Poll Is Star Trek: Khan khanon?

[KRAD]

Does it matter anyway?

I’m more interested in if it will be any good or not.

THIS! SO MUCH THIS!

I will never understand why twenty-first-century fandom invests so much effort struggling over what's real in a fictional construct.

Canonicity only matters if you're writing something for the fictional world. It's completely irrelevant to the consumers of the fiction.

 

[Christopher]

THIS! SO MUCH THIS!

I will never understand why twenty-first-century fandom invests so much effort struggling over what's real in a fictional construct.

Canonicity only matters if you're writing something for the fictional world. It's completely irrelevant to the consumers of the fiction.

Well, I can sort of understand it, but only to a point. I've always been fond of the creative exercise of figuring out how to reconcile different Trek tie-ins, or tie-ins to other series, into a unified continuity. But at the same token, I've recognized for most of my life that you can't fit everything into a single continuity, and that those stories that don't fit aren't worth any less, but are just alternative possibilities, and that having multiple different interpretations of the fictional universe is a good thing, since it means there are more possibilities to be entertained by. There isn't going to be a test, so there doesn't have to be a single "right" answer.

 

[Smiley]

For me, I like a combination of story quality and enough consistency that I don’t have to do a bunch of mental gymnastics to believe that it is the same setting. If a new story supposes that Kirk and Khan had nothing but doughnuts and makeovers during his visit to the Enterprise, then I would expect that to be explained, as it would be wildly different from the version in our collective memory.

 

[Christopher]

For me, I like a combination of story quality and enough consistency that I don’t have to do a bunch of mental gymnastics to believe that it is the same setting. If a new story supposes that Kirk and Khan had nothing but doughnuts and makeovers during his visit to the Enterprise, then I would expect that to be explained, as it would be wildly different from the version in our collective memory.

Well, obviously nobody actually tries to contradict a canonical story (aside from occasionally reinterpreting things in ways consistent with the letter of canon, like revealing that the holoprogram showing Trip Tucker's death was falsified), and our editors and licensing people are there to keep our stuff consistent with screen canon. So what you're proposing here would never remotely be on the table in the first place. Inconsistency only becomes an issue when new canon overwrites tie-ins -- which sometimes happens before the tie-ins are published, due to the much longer lead time of a novel compared to a TV episode. And of course, tie-ins are often inconsistent with each other. Some franchises like Star Wars strive to keep all their tie-ins mutually consistent, but with Star Trek, acknowledging other tie-ins has always been optional.

The only reason it's unclear here is because the Khan podcast is something unprecedented, so we need clarification on whether it counts as canon or not. If it does, then naturally any future tie-ins dealing with overlapping subject matter would be expected to stay consistent with it.

Then again, all this is only true if we're talking about tie-ins. Canon itself has the ability to rewrite itself at will. We already saw a major ret-Khan (forgive me) in "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow," explicitly establishing that the timing of the Eugenics Wars has been altered due to temporal manipulation. Though even that is consistent in a sense, because it gives an in-story explanation for the change. Yet there's also SNW's wholesale rewrite of everything we knew about the Gorn, which seems impossible to reconcile.

 

[Extrocomp]

At its most basic, a fictional canon is the body of works by the original creator, as opposed to apocrypha by other creators. Doyle's 60 Sherlock Holmes works are the canon, everything else is apocryphal. It gets complicated when a series has multiple creators, but generally the studio that produces the work is considered the original author, since the various creators are working on its behalf.

Except that Doyle also wrote a few Sherlock Holmes plays and vignettes that are not considered canon.

 

[JD]

Even though Lucasfilm likes to say their tie-ins are canon they have not hesitated to contradict/retcon stuff from the books and comics numerous times since they reset things with the Disney sale. So even when the people in charge of a franchise declare all the tie-ins are "canon" it really doesn't mean anything in the long run.
I don't care about canon, I love a lot of non-canon tie-ins for a lot of franchise, but I do prefer if they can keep things as consistent as possible.

 

[Christopher]

Even though Lucasfilm likes to say their tie-ins are canon they have not hesitated to contradict/retcon stuff from the books and comics numerous times since they reset things with the Disney sale.

Everyone rewrites history and ignores the fact that they contradicted the "canonical" tie-ins many times long before the Disney sale. The tie-ins pretended to represent a unified, consistent continuity, but when a new movie or Clone Wars episode contradicted them, they either found a convoluted way to reconcile it or just started ignoring the stuff that had been contradicted and pretended it was still consistent.

So even when the people in charge of a franchise declare all the tie-ins are "canon" it really doesn't mean anything in the long run.

Canon doesn't mean consistent continuity. It just means a complete authoritative body of connected fictional works. A canon pretends to represent a consistent reality, but like any creative work in progress, it sometimes revises the reality it presents and acts like it was always that way all along. See above examples re: UESPA vs. Starfleet, Data using contractions, and the Cardassian war. Heck, I've done it myself, when I replaced my first published story in the Arachne-Troubleshooter Universe canon with its updated and expanded version in the novel Arachne's Crime. The event still canonically happened, but the original story must now be considered inaccurate about some of its details.

 

[JD]

I understand all that, but when they started the new Disney canon they made a big deal about the Story Group and how they were going to oversee everything and keep everything consistent, but then once things got going they still didn't actually keep everything consistent.

 

[Christopher]

I understand all that, but when they started the new Disney canon they made a big deal about the Story Group and how they were going to oversee everything and keep everything consistent, but then once things got going they still didn't actually keep everything consistent.

And my point is that that's no different from what happened before. The pre-Disney Lucasfilm made a lot of noise about how all the tie-ins were canonical and mutually consistent, but then new canon contradicted them repeatedly. It's not that the previous tie-ins weren't trying to be consistent; they absolutely were, but canon ignored them anyway, so by the time the reset happened, a lot of inconsistencies had accumulated. Then Disney reset the clock, but the same process is happening a second time.

 

[JD]

Oh, OK now I see what you mean.