Why do we care so much about canon?

I get it, but as resetlocksley said, it's not our baby, thus, we can't really mess with it.

True, but sometimes

also true, and

even truer.

In the end, it's all a matter of where you stand. What your point of view dictates. I mean, the Pulp Master killed Hitler!, and this particular dude ended up killing off the, ''almost'' Final Girl! . We can't do anything about it, the author CANON'd it and that's that.

edited 30th Oct '12 6:13:03 AM by Basterd

Kind of an interesting example, I think, is J.K.Rowling's well known pronouncement that Dumbledore is gay. She's the author, so from the standpoint that the author is the ultimate authority in these matters, that should be that. However, from the standpoint of a LOT of schools of literary criticism, Dumbledore is effectively asexual because his sexuality is never portrayed on the page or ever referred to in-text, and what isn't actually written in the book simply doesn't happen.

In a sense, I think you can look at it that, even independent of the author's intentions, whatever interpretation of a work gets the widest circulation/acceptance is going to end up being taken as canon. This is not to say that alternative interpretations aren't acceptable with the proper justifications, just that, as with so many things, whatever most people believe, like it or not, is going to be what's taken as canon.

A game is a bit different from a more traditional work of fiction. A game is meant to be interactive and by necessity invites input from it's players. And extensive familiarity with the rules and the game system amounts to extensive knowledge of the game's canon, right? You're not rewriting the rules system to suit your whims.

edited 30th Oct '12 5:00:24 PM by Robbery

Are you implying that how one reacts to a story has no effect on it's outcome? Because I find this notion absurd. If I hate a character, but my friend likes them, and the author then kills off that character in a scene intended to be heart-wrenching, my friend and I will have greatly different reaction to that scene, and it may color our experience of the rest of the story.

This is true of any event, not just character death.

But if it has meaning to you, and you find it interesting, then why in the world is it an "issue?" That's like saying a chef prepared a meal that was supposed to taste like like chicken, but I found it closer to fish. As long as I enjoyed it why is that a problem?

Further, saying someone is a "pretentious cock" because they value their own ideas more than the authors is just as assaultive and pompous as me telling an author their ideas are worthless (and both are things I would never do). The author may "own" his ideas and work, but the reader owns their interpretations of it. And which is closer to home for someone who isn't the author?

I don't think games, as a storytelling medium, are that different from other types of media. The idea of "emergent narrative" is really not that different from stories that intentionally make things vague or omit details.

Compare and contrast the storytelling of say, Left 4 Dead or Fallout New Vegas to the storytelling of Finnegans Wake or most things by William Faulkner. The plot hinges on you injecting meaning into things, sifting through the events of the plot in a way that will be different to every reader.

Of course, this article argues otherwise.

edited 30th Oct '12 10:28:25 PM by CleverPun

"The only way to truly waste an idea is to shove it where it doesn't belong."

Go and have a read of Death of the Author. I'll wait.

The bit about the lecturer and Asimov.

I was not talking about a random reader who thought he knew more than the author, I'm talking about someone who twatted on for gods-know how long, telling other people "This is what Asimov meant when he wrote this".

Then told Asimov that he knew absolutely nothing about his own story.

Teacher: "This is what Asimov meant."

Asimov: "No I didn't."

Teacher: "What the fuck would you know!"

I think that's rather different to you and the author having different opinions on whether or not a character is sufficiently "sympathetic" to evoke an emotional response or whatever.

(emphasis added)

You seem to view everything as an interactive game.

How we feel about the characters or whatever has absolutely no effect on the outcome of the story - the story has already been written and published.

Our experience of the story, how we feel about it, what we perceive it to be, does not equate to the outcome.

Me hating or liking a character is not going to affect whether or not the author kills it off or how the book ends (the "outcome" of the "story").

Sure, two people may have a completely different experience of the character's death (or whatever) but the outcome - the end of the story as written and published some considerable time before they read it - is completely unaffected.

It's a book, not a bloody interactive game where if you play it different ways it finishes differently.

edited 31st Oct '12 12:07:27 AM by Wolf1066

Well, I certainly do not view everything as a math equation - immutable facts that look the same to everyone, and don't warrant additional examination XD

I'm not saying every story is a Choose Your Own Adventure. I was trying to convey (and I apologize if I didn't do so clearly) that how we experience something has a very large effect on what we think of it, and that our perceptions of something can enhance, impede or even redirect an author's intent. I wasn't referring to the outcome of the story on the page (and this is something I didn't make clear), but rather the outcome on the reader - it's emotional effect and the ideas they take away from it.

