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lunartulipImagine a TV series which ran for ten seasons, with three creative teams at the helm over the course of its runtime each holding a different vision of the show, a tie-in comic series whose issues were sometimes subsequently contradicted by later episodes of the TV series, and two different former head writers plus assorted other staff-people spouting mutually-contradictory Word of God on Twitter. How is someone—a fan plotting out a fanfic which they want to be canon-compliant up to a single point of divergence, for example—supposed to figure out what is and isn't canon to that series?
Or let's even imagine a simpler example. A novelist writes a three-book series, the first two books of which are very good and the third book of which is very bad. Should we characterize a fanfic which entirely ignores information revealed in the third book as non-canon-compliant, or just as compliant to a smaller canon not including the author's later material? How about another fanfic, also based only on the first two books, which was completed before the third book came out?
The lesson to be learned from these cases is that exactly which elements of a given corpus are canon can be a deeply fuzzy question with no obviously-correct answer. The best answer I've been able to come up with for my own purposes, though, is the following: each of these described scenarios involves more than one canon. The first scenario has the full-TV-run-but-no-comics-or-WOG canon, and the first-two-teams'-TV-run-plus-any-non-contradictory-WOG canon, and so forth. The second scenario has the all-three-books canon, and the first-two-books-only canon, and the first-two-books-plus-smatterings-of-nonbad-material-from-the-third canon, and so forth.
But, of course, this leads to the question: what is and isn't a canon? Aren't the above lists just different bunchings of source material that different bunches of fans happen to have decided they're going to care about to the exclusion of the rest of the source material?
And my answer is: yes. That's exactly what they are. There's nothing stopping someone from saying "I'm going with the canon defined by the third chapter of the first book, the second and third paragraphs of the fifteenth chapter of the second book, and all of the the Word of God that sometimes gets dropped on the author's blog", beyond that doing so would in most cases lead to a somewhat ridiculous canon that nobody would be interested in except maybe as a joke. All a canon is is a bunch of source material which people have decided goes together. It doesn't even have to be source material that was ever intended by any of its creators to go together! I very much doubt that either Tolkien or Wildbow ever had each other's work in mind when writing their respective works, for example, and yet I'm aware of two excellent and entirely unrelated canon-compatible Silmarillion/Worm crossover fanfics.
(You see a related phenomenon in people's occasional laments that The Matrix never got a sequel, or that Buffy the Vampire Slayer didn't get renewed after its third season, or the like.)
Thinking about canons in this fashion can, in my experience, often make it much easier to enjoy particular stories. For example, many people seem to dislike Disney's Hercules on the basis of its massively-inaccurate portrayal of Greek mythology; but I actually enjoyed it when I watched it. (It wasn't great, or even good enough for me to ever plan to rewatch it, but it was perfectly adequate and worth the time taken to watch once.) I enjoyed it because it stood up perfectly well on its own merits and I didn't see any reason to see it as part of a bad {Disney's Hercules, [Insert specific consistent version of Greek mythology here]} canon when I could instead just see it as a reasonably-okay singleton {Disney's Hercules} canon containing no other material with which it could contradict.
For similar reasons, it also makes it easier to be unbothered when reading old fanfics from before Insert Important Information Here was revealed in a series: just model those fanfics as having a different source canon than the more recent fanfics, rather than as being inconsistent with their source canon.
So, overall, I find this to be a very good model, and I figure it's worth sharing in case anyone else similarly benefits from it.
Or let's even imagine a simpler example. A novelist writes a three-book series, the first two books of which are very good and the third book of which is very bad. Should we characterize a fanfic which entirely ignores information revealed in the third book as non-canon-compliant, or just as compliant to a smaller canon not including the author's later material? How about another fanfic, also based only on the first two books, which was completed before the third book came out?
The lesson to be learned from these cases is that exactly which elements of a given corpus are canon can be a deeply fuzzy question with no obviously-correct answer. The best answer I've been able to come up with for my own purposes, though, is the following: each of these described scenarios involves more than one canon. The first scenario has the full-TV-run-but-no-comics-or-WOG canon, and the first-two-teams'-TV-run-plus-any-non-contradictory-WOG canon, and so forth. The second scenario has the all-three-books canon, and the first-two-books-only canon, and the first-two-books-plus-smatterings-of-nonbad-material-from-the-third canon, and so forth.
But, of course, this leads to the question: what is and isn't a canon? Aren't the above lists just different bunchings of source material that different bunches of fans happen to have decided they're going to care about to the exclusion of the rest of the source material?
And my answer is: yes. That's exactly what they are. There's nothing stopping someone from saying "I'm going with the canon defined by the third chapter of the first book, the second and third paragraphs of the fifteenth chapter of the second book, and all of the the Word of God that sometimes gets dropped on the author's blog", beyond that doing so would in most cases lead to a somewhat ridiculous canon that nobody would be interested in except maybe as a joke. All a canon is is a bunch of source material which people have decided goes together. It doesn't even have to be source material that was ever intended by any of its creators to go together! I very much doubt that either Tolkien or Wildbow ever had each other's work in mind when writing their respective works, for example, and yet I'm aware of two excellent and entirely unrelated canon-compatible Silmarillion/Worm crossover fanfics.
(You see a related phenomenon in people's occasional laments that The Matrix never got a sequel, or that Buffy the Vampire Slayer didn't get renewed after its third season, or the like.)
Thinking about canons in this fashion can, in my experience, often make it much easier to enjoy particular stories. For example, many people seem to dislike Disney's Hercules on the basis of its massively-inaccurate portrayal of Greek mythology; but I actually enjoyed it when I watched it. (It wasn't great, or even good enough for me to ever plan to rewatch it, but it was perfectly adequate and worth the time taken to watch once.) I enjoyed it because it stood up perfectly well on its own merits and I didn't see any reason to see it as part of a bad {Disney's Hercules, [Insert specific consistent version of Greek mythology here]} canon when I could instead just see it as a reasonably-okay singleton {Disney's Hercules} canon containing no other material with which it could contradict.
For similar reasons, it also makes it easier to be unbothered when reading old fanfics from before Insert Important Information Here was revealed in a series: just model those fanfics as having a different source canon than the more recent fanfics, rather than as being inconsistent with their source canon.
So, overall, I find this to be a very good model, and I figure it's worth sharing in case anyone else similarly benefits from it.
