Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="DreadPirateMurphy" data-source="post: 4830518" data-attributes="member: 20715">My point was to demonstrate that issues of history are often in dispute, and that if you apply this same vagueness to fictional history, this provides a good deal of flexibility in discussions of canon with relation to gaming and fandom.I think this is a valid distinction.  In writing speculative fictions, for examaple, the reader is expected to accept certain setting-specific non-realities, like magic or faster-than-light drives.  Consistency in important, because it makes such things behave in the same way as real things behave.  If I drop a brick, it doesn't hit the floor one day and float around the room at random the next.  Likewise, we tend to categorize people in many different ways in the real world, so seeing similar categories (race, community, ethnic group, language, belief system) is familiar and plausible.Canon, on the other hand, is a consumer's perspective on the relative quality of different works sharing a setting.  Krensky mentions Western Canon in his post (something I admittedly had to look up).  There is apparently a concept that there are bodies of work that are most representative of high quality Western culture.Wouldn't you say, Cam Banks, that as an author in a shared universe, you are ALSO a consumer, and you have to make decisions on your version of canon in order to maintain consistency within in your own work?Maybe we also confuse "canon" with "official" because of the confluence with copyright?  Lucas controls Star Wars, and so I can't go out and write a Star Wars novel without a license.  He can deny me a license if he doesn't like the quality of my work, or if he dislikes the direction in which I take the setting or the characters.Star Trek is a better example of the creator's subjective canon selection.  Paramount decided when they were ready with NextGen that all of the novels were "non-canon" with regard to the TV series.  JJ Abrams decided to reset canon with a plot device, so now both the novels and all of the previous TV series (maybe excepting Enterprise?) are non-canon for the new movie.  The new Star Trek is undoubtedly a better film than say, Star Trek V, so this may be an example of "official" canon better coinciding with fan-popular canon, i.e., Star Trek V no longer really happened...Does the word "canon" have so many divergent meanings and so many misinterpretations that it is no longer a meaningful term for debate?</blockquote>

Verification