Nor am I saying that authorial intent is worthless (again, I apologize if I was implying that). But it is certainly not the last word on a book. Indeed, limiting a book to a single meaning is why I don't generally enjoy Allegory (see Tolkien's quote on the Death of the Author Quotes page). Asimov got this, that's why his stories presented events not aesops.

If an author writes an emotional scene, it may make me cry as intended, or it may make me laugh, or do nothing at all. But if it didn't make me cry, then it's not because the author failed as a writer, or I failed as a reader. The idea that you can read a book the wrong way is simply something I can't fathom; you may miss a few details, be unable to follow a few parts, but you read it and it meant something to you, so how can you claim either party failed because the reader took it a certain way?

A plan never survives contact with the enemy, and an author's intentions don't always survive contact with the reader.

edited 31st Oct '12 12:32:01 AM by CleverPun

"The only way to truly waste an idea is to shove it where it doesn't belong."

Wolf answered your question for me, Clever Pun. Apart from that, nobody can tell you what you're allowed to feel, or how to react, or which character to root for.

Thanks for your reply, Clever Pun, and for explaining what you meant by "outcome" - I certainly didn't get that meaning from your previous post.

I fully agree that each person's perceptions provide for a unique experience and that we may well see things in works other than that which the author sees.

But they're still personal opinions, not Holy Writ, not The Truth tee-emm.

And if the author says that something happened or that the work was an intentional allusion to the philosophies of Plato, then that's exactly how it is, regardless of what we personally may want to have happened or personally read into it.

That is totally distinct from "how we feel about what happens" - the author can't say "oh, yeah, this scenes going to make everyone cry" or "this character is totally sympathetic and everyone roots for him" - but the author can say "this character really did get away with murder" or "that character totally did die/fail to get the girl/whatever.

The author might hope we find his characters likeable/lovable (and some of us will) but it won't work for all of us.

But canon's still canon and our right to feel about the story individually does not confer a right to say "nah, the author shouldn't'a' killed off that character, so I say it never happened" and reject it.

And it doesn't confer a right to tell the author he doesn't know what his story was about.

Really, it doesn't confer a right to tell people that what we think the author was on about is what the author really was on about.

And reading back through the thread, I can see I'm sitting here basically elaborating on what Night said way back at the beginning of the thread when (s)he told the OP that Death of the Author (interpretation of the work) has utterly nothing to do with canon (the events that happened and what the universe is actually like).

Considering the OP was about whether or not fanfic is "more or less valid than the original work", we're debating way off track.

edited 31st Oct '12 11:55:36 PM by Wolf1066

Separate post because I'm answering the OP directly.

While there's a lot of really good fanfic out there and some interesting crossovers, if the original author has decided that a character has died or it turned out to be all a dream or whatever, then that's exactly what happened in the "universe" that the author created.

If a fanfic does not adhere to that canon - perhaps the author of the fanfic didn't want the character to die or thought it'd be interesting if the USS Enterprise wound up in the Serenity 'verse with Sulu as the captain - it's not "official" - the fanfic author does not hold the copyright to the characters etc, the fanfic author did not invent them or their fictional universe.

As enjoyable as the fanfic may be, the author of the fanfic is basically just using someone else's characters etc.

There is always going to be more "weight" afforded to the person who actually imagined the original story, characters, universe etc than to someone who may have come up with a "neat story" but nothing else.

Canon is always going to trump non-canon works in that manner. Canonical tales are those written by the author or by others with the author's guidelines (even To Dream In The City of Sorrows had a fairish amount of input from JMS as he was asked to clarify why he wrote certain things in the original episodes and what he had in mind for certain characters etc. Although the work was primarily that of Kathryn M Drennan as she tried to piece together a lot of different episodes and fill a few plot holes, it was based on canonical works and JMS also provided additional Word of God information and then he deemed the story to be canon.)

They have gravitas due to having the original author's stamp of approval.

Fan works do not have that weight to them, even those that adhere to all canonical "facts".

Just because both are "fictional" it doesn't mean they are equal - because the fact that Author A created the universe while Author B merely borrowed from it is not remotely fictional.

Double ditto.

Very well said.

Fear is a superpower.