Pinned
My natural fannish habitat — my preferred niche? — is the canon-compatible. Here is the canon; now let's look at what's underneath or behind or beyond or inside canon, without contradicting it beyond a few carefully chosen allowances and sometimes narrative-required tweaks.
I like my understandings of characters and worldbuilding to be canon-compatible. I like being able to consider clashing and unappealing interpretations of characters and worldbuilding and say "this is wrong, because that's just not canon".
So it pains me to say that canon is as a rule not objective fact.
Actually I should start out by defining terms. See, up above I wasn't really using a strictly correct definition of "canon".
Properly, canon means "the texts [literal or otherwise — just assume when I say text I might mean film or audio or game or what-have-you] we accept as The Source Material". This also isn't objective fact (see "we"), but it's a lot closer to objective fact than the way I was using it in some of my previous posts, which was "what is True in-universe".
"What is True in-universe" — that doesn't exist. It's imaginary. The universe is not real. We can (and I do) talk about the universe and the characters and the story as if they are real and have facts concerning them, that's one of the primary activities of fandom, but we are playing pretend. It isn't real. (The terms 'fanon' and 'headcanon' are both referring to this meaning of 'canon'.)
The bridge between "the texts we accept as The Source Material" and "what is True in-universe" is "what The Source Material says is True". This is real, but it is very sadly not objective fact even after agreeing on what you are considering The Source Material, which as mentioned is something that may or may not be agreed-on.
There are several ways in which "this is The Source Material" fails to lead directly into "this is what The Source Material says is True".
Inconsistency:
- The Source Material gives conflicting information in different places.
- It is possible (and in my opinion most preferable) for a canon to have no or negligible inconsistency. But the more there is of a canon, the more discrete units there are, the longer the period of creation, the more people who are involved in creating it, the more likely it is that there will be inconsistencies.
- When going from an inconsistency to "what is True in-universe" there are several ways to go.
- We can try to rationalize how both could be true. —Sometimes I'm pretty sure things which could be taken as inconsistencies are both true; it depends on how much I trust the creator(s) not to mess up.
- We can create rules based on, um, metadata? to decide which is true. "The version written later is true" is common, and "the version written by the original author is true".
- We can make decisions based on something other than the text — (our best guess of) authorial intent, thematic consistency, real-world conditions, real-world implications, or just what seems to make more sense.
- We can just pick the version we like best.
Ambiguity:
No, wait, let's split that.
Ambiguity of omission:
- The Source Material doesn't address a subject at all.
- Everything has this ambiguity. Everything should have this ambiguity, you don't need or want every story with humans to go through explaining that they are physiologically the same as real humans unless there's some reason to think they're not. Sometimes things aren't relevant and/or interesting to the author.
- There are multiple ways to go with this, too.
- Usually broad strokes of reality are assumed to apply if canon doesn't contradict them. We don't need to be told human characters have lungs or need to sleep, or that a horse has four legs and may pull a cart. If a story is more-or-less set on Earth we don't need the continents described unless they're different.
- There can be some disagreement about which departures from reality are necessarily given in the canon.
- Sometimes there's a secondary canon, an apocrypha if you will, which does cover the subject. You can say that when canon and apocrypha conflict then canon goes, but in the absence of canon apocrypha fills in. Example: A minor character is unnamed in the original but gets a name in an adaptation.
- Not everyone does this even when apocrypha exists and covers the subject; some people actively avoid it.
- Sometimes genre conventions can fill in. Not everyone does this and some people actively avoid it.
- Sometimes fanon can fill in. Not everyone does this and some people actively avoid it.
Active ambiguity:
- The Source Material can be interpreted in more than one way.
- Most things have this to some extent. Limited POVs, unreliable narrators, not reading characters' minds, etc. True omniscient POV can avoid it but that's not super popular these days.
- Is The Source Material in the form of a potentially biased in-universe account?
- Does the viewpoint character not fully understand the situation?
- Are there lying liars who may or may not be lying at any given point?
- All of these create room for debate. But, unlike some of the other areas, I think fans usually understand that there's room for debate.
The next category is Value Judgments/Conclusions but I'm going to pause for a moment.
No actually we need another category for… technical issues? Diegesis ambiguity?
- Say, for example: The movie tells us that this creature is a vicious giant killer shrew. Visible on-screen is very clearly a friendly dog.
- Accepting that this is a vicious giant killer shrew is part of suspension of disbelief.
- But having done that — what does the vicious giant killer shrew look like?
- Strictly according to canon this character has long hair and that character is 6'1 and the vicious giant killer shrew looks like a golden retriever.
But a bigger example is gameplay mechanics.
- Example: In gameplay, you obtain rare item A by actions XYZ — should that be taken to be the case in general?
- Example: If in canon there's turn-based combat, is that a truth about the universe?
- This can apply to all sorts of mechanics — combat, travel, magic, geography, dialogue, relationships, healing, items, etc etc etc.
- As far as I can tell it's universally agreed that not all gameplay mechanics should be considered "real", but I've never heard any objective rule for picking which ones to discard.
Conclusions/judgments/analysis:
Even fixing everything above
Even if there is a singular consistent agreed-upon text which doesn't have any glaring omissions or controversial ambiguities
Even if everyone agrees on the imaginary facts
Not everyone is going to draw the same conclusions.
For every conclusion that I find obvious and self-explanatory there are ten other conclusions other people find obvious and self-explanatory that I don't see at all. (Probably thousands — more — of other conclusions I don't see in my particular case, since I pretty much never see romantic 'chemistry'.)
- 'These characters are in love'
- 'The unstated theme is—'
- 'This character is/is not redeemable'
- 'This character is really thinking—'
- 'This side is right'
This is literary analysis. In literary analysis there are no wrong answers, or maybe it's no right answers. People can come up with the most outrageous takes and not be 'wrong', because that's not how the activity works. I do not like this about literary analysis, but here we are.
