Lost what? The ability to say "the authors currently agree with me"?
That's all canon is.
No, it's not. It's much, much more than that.
A lot of what I've seen in this thread has touched upon issues that ultimately boil down to "why is 'canon' important to people in the first place?" I can give my answer, but this is going to be a bit of a long one, so I'm going to do this
@Snarf Zagyg style.
MODES OF ENGAGEMENT: DIFFERENT WAYS TO PLAY (OR NOT PLAY, AS IT WERE)
I've recently been reading Joseph Laycock's book
Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds, which is aimed at understanding the frenzy that fell over D&D (and other tabletop RPGs) during the 80s and 90s. It's an excellent deep-dive into what happened, and I encourage everyone to read it. But what does that have to do with canon? Well, quite a bit, actually, the first point of which is to help lay down some ways of looking at points that have only been lightly acknowledged so far.
One of the ways that Laycock indicts the people who were panicking over D&D is that they were wrong to say that role-players frequently lost the ability to tell reality from the game world. In fact, he asserts, game-players were easily able to maneuver through three different modes of engagement while sitting around the game table:
- Mode 1: Reality is where the players acknowledged what was going on around them, without reference to what was happening in the context of game-play (i.e. "Hey, can you check under the couch? I think my d20 might have rolled under there.")
- Mode 2: Meta-context has the players engaging with the game in its framework as a game, typically via out-of-character references to the rules of the game world and the actions performed with regard to them (i.e. "I make a Charisma check to intimidate the guard. Don't forget my +2 bonus from that non-weapon proficiency I picked up last level.")
- Mode 3: In-character is when the players act as if they were their character, which is almost always limited to in-character speech (i.e. "By the light of Pelor, you shall burn away to nothing, vampire!")
Obviously, gamers had no real issue with moving between all three modes without any sort of overt signalling that they were doing so; it was understood.
While that might seem like something of a digression, I bring it up here because something similar is going on with regard to discussions of canon. Namely, that we're referencing different modes of engagement with the game. It's just that the engagement isn't with different levels of play, but whether or not we're playing at all.
LEVELING UP THE "ART APPRECIATION" SKILL
While it can be contentious to try and define what "art" is, trying to figure out what constitutes "good art" and "bad art" is even more so. But at the risk of starting an entirely new debate, I'll offer a definition: "good art" is that which is able to engage the people who view (or read, listen to, or otherwise partake of) it on multiple levels simultaneously.
What does "more than one level" of appreciation mean? Well, take a look at the following:
That's the
Equestrian statue of Gattamelata, sculpted by Donatello (the person, not the ninja turtle in 1453. To me, this piece is pleasing on two levels: it can be appreciated for its technical skill, and for the history it evokes, as Gattamelata was himself an actual person ("Gattamelata" meaning "sweet cat"; notice my avatar here and all).
Now take a look at this one:
That's
Venus Callipyge (or rather, a reproduction of it). Made in Greek antiquity, this is one I can appreciate on three levels: the aforementioned technical skill, the historical associations surrounding the statue (I actually found out about it when researching the
Deipnosophists), and for the erotic appeal of a hot chick admiring her own naked butt.
Now obviously, there's no expectation that these particular appreciations will be true for anyone else. Someone else may find no attractive qualities in
Venus Callipyge, but might find
Gattamelata to be smokin' hot. Which is fine; the subjective nature of the appeal is understood, oftentimes to the point where it can be easily overlooked. I think that's what's happening with our discussions on canon: the appeal of how useful lore is with regard to forming a campaign isn't being separated - in the context of what's being discussed - from the appeal of the lore unto itself, when in fact those are different modes.
Of course, this then brings us to ask
why the lore is appealing "unto itself" anyway. Which brings us to a new point in the discussion.
