I accept all of produced Trek start to finish as canon in one sense, TAS included though with the understanding that it's somewhat disconnected from later works because of Paramount's disavowal of it.
On the other hand, I don't believe that the sum total of all the created canon is the best or truest version of what the Trek universe can be. Because some of it contradicted previous continuity, and some of it just downright sucked.
I think there's a second kind of 'canon' that's quite different from the sum total of hours of footage you can buy on discs. It's created by the fans, and it's in a constant state of flux, and it's not quite the same for any one viewer, but it very definitely exists.
In literary criticism we sometimes talk about the trinity of the text, the creator, and the reader and look at the different interactions between the three. For things like Trek, I think there's another version of the Text/Reader interaction which is Text/Fandom. In fandom, we dedicate so much time to debating interpretations of the text that we construct a sort of shared map. It's always open to debate and argument, but it can't be redrawn entirely by one fan alone if s/he expects to be able to join in fandom conversation. I think of that as a canon too - the events of the universe of Trek as deduced by fandom through study of the original video footage. It's a kind of open source wiki canon.
On a more personal note, I also have a slightly weird relationship with Nemesis whereby I accept as fact in my head everything that happened there as though it were written in a report, but completely dismiss the entire tone of the thing. B4's discovery? Fine, it's in the logs. Picard tooling around on a dune buggy shooting at the locals? That's a breakdown in communication somewhere.
On the other hand, I don't believe that the sum total of all the created canon is the best or truest version of what the Trek universe can be. Because some of it contradicted previous continuity, and some of it just downright sucked.
I think there's a second kind of 'canon' that's quite different from the sum total of hours of footage you can buy on discs. It's created by the fans, and it's in a constant state of flux, and it's not quite the same for any one viewer, but it very definitely exists.
In literary criticism we sometimes talk about the trinity of the text, the creator, and the reader and look at the different interactions between the three. For things like Trek, I think there's another version of the Text/Reader interaction which is Text/Fandom. In fandom, we dedicate so much time to debating interpretations of the text that we construct a sort of shared map. It's always open to debate and argument, but it can't be redrawn entirely by one fan alone if s/he expects to be able to join in fandom conversation. I think of that as a canon too - the events of the universe of Trek as deduced by fandom through study of the original video footage. It's a kind of open source wiki canon.
On a more personal note, I also have a slightly weird relationship with Nemesis whereby I accept as fact in my head everything that happened there as though it were written in a report, but completely dismiss the entire tone of the thing. B4's discovery? Fine, it's in the logs. Picard tooling around on a dune buggy shooting at the locals? That's a breakdown in communication somewhere.
