scarimor:

moon-faced-pear-shaped:

scarimor:

Know what ticks me off the most about the “we’re canon” and “but that’s not canon” and “your ship is not canon” nonsense? It buys into the whole proprietary ownership of storytelling that Disney exemplifies: tales as commodities controlled and dispensed by suits with their own self-serving agendas.

If you tried to tell the bards or poets or ballad-writers of centuries past that there’s such a thing as “canon” and it’s superior, they would have laughed in your face. Try telling even the famous storytellers like Shakespeare or Homer or Sappho or Ibn Tufail.

The recent preoccupation with “canon v. fanon” in the culture battles makes the Textual Poachers author’s quote more relevant than ever:

“Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk.”
– Henry Jenkins, 1997

I did my undergrad comp thesis on Pavel Chekov’s potential realization and fufillment in Star Trek fanfiction; Textual Poachers is a great resource. 🙂

And yeah, the moral of the story: people need to chill the fuck out about canon and ships (did you write The Thing? If not, stop.), read up on reader response theory, and enjoy the fan-works they enjoy and don’t participate in the ones they don’t. In the end, it’s your experience and others, and as much as people think fandoms are communal, they’re comprised of individuals with different perspectives and desires experiencing a work through their own worldviews.

I laugh because the term “canon” to mean true and authoritative is appropriated from religion, and that’s a very recent phenomenon pushed by the commercial imperative; “canon” as it pertains to fictional works means “collection” – e.g. the American literary canon, the canon of classical Hollywood cinema; “The girl’s bookshelf was filled with the canon of children’s literature…”

How ironic that people are using “canon” – i.e. scriptural authority, the doctrinal truth, the Truth so true it is the decisive Word of God – for something which is literally fiction.

If there’s “canon” in fiction then most of the TV writers in Hollywood are heretics.