It succeeded because it was (I'm told) a good film. No one is saying that people will go to see a film precisely because it butchers canon. (Except perhaps for some limited-appeal avant garde films.) The claim is that there is no evidence that adherence to canon is an important factor in flimic success.
The reply that I quoted was a reply to this statement:
Imaro said:
But you've yet to show a property that benefited by excessive changing of lore and canon.
"Deadpool was a successful movie" doesn't show a property that benefited by excessive changing of lore and canon.
But this is the difference between canon and tropes, feel, theme, etc.
Being true to the character, or the setting, doesn't mean never chagnging anything. Whether or not West Side Story is true to Romeo and Juliet isn't going to be settled by noting that it is set in NYC rather than Verona.
It does, though! Both of those works have contexts and meanings that are quite different in their own time and place from each other. They share a lot of overlap, too, but you'd be grossly over-simplifying to imagine that they are essentially the same thing.
Not in my experience. As I have already posted, I play in a D&D groupt that has over 100 years of collective FRPGing experience. Yet I doubt that any of them but me would know about PS-era eladrin, and while they're been cheerfully beating up on gnolls for decades, I doubt that any would notice that the 4e gnolls they fought were slightly more demon-oriented than the AD&D versions.
This stuff is just not such a big deal. And here's one of the reasons why:
I mean, that's all well and good, but if you'd like to understand why canon matters to
other people, your own experience is irrelevant. You need to acknowledge the experiences of others. Baldly asserting that it's not a big deal is not a great way to demonstrate that you're open to that, if indeed you are.
I think that your analysis here is exactluy the opposite of the truth.
It is because RPGers use lore that canon doesn't matter much to many of them. Lore provides the building blocks of a shared fiction - it is not itself the shared fiction.
It becomes the shared fiction when you use it in the game, no?
Converesly, those for whom lore matters - for whom the goal of RPGing is to emulate an existing story or setting - are the ones who are not using lore but rather are holding it in crystalline stasis. I have never played with such people. I get the impression that they are a minority of D&D players (eg from another current thread I believe that WotC reports the most popular campaign setting is "homebrew").
Your characterization of people who "use the lore" seems to be little better than a condescending stereotype. Assert less, listen more. You will find that, for instance, running a homebrew game isn't incompatible with a conservative idea of lore. In fact, a tendency to homebrew can be pointed to in certain situations as an example of the negative externalities of lore changes ("I don't play these settings because I don't read the novels.").
Using the lore doesn't mean holding it in stasis. It means using it
in play, to inform characters and narratives and mechanics. It necessarily changes and develops in the course of play. But if it changes because some developer had a Cool Idea, that disrupts the characters and narratives and mechanics that were part of that lore before.
Meanwhile, if Deadpool changes because some directore had a Cool Idea, it might not disrupt much about the character or it's narrative, really. I mean, it might! But it being a change doesn't automatically make that happen the way that changing game lore automatically disrupts existing games using old lore just as much as a errata does.
From the aesthetic point of view, I don't think it is good for the game to cater excessively to this minority, because it undermines what I regard as the key point of RPGing: creation, not emulation/reenactment. And from the commercial point of view, I think the same conclusion follows, as this minority is not enough on its own to make the publications viable. Therefore the publications have to appeal more broadly, which sometimes will require disregarding past lore.
I mean, you can baldly assert your view that this group is in a minority, but I think you're blinding yourself to considerable nuance without much evidence for the sake of preserving some cartoonish characterization of people who just play the game a bit differently than you do. (As if the people who prefer the PS tiefling story aren't creating with that story!). That intractable delegitimization is harmful to everyone involved.
