D&D 5E Do you care about setting "canon"?

[Mirtek]

I want to think it's a prequel... but if it is... why can Proff X walk at the end of X-Men Origins and yet is crippled by the end of First Class?

actually that's in DoFP. He's taking a medicine that allows him to walk but weakens bis powers.

 

[Corwin]

Anyone seen the commercials for NBC's upcoming TV series Emerald City? I was going to say how great it looks, but it messes with original Wizard of Oz canon, so it will invariably suck I guess. And that's a bummer. I was really looking forward to watching it.

 

[pemerton]

actually that's in DoFP. He's taking a medicine that allows him to walk but weakens bis powers.

[MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION] is referring to a scene at the end of the first Wolverine movie where Patrick Stewart Xavier is walking and using his powers to make contact with escaping mutants.

That is not consistent with First Class or Days of Future Past.

But, in my view, that lack of consistency has basically zero casual relevance to the box office of the X-Men movies.

 

[pemerton]

Canon for a setting doesn't dictate everything for that setting. It just tells you what is different from standard, so unless a setting says, "There are no demons, devils, and fey nobles.", those things exist, even if not brought up in the setting lore or adventures. Bringing them up later isn't a change to canon. It's just bringing up later something that already exists.

I regard this as an incredibly impoverished approach to interpretation and criticism.

It's not a coincidence that, in the Conan stories, Conan is the only Cimmerian we ever encounter. (See eg the discussion in Patrice Louinet's critical editions.)

It would undermine the Holmes stories if another detective, equally good, happened to be solving equally baffling mysteries just off-stage.

For Oriental Adventures to make sense, the Celestial Emperor must, indeed, be the ruler of Heaven. This means that other gods have to be absent from the setting.

Works of art don't have to be utterly enclosed - but they're not just lists of non-standard variations on a received template. They have meaning. Sometimes the silences and absences are part of that meaning.

 

[billd91]

But movie viewers don't care about production houses, or who labels what as part of the MCU.

The simple point is that there was a Hulk movie, in 2003, and then another Hulk movie, in 2008 - and the two films did not have consistent lore. By [MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION]'s theory, this should have hurt the second movie. But the two movies made about the same - a bit less than a quarter-of-a-billion for the first, a bit more than that for the later one.

More generally: the idea that consistency of canon is the best predictor of commercial box-office success (or even a remotely reliable predictor) has no evidence behind it that I'm aware of.

I don't think it's at all clear that movie viewers weren't interested in production houses with the MCU. Incredible Hulk probably benefits from the rampant success of Iron Man the previous year and the curiosity of Marvel making its movies internally and leading to an anticipated combined movie rather than farming them out as separate franchises, whereas Ang Lee's Hulk obviously could not have done so (not being related to anything). The MCU, compared to the other franchise efforts, is a bit of a game changer because it's clear that not only are there standard franchises (Iron Man 1-3, Captain America 1-3, Thor 1-3, Guardians 1-2, Ant-Man 1-2) but also a super-franchise tying everything together.

Then there's the audience reaction. They may have done similarly at the box office, and official reviews may be positive to a similar level, but the semi-random viewer experience suggests a great deal of difference with Ang Lee's version running at only 29% positive compared to 71% for the MCU version.

 

[Imaro]

How many viewers do you think thought - You know what, that First Class was a great film except that, at the end, Xavier was crippled yet a few years ago I saw this other movie where he was played by a different actor who was older and he could walk?

My approximate guess is one: you.

I noticed it, but it didn't spoil my enjoyment of the film. My partner, who has seen all the X-Men films with me, many of them multiple times, didn't pick it up until I pointed it out. People just don't care that much about that sort of cross-story continuity. It's a learned thing, not an innate aesthetic impulse.

Lol... ok if you really think people don't care about continuity in a franchise. Well our views are so far from one another I don't think we can have a meaningful discussion. I honestly believe the consistency of canon and lore between numerous movies is one of the greatest strengths of the Marvel studio movies and one of the reasons they continue to do so well. While X-Men and FF haven't had anywhere near the success they have.

Of course I am still waiting for an example supporting your position that numerous reboots and inconsistent lore helps a property...

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Imaro]

Agreed, and you see this in multiple different areas.

Whether it's the old maxim expressio unius est exclusio alterius, or the concept of negative space in criticism, or pretty much all of modernism on, the idea that absence, silence, and that which is not explained has meaning just as much as that which is explored and explained is fairly standard.




