Except canon is LITERALLY headcanon.Head-canon ≠ canon.
Point me where canon exists otherwise? Is it in the air? the sky? dirt? Can we mine canon?
Canon exists nowhere but in the heads of the fandom when discussing the setting.
Discovery Showrunners fired; Kurtzman takes over
- Thread starter StCoop
- Start date
Point me where canon exists otherwise? Is it in the air? the sky? dirt? Can we mine canon?
Canon exists nowhere but in the heads of the fandom when discussing the setting.
Wow. That's pretty disconnected from reality.
How? Where else does canon exist or matter?
The term Canon literally came from randoms arguing over what scripture was authoritative hundreds of years after it was written. Ask Christians what is canon and you will get several hundred different answers, ask Muslims what is canon and you will get numerous different answers.
Consistency in a setting and franchise only matters to the consumer i.e the fans. Thus canon is entirely a fan concept of what is to be taken as authoritative in a work. Canon literally exists for no other purpose and does not exist anywhere outside the heads of fans.
Well, you're not grasping basic definitions, and you seem to be taking solipsism for granted. I'm not really interested in discussing it further with you, to be honest.
I could not possibly disagree more.
As many people have pointed out in myriad ways in this thread and others, a significant proportion of Star Trek stories are (in a word) crap. They don't stand up well on their own. In particular, this applies (IMHO) to almost every damn thing put on screen in the last 20 years. What makes Trek worthy of continuing interest and attention despite this is the worldbuilding. The larger fictional construct within which those stories are set. And without reasonable adherence to the details that make it up, that all falls apart.
This is really the crux of our disagreement, I think. I would say "it's fiction and therefore has an integrity of its own."
It really isn't, and they really don't. I've pointed out numerous examples.
Canon isn't subject to revision per se, its simply that most people don't get what the word means. People think "canon" refers to some internally consistent timeline and parameters which define the fictional universe. They think that if something new is released which makes no sense sat next to something in a previous iteration or episode it "violates canon".
This is all nonsense, "canon" simply refers to that which is officially part of the franchise, regardless of whether it all fits neatly together or not.
While that may be the original meaning, we're about 40 years into the words "canon" and "continuity" being synonymous.
Are you not familiar with the past 700ish episodes of Star Trek?
There's contradictions aplenty.
Name them.
Keep going, you said aplenty...James R. Kirk.
Watch these when you have a half hour to spare:Keep going, you said aplenty...
As always, my eternal gratitude goes to King Daniel for creating my all-time favorite Trek-related YouTube videos.
ETA: Ninja'd by Daniel himself!
Wait, hang on. If TOS says that so far cloaking tech is only theoretically possible and ENT shows cloaking ships it's a continuity error. If DSC shows cloaking ships it's a canon error?
Yes.
But back when Enterprise aired that was a canon violation.
And when the next TOS prequel uses cloaking technology, that will be a canon error, and Discovery will move to continuity error. That's how this works.
I could point you to startrek.com that lists the official Trek canon. I could also point out that just because something doesn't have an intrinsic physical value (Trek canon is just a few magnetic pins on the server that hosts startrek.com) doesn't mean it has no intellectual value. For example money; why can i trade two pieces of paper with a "five" and a "ten" them for more than five hundred pages of Star Trek: Prometheus 3? I'm pretty sure I just scammed my book vendor! Now, if some community wants to include or disinclude (is that a word?!) specific works in their specific group head-canon that's totally fine. We do that in TrekLit all the time; it would be pretty annoying to post "In this non-canon novel that I am going to take at face value for the purposes of this post" in front of every post we make there.
The "official canon" is the baseline from which we then mold our individual head-canon: Mine includes the relaunch novels, yours might not include Discovery and that's okay.