JOURNEYING TO ANOTHER WORLD (WITHOUT GOING FULL ISEKAI)
In her book
Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel, Lisa Zunshine posits that reading, like writing, is inherently a creative act. The reason for this boils down to how we fill in the "gaps" in what's there; that we read between the lines to a far greater degree than is commonly acknowledged. That is, that while we might read a passage about a knight charging a dragon, we're imagining the various details that go unwritten in that passage: about the fear the knight is feeling and how they're dealing with it, or perhaps that they're excited rather than afraid, or perhaps that they're filled with a quiet resignation, experiencing neither excitement nor dread.
Like with art appreciation, none of these are right or wrong, because they're all personal, but here we're doing more than just acknowledging what's there: we're adding to it, even if only in the context of our own minds.
But again, what does that have to do with canon?
To that, I offer the following, from
Penny Arcade:
As amusing as that is (a reference to characters from Star Wars appearing in
Soul Calibur IV), it's the text that accompanies the comic that I found memorable, where Jerry Holkins wrote:
The urge to create stable frameworks and legitimize our fantasies, to make them internally consistent an therefore more real is something we’ve poked at before. I can’t resist it. I always feel the strong compulsion to build upon whatever I enjoy, to understand it better. I can’t listen to a song without harmonizing with it, and I can’t play a game without imbuing it with sheaves upon sheaves of personally relevant contextual information.
That, right there, is what it's all about.
If we've established that a body of fiction - whether it's part of a video game franchise, a series of novels, the world of a tabletop role-playing game, etc. - can be approached in multiple different ways, and that one of those is to engage with the fiction
as fiction (rather than a framework for game-play, a source of inspiration for some other creative impetus, etc.), then we can take that to the conclusion Holkins has reached here: that the more there is for us to partake in, the more we understand the internal logic and self-consistently of that imaginary world, and so we can then in turn fill in more details on our own, and enjoy it more richly.
It might sound paradoxical to say that the more we know about a given piece of fiction, the more we can make up, but that's been my experience in fandom after fandom. We want to know more about a particular imaginary world because it makes it clearer in our minds. Harry Potter fans want to know what the wizarding world looks like outside of England, or what it was like in the past. Kingdom Hearts fans want to explore the nature of the various settings of the series and expand connections between them and their characters. A Song of Ice and Fire fans want to explore beyond Westeros and learn about the various histories teased throughout the books (the TV series, not so much).
And fans of the Forgotten Realms want to understand the nature of that setting better also.
To that end, "canon" as a concept is important because it's the guide by which we determine what does that for us and what doesn't. A particular piece of fanfiction about The Lord of the Rings might be a masterpiece in its own right - and if you haven't read
The Last Ringbearer, you should - but it doesn't help a Lord of the Rings fan understand Middle-Earth better. It's a different mode of engagement, one that goes for entertainment without widening the conceptual framework that is the imaginary world and its history, characters, etc.
At least, that's what canon is to me, and why I think it's important. It's why I don't want various aspects of a setting changed - and when I say "changed," I mean meta-contextually changed; if Thay didn't originally sell magic items to other nations, and then in later editions was selling them to any and all, that's fine if it's because Szass Tam elected to change Thay's foreign policy as a matter of shoring up political influence abroad - for reasons that don't relate to in-setting reasons (e.g. some people find it offensive, it's perceived as being too off-putting for newcomers, etc.) Doing so makes it
harder to engage with that fantasy world under the mode with which I'm trying to engage with it: as its own thing, separate and apart from any changes or alterations that I might introduce to it on my own (that's a mode of engagement that I reserve for game-play).
The same way having rules grounds and stabilizes what's otherwise a game of "let's pretend," canon is the set of rules by which we interact with an imaginary world. Without it, there's no sense of structure to the fantasy, and it's no more entertaining than trying to play a game of make-believe completely on your own.
That's why I think a lot of people are upset about this, because a method of engaging with the setting has been impacted, one which is keenly perceived even if it's entirely conceptual in nature.
TL;DR Canon is important because it's the framework that people use to engage with an imaginary world, giving structure to fantasy, and in so doing making it seem real enough to be entertaining.
