loose canon; the swedish compromise
Reading forums and talking to .. well lets call them “passionate” consumers of fiction, be it tv-series, comics or books spanning entire forests, you often find them touting and challenging the canonicity of the writer/creators own “universe” of fiction.
This often due to cross-franchise entertainment like games, comics and movies made out of, say, a series of tu.. oh sorry, books.
Now this is actually fine, everyone’s entitled to their own opinions, me, I like to enjoy what I consume via the various mediums.
Take one of my favorite examples, Star Wars, early on it was a hopshod ragtaggled bunched together impression of various sources — Lucas early script was a loose impression based on Akira Kurozawas “The hidden fortress” — but today it spans a multi-billion franchise consisting of books, comics, the movies, tv-series and games.
but what most fanboys discuss is the canon and its redheaded stepdaughter “continuity” — who’s a real bitch — the inherent facts as they’ve interpreted it via one of the above sources.
Now forums on the net are a place where fanboys bunch together to continously one up eachother and earn a badge of honour for being “Correct” regarding the topic of discussion, usually it follows a pattern somewhat like this:
User A asks a question, receives a reply, someone corrects the reply, a flamewar erupts, people are rude to one another, someone insults someone’s mom, threats are made, moderators step in to calm it down, Strawmen A & B start their incessant tripe and Power User A corrects everyone, thus earning credibility.
Needless to say, its something forumgoers feel insane amounts of passion for, but normal people feel, well. indifferent towards.
it’s essentially one of those “cant see the forests due to all the tree’s” sort of deals, to me anyway.
But the way it works in a franchise license like the Star Wars franchise, is that the span is through various mediums and corporations, in that there’s even an inverted pyramid of classifications involved, relating to just canon, and more often than not this is not regulated by a writer or a creator, but by an Intellectual Property Rights Lawyer, let’s just refer to that guy as the “badguy” henceforth.
So this badguy has created a set of classes pertaining to which part of the published information is the primary source for all the lore relating to the story.
This to keep a firm grip around continuitys throat as it relates to, the canonicity of the story.
A more hands on description of this classification is a set of classes, lets call name them A all the way to D.
A - is the “do what the creator demands of us puny plebs” (the filth called pre-trilogy movies)
B - is what the Creator himself creates. i.e the mainline (The Star Wars trilogy)
C - is edge stuff like comics, books and RPG’s of the Star Wars franchise, products that contain /some/ canon that the Lucas does not pay much attention to — if at all —
D - basically, this is stuff that is not an essential part of the storyline and retains some inklings of The Canon, stuff like Games.
That’s the basics the law that people like the badguy spill forth, at least in how it relates to the Star Wars franchise.
Firefly, Star Trek and B5 has a similar dress up from what I understand, or well. not Star Trek, since Gene Roddenberry is basically the reason to why the term “Retcon” exists, but the essentials are the same.
But its even more convoluted in our modern time, not only is there a badguy, but more often than not it’s a team of them, led by what’s called an “Intellectual Property Rights Manager” who sets direction.
And this is why, Canon, isnt up to frothing fanboys on online forums.
