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.
for all the Discourse of ‘this is a group historically only for those who deal with homophobia or transphobia’, it’s not even that. not close. like the amount of abuse i’ve faced as a trans woman. from cis LGBs and truscum. i’ve blocked out half the shit i’ve been through just in lgbti and queer spaces. i can’t go to those places anymore. i want to just give up on discourse on this blog like, I don’t know why i’m fighting for a community that i haven’t felt welcomed in since, i thought i was a cis dude tbqh
If you like labels that’s great. If you don’t like labels that is also great. If you refuse to respect someone else’s personal choices about their labels, that is fucked up.
could a depressed person do this? *watches a hundred hours of rubiks cube unboxing videos*
nonbinary robots are cool and all but imagine a robot designed to be genderless and it sees a girl and is like “wtf girls are cute im a girl now” and the scientists are like u cant do this thing but she is already out the door
there’s a specific wikipedia article for “star trek canon” and in it i read, “Roddenberry considered elements of Star Trek V and Star Trek VI to be apocryphal,” so honestly if star trek canon ends after The One With the Whales for gene roddenberry himself then goddamnit that’s where star trek canon ends for me too
I really, really, really cannot fathom the level of willful ignorance required to believe “it’s ‘LGBT’, I don’t see aces in there” is a legitimate argument.
Like, where do you think that term came from? “LGBT” was not handed to us from on high. It’s not a fundamental law of the universe. It’s not even that old as an accepted term. It’s the latest iteration of a series of shorthands attempting to refer to groups supposedly standing in solidarity with each as a shared community, with shared problems and shared goals and hopes. It’s an umbrella term, and whenever we realize we’ve left someone out in the rain, we get a bigger umbrella. It’s actually already happening, you can’t pretend it isn’t.
So, seriously, if you think somehow a recently coined phrase is the absolute word of truth with who does or doesn’t belong in this community, get bent.
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