

[Christopher]

To what extent does your status as, for want of a better term, an indirect employee of the producers, inform your opinion? For example, do you think that Trek producers would potentially retaliate if you were to say that an unofficial product had canon status, preventing you from further work?

Why would I do such a thing? Star Trek is a piece of intellectual property. CBS owns it and has the right and ability to profit from it. If I tried to assert that my tie-in work were "canon," I wouldn't be able to benefit in any way from such a claim, because obviously I don't own the intellectual property, nor am I an employee of the corporation that does own it; I'm just a freelance subcontractor. It would be a totally empty assertion with no meaning behind it. Besides, I already do have my own intellectual property, my own original fictional universes. Those are my canons. Those are properties over which I have full ownership rights and I can potentially license out for myself, in a way I can never do with Star Trek. More, they're my own original creations that I can shape however I see fit, which is immensely more satisfying than playing in someone else's sandbox.

If I wanted my work to be Star Trek canon, then I'd do what my friend Kirsten Beyer did and get a job on the writing staff of an actual Star Trek show. But the advantage of that wouldn't be my ability to use the label, because the label is insignificant. The advantage would be that I'd get paid a whole lot more that way, and that my work would be seen by a much larger audience. Fans have the luxury of obsessing over abstractions like what labels mean. Professional writers have more pragmatic concerns.


Oh, speaking of what words mean: The Star Trek tie-ins I write are official. They are authorized and approved by the owners of the property, they are written under contract, and my employer (Pocket Books) and I therefore have a legal right to profit from their sale. That is what "official" means. It has nothing to do with the contents or continuity of the story, merely with whether the owners of the intellectual property have approved its sale. Licensed tie-in books, comics, and games are official. Licensed toys and t-shirts and Christmas ornaments are official, even though they're obviously not part of the story continuity. Unlicensed things like fan fiction and fan films, or like bootleg videos and toys, are not official, because their makers don't have permission from the owner and thus would be committing a crime if they tried to sell them for profit, as opposed to simply making them and giving them away as a hobby.

 

[ChallengerHK]

I don't think I communicated my question properly. On the other hand hand, I'm not sure there's a way to get useful information from that question, in hindsight, so I'll withdraw it.

How about this? You seem to be saying that canon status devolves from the legal right to produce the work, that all work produced under that copyright is canon, an no work produced outside of it can ever be canon. Does the producer's opinion factor into this? In other words, if Roddenberry says TAS is not canonical, is that the end of the story, or it is still canonical because it was produced under the copyright?

 

[Christopher]

I don't think I communicated my question properly. On the other hand hand, I'm not sure there's a way to get useful information from that question, in hindsight, so I'll withdraw it.

How about this? You seem to be saying that canon status devolves from the legal right to produce the work, that all work produced under that copyright is canon, an no work produced outside of it can ever be canon. Does the producer's opinion factor into this? In other words, if Roddenberry says TAS is not canonical, is that the end of the story, or it is still canonical because it was produced under the copyright?

As I keep trying to explain, "canon" is not some formal policy or doctrine or legal status. It's just a metaphor. It's a convenient nickname that critics and fans discussing a fictional series use to refer to the original work as distinct from other people's works based on it, because that's a lot of syllables and calling it "canon" is shorter. Calling something canon doesn't make it what it is, it just describes what it is. It's like calling something land as opposed to water. That doesn't make it land. The land will always be what it is, no matter what word you use for it. The word is just a way to describe it and talk about it. And most of the time, it isn't even necessary to talk about something being land except to distinguish it from something else like water or air (or someone else's land).

What we use the nickname "canon" to figuratively describe is either the original author's work as distinct from its imitations or adaptations (as it was originally used for the Sherlock Holmes canon), or in a case where a series is produced by many different authors, the ongoing body of work created by the owners of the series.

Roddenberry's memo attempting to "de-canonize" TAS is the thing most responsible for infecting fandom with its modern obsession over this silly little label, because it created the misleading impression that canon is something that has to be formally defined by some authority. But by the time Roddenberry issued that memo in 1989, he had no meaningful authority over The Next Generation. He was extremely ill and drug-addicted and had become little more than a figurehead since he was no longer capable of the responsibility of running a series. His memo was not actually binding on the show, because it didn't stop the show's writers from referencing TAS in "Unification" and occasional DS9 and ENT episodes. It only affected the tie-ins, because Roddenberry's assistant Richard Arnold, who was also behind the memo, controlled tie-in approvals at the time and was able to impose his very narrow ideas of what they were allowed to do. So it wasn't about the memo itself, it was about Arnold's power to enforce it. (I'm not even sure how much of the idea came from Roddenberry and how much was Arnold passing off his own control-freak attitudes as the Word of the Great Bird.)

