Saying something is "considered continuity" is not remotely the same thing as saying something is canon. Did you miss all the threads we've had establishing there's a difference between continuity and canon?
According to IDW, their comics are canon?
- Thread starter JRoss
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Which it has never, ever been.
I am sorry,
my bad. I see it now. A bad brain or eye thing. Every time I looked at the word continuity in this sentence...“Every comic we do is considered continuity,” said IDW Senior Editor Heather Antos.
I would see the word canon instead. Freaking canon on the brain. lol Thanks for understanding.
Would it be helpful if they said "in continuity at the time of publication?" because invariably things get contradicted a lot in Star Trek. But, enough about TOS
Canon has become a buzz word no company can let go of, even when most consumers don’t even know what it means.
Sure but that's PR spin for you. There is this rather odd nothing that authorized product somehow are superior in all forms; probably a holdover to the Nerf days of the Campaign "Nerf or Nothing." Marketing is effective when it makes something sound exclusive rather than just another story.
All professional tie-ins are authorized. They couldn't legally be published for profit if they weren't. Authorization has nothing to do with canon or continuity, just about having the owners' permission to use their intellectual property. After all, it's all imaginary, so continuity is an incidental consideration.
Authorized as in it ties in to the official story. Probably not the right term, but I'm failing to grasp the right one right now.
The term would be "canonical."
That's not what I am thinking of but will have to do.
Or, we could just understand that is the chance we take when we choose to buy them.
I used to do that all the time for decades! until I got tired of them eventually slipping out of continuity and becoming TP.
Now I try to get spoilers on them to fuel my thinking about and pondering them without spending a penny.
Sorry but that is the economics of the situation.
Honestly, when I go to my local comic shop I flip through a couple, admire the art work, catch the gist and buy my action figures.Or, we could just understand that is the chance we take when we choose to buy them.
I used to do that all the time for decades! until I got tired of them eventually slipping out of continuity and becoming TP.
Now I try to get spoilers on them to fuel my thinking about and pondering them without spending a penny.
Or the library.
Depends.FTFY
It's all equally unreal whether it's in continuity or not. You're not taking a "chance," because you don't actually lose anything of value if the story is out of continuity. As long as it's an enjoyable story, that's the thing that matters. There are plenty of older Trek novels and comics that are still terrific stories even though they haven't been in continuity for decades.
These aren't study materials for a test, so it's not important whether you get the "right" answers. There is no such thing as a "wrong" version of something completely imaginary. There are just alternative ways of imagining it. Indeed, the fact that there can be multiple coexisting versions of the same concept is a good thing, not a bad thing. Imagine if, say, all Batman stories were required to be in the same continuity as the comics. Then we wouldn't have the Adam West show and Batman: The Animated Series and the Nolan movies and The Brave and the Bold and all the other delightfully different alternate takes. They're all different from each other, and that is a feature, not a bug.
Companies don't often know what it means either.
I'm from the generation where things like novels, comic books, FASA roleplaying games, Star Fleet Battles, the Franz Joseph tech manual, and other miscellaneous books, games, publications, etc. were all considered 'canon' between TOS/the TOS films and the TNG era of the '80's, simply because there was nothing else going on in that intervening time. And there was also nobody in charge telling people that it wasn't 'canon.' It was a great time because all of these things fleshed out a whole entire universe that the original show never covered. Heck, they even used some things from those publications in the movies and early TNG, seemingly reinforcing their 'canonicity' in the Star Trek universe. Of course, ALL of that changed in the late '80's thanks to Roddenberry wanting sole control over everything. And it's only started to change now with some tributes to those old publications (i.e. the FASA Loknar class showing up in LDS, etc.)
But the unfortunate truth is that as of now, and for some time, CBS/Paramount calls the shots as to what's canon or not. But that doesn't mean that you can't buy a novel or a comic and appreciate it for what it is (or not appreciate it if it's a piece of crap.)
Appreciating fiction as fiction is my primary goal.
Long before that memo, I had many frustrating discussions with people in 1980 and beyond. They had urgent questions about TMP, which could be filled in and satisfied by the novelization (or even the comic adaptation) but they would say that they shouldn't have to read a tie-in (or spend extra money) to understand a movie. The Canon Debate of the 90s just gave them a formal reason to reject all tie-ins.