The concept that "canon," as you keep returning to (the idea that there is a great continuity between works that must be maintained for an audience of superfans) is incredibly recent. This is why we have other, modern conceits, such as "retconning," and "reboots," and "expanded universes," and "fan fiction," and other concepts that allows said superfans to reconcile the creative visions of those who produce the work with what is in their head.

While you keep returning to the MCU, which, again, has existed since 2008*, it is better explained not as an example of the overall "canon," but as an example of taking elements of TV serialization and putting them in movies. Sure, it has excellent fan service (through Feige) and easter eggs, but that is different. Because that's the difficult nature of canon; a person can be referring to something as simple as "no errors" (even Kubrick didn't notice that some of the extras were wearing watches in Spartacus; Kessel run in 12 parsecs or less**) or "makes sense with what came before" (prequels in Star Wars looking more advanced than the original trilogy; trying to understand Warp speed given all the different movies) or "seriously, WTF" (James Bond in its entirety, which is more of a gestalt than a canon) or, as you posit it, consistency within a serialized story; this, of course, has the trouble that at some point, something will happen (an actor will die or be priced out, someone will want to tell a new story, some off-hand artifical limit - 12 regenerations for the Doctor- will need to be finessed, and so on) and the canon will need to be modified, changed, altered, or rebooted.

There is nothing wrong with either enjoying the comfort of the familiar or enjoying the way that stories play into one another; but once you get to the point of insisting that canon remain static as a fan, it becomes stultifying to the very thing you love.

*When the self-contained MCU has existed long enough for actors to age out of their roles, and for contradictions to mount, then it would be more prudent to discuss the extent to which something is "canon." But we've seen how quickly Marvel moves away from ideas when they believe it's not in their best interest; you can see that in their unexplained re-casting of the Hulk and War Machine. You can see that in the tacked-on appendages of the Hulk*** and the fact that it is, for all intents and purposes, it is an orphan movie in the MCU; once the MCU has been around as long as James Bond, Star Trek, or Doctor Who I think people can reasonable discuss issues of canon.

**I don't want to get into a huge debate about this, but this is a perfect (canonical?) example of how, post hoc, superfans like to retcon mistakes as, um, not mistakes.


**The little bits to reference the MCU were all done in post.

I feel like you're arguing an extreme (perfectly frozen canon) when that isn't what I or others have been talking about. It'd be akin to me arguing against constant change and chaos within a property, which while I may be wrong isn't the extreme I think [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] and [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] are necessarily asking for.

You can move canon forward, add to it, detail it and so on... however choosing to change what's already been established, disregard what's come before without an explanation and so on, at least IMO, isn't good business and doesn't enhance a property it only helps to alienate your fanbase at a certain point.

 

[pemerton]

I don't think it's at all clear that movie viewers weren't interested in production houses with the MCU. Incredible Hulk probably benefits from the rampant success of Iron Man the previous year and the curiosity of Marvel making its movies internally and leading to an anticipated combined movie rather than farming them out as separate franchises, whereas Ang Lee's Hulk obviously could not have done so (not being related to anything). The MCU, compared to the other franchise efforts, is a bit of a game changer because it's clear that not only are there standard franchises (Iron Man 1-3, Captain America 1-3, Thor 1-3, Guardians 1-2, Ant-Man 1-2) but also a super-franchise tying everything together.

Then there's the audience reaction. They may have done similarly at the box office, and official reviews may be positive to a similar level, but the semi-random viewer experience suggests a great deal of difference with Ang Lee's version running at only 29% positive compared to 71% for the MCU version.

So [MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION] is telling me that the Hulk reboot was a failure, while you are telling me it was a success.

Is it an example of rebooting hurting popularity or helping it?

Or is the whole "reboot" thing actually irrelevant?

 

[pemerton]

You can move canon forward, add to it, detail it and so on... however choosing to change what's already been established, disregard what's come before without an explanation and so on, at least IMO, isn't good business and doesn't enhance a property it only helps to alienate your fanbase at a certain point.

The "fanbase" for The Avengers isn't people who remember how many sripes Captain America has on his suit, or what year Bucky's was born. It's people who have some vague recollection that the Hulk is green and angry, and who enjoy Robert Downey Jr's screen presence.

It's about key tropes, not the minutiae of "canon".