Canon is not something you declare. It's just the work itself. It's the stories you tell, and they speak for themselves by what they contain. If you want to decanonize a story from your series, you don't issue a memo, you just tell new stories that overwrite it. The reason Roddenberry had to issue a memo is because he had no actual control over the show anymore.

 

[ChallengerHK]

That seems kind of circular. I see where you're going, but at least one interpretation of that is: "Canon is what the producers make, and it's canon because the producers made it." And it may be that the term has no more meaning than that, so feel free to agree with that if that's whhat you're saying. What I'm looking for though, is a subjective definition with which to continue. "Canon is anything officially released" is subjective, something I can work with, whether or not I agree with it. "Canon is what the producers say it is" would have failed the objectivity test.

So, next question: If canon is "a convenient nickname that critics and fans discussing a fictional series use to refer to the original work as distinct from other people's works based on it"... why are these fans discussing that dichotomy between the official and other people's knock-offs? I may be missing something, and you've been good about letting me know when I am, but the only purpose I can see for fans having that conversation is to verify that some element or another was part of the official continuity, versus an unofficial element. This seems to be reasonably close to the way the bulk of fandom uses the term "canonical," and the way you're using "continuity", i.e., in the diegetic world, did X really happen.

 

[Christopher]

That seems kind of circular. I see where you're going, but at least one interpretation of that is: "Canon is what the producers make, and it's canon because the producers made it." And it may be that the term has no more meaning than that, so feel free to agree with that if that's whhat you're saying. What I'm looking for though, is a subjective definition with which to continue. "Canon is anything officially released" is subjective, something I can work with, whether or not I agree with it. "Canon is what the producers say it is" would have failed the objectivity test.

It's not about what they say, it's about what they do. Once more, "canon" is not an official or legal term, it's just a term of criticism/analysis used to describe the work of the original or core creators. At its most basic, it's the stories that they themselves tell. (With Star Wars being the exception, because of the unique construct of the Lucasfilm Story Group, a team whose whole job is to coordinate all the various creators' work into a common canon.)

So, next question: If canon is "a convenient nickname that critics and fans discussing a fictional series use to refer to the original work as distinct from other people's works based on it"... why are these fans discussing that dichotomy between the official and other people's knock-offs?

I really couldn't tell you. It's not really a very difficult or complicated distinction. It should be pretty easy to tell the difference between the original work and its derivatives. But for some reason, fandom has become irrationally obsessed with the term and loaded all sorts of misapprehensions and misinterpretations onto it and made it a thousand times more complicated and confusing than it really is. It should just be a straightforward matter of classification; this story is from the core creators, that story is not. But fans twist it into a value judgment and make up all these myths about how it's defined and assigned and it's become ridiculous.

And again, "official" does not apply here. That word has nothing to do with canon status. My Trek tie-ins are official but not canonical, because those are two different things. "Official" means that I and my publisher have the owner's permission to make and sell the stories. It's a business term, that's all.

 

[Shawnster]

Here, Star Wars is a great example.

In the late 90s/early 00s the Star Wars canon after Return of the Jedi were the Thrawn novels and the various other novels. What happened in those novels were considered canon.

Not anymore. They have been taken out of canon. The story is no longer Han and Leia married, had 3 children with 2 of them twins and the youngest named Anakin. Now the story is what we saw in episodes 7 and 8.

Those Thrawn stories still exist. You can still read them. They are just not what happened after Return of the Jedi.

Neither is it just a continuity error that can be explained away or ignored. They are totally different histories or stories about what happened post ROJ.

Same thing with Trek. There is only one Canon and that is what the creators or producers create or produce. It isn't what fans make or produce. It isn't what Marvel comics produced in the 70s or the Gold Key comics prior. Canon is not the old novels by Ballentine or Pocket. It's not even the current novels.

Continuity has nothing to do with canon. It might have a similar appearance or affect.

Apples are red. Cherries are red. Apples are not cherries.

Canon is a metaphor. It means "produced by the producers."

Canon maybe is equal to OEM parts if you are a car affectionado. Original Equipment Manufacturer.

Turkish Star Trek is an example if canon violation.

 

[Valenti]

Who decides ultimately what is acceptable in a novel? Does Superman and Batman have canons? Let me rephrase that.

 

[BillJ]

My philosophy? Fuck it. Tell the absolute best stories you can and let the chips fall where they may.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Who decides ultimately what is acceptable in a novel? Does Superman and Batman have canons? Let me rephrase that.

CBS decides. IIRC, they have someone who approves what Pocket does. Plus Pocket has editors who oversees the writers.

Yes Superman and Batman have a canon. They also have an ever changing continuity.

 

[Christopher]

Here, Star Wars is a great example.

In the late 90s/early 00s the Star Wars canon after Return of the Jedi were the Thrawn novels and the various other novels. What happened in those novels were considered canon.

