“Canon” is subjective and meaningless
Every now and then you run into fans of various media complaining about corporations having no regard for the canon of their hobbies:
Be it Star Wars, Marvel, DC, Doctor Who, Warhammer 40k, or anything else that’s got enough entries in it, you’ll hear people complaining about some new release contradicting the established cannon and being bad because of it.
But when you stop and think about it, glorifying the canon and using it as a piece of media criticism is mostly a convenient scapegoat for when you don’t like something (whether it was actually bad, or subjectively bad). If you’d have some good piece of media that bends or breaks the canon, you’d accept it and work around it. Star Wars is a good microcosm for that, so let’s use that for an example.
What is canon?
Just to make sure we’re on the same page, canon “is the material accepted as officially part of the story in an individual universe of that story by its fan base”. It can also clash with “the official canon” that is more mandated by the intellectual rights holders that might push for something that the fans don’t agree is canon. For a recent example, look at how fans decry the sequel trilogy.
Star Wars canon
Star Wars is one of those properties with a hierarchy of canons that establish some work as taking precedent over the others. On top of it, you have the G-canon that’s the six movies produced by Lucas and other things.
But even from here, things start to be a popularity contest as to what actually is canon. If Lucas has the final say, Greedo shot first, which is something a lot of fans would balk at.
Then we start getting into the weeds of everything outside of the main movies. How do you define canon here but based on the popularity of something? If you’d try to be objective and say, go by the order of release, the Star Wars Holiday Special would be one of the main canon sources (only beaten by like, two novels), but clearly everyone ignores it and would gladly remove it from canon.
Then there are some parts of the movies people want to gloss over so they can keep their cool characters. First, is Boba Fett dying in the Sarlacc pit:
Everyone just agrees he didn’t actually die there since he’s such a cool guy:
So obviously that got retconned into him surviving so we can see him be a badass in Mandalorian Season 2. So sure, we didn’t see him actually merked, so you can suspend your disbelief a bit. So is there some other, better candidate for that kind of for sure on-screen death? Well, we do have Maul:
That guy has to be dead dead! But no, he’s too cool for that, now he gets to have spider legs:
But if those two could survive, then why do people get upset about a third character coming back from the dead. I’m talking of course about Palpatine:
We didn’t *see* him die after all, so why are so people upset about him being back in Episode 9? Because that episode sucked of course!
Canon is about popularity
So in the end, canon is really about popularity, which is often tied to how good something was. If some particular story was cool, people will want it to be canon. It of course feeds back in on itself — often if you take the time to do your research of previous works and maintain continuity with them, you already have the hallmarks of a good writer (or at least one that does a lot of prep work), so chances are what you create will be good. The reverse is also true — if you don’t care or don’t have time to do your research, you might just be making something that’s disposable that won’t be enjoyed by the community.
But if canon is about popularity, it can also make it a double-edged sword for some of the “hardcore fans” — if something they don’t like draws in a large swath of new people into the medium or gets embraced by “the normies”, wouldn’t that mean it then becomes canon?
A good deal of people might be hating the Clone Wars cartoons because they don’t fit in the canon, but chances are more people have grew up watching that show that have read the books by orders of magnitude. So does that mean that canon Mandalorians are peace loving civilised people that get their children drinks poisoned by smugglers? If you go strictly by cultural dissemination, yes!
It’s all meaningless
Really, at the end of the day, this whole canon vs non-canon debate is kind of meaningless if you apply any sort of rigidity to it. Multiple groups of people can reach different canons based on their personal opinions and more specific variables they set for themselves. Sure, obsessive fans might be passionate about everything fitting together and harmonising into one grand whole, but that can be constraining on new creativity. Sometimes to make something new you have to let the past die, or kill it if you have to…
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Arguments about canonicity remind me somewhat of an old Collage Humor sketch, where they talk about how religious people are just nerds:
And when it comes to debating what is canon or not, it’s pretty much the same whether you’re talking about Star Wars or the New Testament.
So whether you stick closely to canon, or deviate from it, it doesn’t matter as much as whether what you present is worth it. Making sure you fit perfectly to canon doesn’t guarantee a win, but if you change something big, make sure it serves a strong purpose, since you’ll be fighting an uphill battle.
