Why do we even care about canon?

Death of the Author is something that I think even the most hardcore canon purists fall into.(Even when the author says you should find your own meaning people will try to find the "true one")

But If everything is fictional and every Fix Fic or Fanfic ever made is equally real... why most people usually consider the original authors work as "what really happened" and every person "head canon" or "fanfic" as an alternatate universe or "not what really happened".

Even when people try to "ignore" the parts they don't like about something make a Fix Fic or make their own version ... most people will say that "it's not canon"

Take for example the famous case of "mass effect 3". I haven't played the games myself but even thought nobody liked the "canon" ending almost nobody (who isn't a fan fic author) dared to make up their own?.

Why do we treat "canon" as the truth if all fiction is equally false? is it for respect to the author?.

As much as we can claim every work is subject to interpretation I am sure most authors wouldn't like their work to be interpreted as opposite to what they wanted to say in the first place and even the idea of finding a "true meaning" is paradoxically one form of interpretation.

Why do we see as what the original author makes as "true" and what everyone else does as "false". Even if we like more what the latter does.

As much as we would like to claim that canon doesn't exist or "everything is subject to interpretation" Nobody will say be able to say that the canon (sir arthur conan Doyle's) Sherlock holmes was in fact a female alien or that harry potter was the "true villain" of the story without many people challenging such ideas.

just curious about this.

edited 21st Apr '14 1:33:03 AM by fallenlegend

Part of good storytelling is convincing people, despite their knowing logically that it isn't true, to believe that the story is something real. That it's more than just a bunch of made-up stuff that doesn't matter.

It needs that sacredness to it, or why care at all?

Because canon gives some semblance of order to a work or series of works.

Why do we care about chronological order? Why should causality exist? If I hit someone, why does it hurt for them?

Answer: That's the way the world works. Time flows forward. Something has come before. Events do proceed from one another. Mass Effect 3's ending was not only a terrible ending in itself, but it was a terrible ending as a betrayal of the the story that came before it; of the themes that your choices matter and that with enough do-what-must-be-done ruthlessness or enough time and understanding you can defeat any problem. The fact it was tacked on to what was, in every other respect, an amazing tribute to those ideas was just defecation icing on a butt-shaped cake.

I'll have to get me one of those for my next birthday.

Also, we do grow attached to characters in the original work — if we saw someone acting completely different without any explanation, we simply would find it hard to believe that that was the same character. Just a different guy in the same suit.

I see it like this. The canon original is by no means the only valid interpretation of a story or characters and other authors, amateur and professional, are free to have at anyone's work if they so choose. However, just because this doesn't invalidate anyone else's take on the canon doesn't make the original irrelevant, unimportant, or insignificant. It's still the ur-example, and you should treat it with the respect it deserves even if you want to deviate from it.

To expand on that, the original canon has immutable facts; you can argue why a character did something or if they lied about their motivations, perhaps, but certain things happened and those are not as mutable. If Gilligan was conducting an extended psychological experiment via the island, you have to explain all his actions in that context.

Unless you're writing an AU story of course, in which case all bets are off

To a point. If it's that AU, then I'll start questioning why the characters are similar rather than why they're different. This is something I used to beat people over the head with in Gundam Wing AUs.

edited 21st Apr '14 3:23:38 PM by Night

The same reason we have grammatical rules. To understand each other better. If everyone just followed a head canon it would be cumbersome to have a conversation about a work. If you want to share a story (and we usually want to, otherwise we can just daydream) you have to agree on a story.

Having your own fanon is also technically an own, alterated work and not the same story. A ME 3 with another ending is another story as the canon game. And even if a can make up my own ending, I cannot programm a game.

Night's absolutely right.

If the ending to Mass Effect 3 had a positive side to it, it's that the existence of such quality in close proximity to such utter garbage serves as the perfect case study in why keeping a story consistent matters so much.

A story has to make sense before it can even try to do anything else, including evoke emotion in the audience or try to have some kind of artful message. A story that doesn't adhere to these basic concepts can bury whatever merit it may have had under an avalanche of questions that the author was too lazy or inconsiderate to give the audience answers to.