Not anymore. They have been taken out of canon. The story is no longer Han and Leia married, had 3 children with 2 of them twins and the youngest named Anakin. Now the story is what we saw in episodes 7 and 8.

Except it was never really honest for them to say the Expanded Universe novels and comics were canonical. The prequel movies and The Clone Wars contradicted the novels a lot of times, long before Disney came along and redesignated them as "Legends." The tie-ins were ignored by new canon and had to adjust their own continuity to fit, which is basically how most tie-ins work, Star Trek included. The only difference is that the SW EU tie-ins all had to be consistent with each other, while Trek and other tie-ins only have to be consistent with screen canon. George Lucas even said that he didn't consider the EU canonical.

The current situation under the Story Group is different, because the tie-ins are being directly supervised in-house and a genuine attempt is being made to treat the tie-ins as canonical -- at least nominally. I think it's a safe bet that if some future filmmaker has a story to tell that requires overwriting some novel or comic, then it will do so. Of course, the same goes for onscreen canon -- new films or episodes can overwrite old ones, like when Return of the Sith contradicted Leia's line about remembering her birth mother.

The thing is, Star Wars is not a good example, because its approach to canon is not typical. The source of a lot of fan misunderstandings is that it's the exceptional, atypical approaches to canon that tend to get the most press and attention. After all, normally canon is so straightforward that it doesn't even have to be discussed or explained. It's only when something unusual is going on, like tie-ins being treated as canonical, that it needs to be talked about.

Who decides ultimately what is acceptable in a novel? Does Superman and Batman have canons? Let me rephrase that.

"Acceptable" is an odd word for it. I keep saying, none of this is a value judgment, just a matter of categorization. Continuity is a storytelling option, not a moral mandate. Different franchises have different approaches. With books based on DC or Marvel characters, generally the guideline is to be consistent with the basic nature of the characters and their setting, but not to worry about exact continuity. When I was contracted to do a couple of Marvel novels a decade or so ago, my brief was to approach them like movies, standalone tales that didn't depend on any continuity beyond a basic knowledge of the characters. I chose to fit my Spider-Man novel very tightly into the comics continuity from a few years earlier because I was familiar with it as a regular reader and fan, but with my X-Men novel I chose to fudge the exact continuity details a bit because I wanted to use a certain combination of characters that wouldn't have been possible at the specific point in the timeline I chose.

And, again: Canon is just a word for the stories the core creators tell. Tie-ins are only part of the canon in cases where they're actually written, outlined, or supervised by the original creators. The licensors of non-canonical tie-ins do have to approve their content and check it for consistency with canon, but that doesn't make them part of the canon because the consistency doesn't flow back the other way, because the core creators don't count them as part of the story they're telling. So canon is one thing, tie-in approval is another. As a rule, canon is the stuff that isn't tie-ins. Fans get confused because the exceptional cases where tie-ins are canonical get more attention and discussion, so people latch onto exceptions as though they were the rule.

 

[The Old Mixer]

Jedi philosophy [...] is about letting go of [...] possessiveness

Tell that to Obi-Wan when you lose your lightsaber.

the Word of the Great Bird

Spoiler: Don't want to disrupt the conversation, but...

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[Christopher]

Tell that to Obi-Wan when you lose your lightsaber.

Obi-Wan did nothing when Luke pointed the business end of a lightsaber at his own face. I wouldn't exactly call him a paragon of weapons discipline.

 

[MAGolding]

I don't think I communicated my question properly. On the other hand hand, I'm not sure there's a way to get useful information from that question, in hindsight, so I'll withdraw it.

How about this? You seem to be saying that canon status devolves from the legal right to produce the work, that all work produced under that copyright is canon, an no work produced outside of it can ever be canon. Does the producer's opinion factor into this? In other words, if Roddenberry says TAS is not canonical, is that the end of the story, or it is still canonical because it was produced under the copyright?

Let me put it this way. When fans discuss various aspects or problems of Star Trek, they often use canon to decide which evidence is included. If the fans limit the discussion to the several hundreds of hours of movies and TV shows that are considered canon there is a lot less evidence to consider than if all the authorized official Star Trek novels, comic books, nonfiction books etc., etc., etc. and a lot of non authorized and non official products are also considered and included in the discussion.

Therefore, in many online discussions the various posters will say that only canonical evidence is included. Obviously that does not happen in the Trek Gaming section here, or the Trek Literature section, and probably not much in the Trek Tech section. Obviously those sections of TrekBBS don't limit their discussions to only canonical elements of Star Trek.

Sometimes a poster will say something in a discussion and others will reply that his supposed fact is not in canon. For example, many fans of TOS believe that Captain Kirk was the youngest starship captain ever appointed (up to his era, of course). But that is not based on any statements in canon. There is a statement that "Captain Kirk has been in command of the Enterprise for more than four years and is the youngest Academy graduate to ever be appointed a Starship Command Captain.", or words to that effect, but it is not in canon.

And that is almost all that canon really means to Star Trek fans. They usually more or less know what the canon of Star Trek is, and often (but not always) find it convenient and desirable to limit discussions of Star Trek lore to canon sources and canon evidence.

So when I saw the title "What is the Current Philosophy of Canon?" I was rather amused because I could not imagine a philosophy of canon!

 

[Christopher]

And that is almost all that canon really means to Star Trek fans. They usually more or less know what the canon of Star Trek is, and often (but not always) find it convenient and desirable to limit discussions of Star Trek lore to canon sources and canon evidence.

Basically, yeah. It's just a matter of keeping straight what stuff is part of which stories. The stuff from canon needs to be part of the tie-in stories, but the stuff from the tie-ins usually won't be part of the canon stories. Which is fine as long as people remember that it's just a matter of classification and keeping things straight, rather than a judgment of worth.

 

[Donker]

Not anymore. They have been taken out of canon. The story is no longer Han and Leia married, had 3 children with 2 of them twins and the youngest named Anakin. Now the story is what we saw in episodes 7 and 8.

Here is the funny thing though. In general Star Wars fans HATE Disney "Canon" and the Disney "Canon" is already a jumbled mess of contradictory nonsense that makes no sense with itself, so you will actually find that much of the fandom, just ignores what Disney claims and considers canon is some alternative universe or even basically glorified fanfic, while huge portions of the fandom, probably easily the majority, just keep talking about "Legends" like it's canon.

Great older example of this in Star Wars is KotoR II, it's one the single most beloved stories in Star Wars with arguably the best Star Wars villain next to Palpatine and Vader, KotoR II was hated by Bioware though who basically completely retconned it out of existence in TOR... yet the fans just ignore TOR and keep till this day talk about KotoR II like it's the "official" canon. In all the discussions I see on the Old Republic Era of Star Wars. TOR's retcon is never even talked about like it even exists, everyone just considers KotoR II canon and it is still one of the single most discussed Star Wars stories and Kreia is still one of the most beloved "Legends" Star Wars characters.

This is really what defines is "Canon" in the end, are the fans. Canon has literally zero real point beyond what the fandom considers to be worthy discussion points of a franchise so really, Canon and continuity is largely just a fan concept. If Rowling wrote a new Harry Potter novel that actually said the original story was all a dream and Harry Potter is actually a BDSM dominatrix and the Harry Potter series became some weird 50 Shades of Grey crap for lonely house wives, think the fans would consider that canon or even worthy of discussion beyond laughing at it? Nobody beyond the publisher or creator would consider it canon so in reality to the average fan and person, it's not canon.

For me Canon is defined by
Fans >>> Creator >>> Writers >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Rights Holders.

 

[Nerys Myk]

I don't see why fans are even in the equation. They don't create they consume.

 

[Christopher]

I don't see why fans are even in the equation. They don't create they consume.

Exactly. People who say "the fans create canon" are completely misunderstanding what the word means. It's an incredibly bizarre vocabulary fail. In its original, religious sense, canon means the official church doctrine and texts. The whole purpose of the word is to make it clear that other people's alternative ideas are not part of the canon. Canon is what comes from the original source -- in religion, what's claimed to be the word of God; in fiction, what's written by a given series' creators or their direct inheritors.

I think the "fans create canon" meme arises from the confusion of the words "canon" and "continuity." Naturally fans are free to create their own version of what non-canonical stories they want to count as "real" in their personal continuities. That's something that exists within their own minds, so naturally they have control over that. But a canon is the ongoing work of the series's creators, and fan opinion has no influence over what the creators will choose to do with their own stories. Fans have adopted terms like "personal canon" or "headcanon" or (ick) "fanon" to describe their individual interpretations of continuity, but that's pretty much the exact opposite of what the word literally means. At best, it's a metaphorical repurposing of a term that's a metaphor to begin with.

 

[Valenti]

Well, now with Star Trek, it's the current owners and showrunners (God, I wish they would sell it), and their writers and whatever appears on the screen.

 

[1001001]

I just want all of you to know:

Every time a Star Trek fan talks about "canon", a kitten dies.

 

[Christopher]

Well, now with Star Trek, it's the current owners and showrunners (God, I wish they would sell it), and their writers and whatever appears on the screen.

That's the default. Canon is the source, the original that other, derivative works are based on. It should be understood that that's the most common way it works, that it's an exception for anything beyond the original work to be part of the canon. The problem, as I said, is that the exceptions get talked about more, so people get the inverted idea that the exceptional cases are the norm, and they need to have it explained to them when a franchise does it the normal way.