4 ms·

It sounds like you don't take fiction seriously, and are showing contempt for people that do. The issue of canon really occurs when different groups of people

by hx8 2y ago

It sounds like you don't take fiction seriously, and are showing contempt for people that do. The issue of canon really occurs when different groups of people work on a singular fictional world over a long period of time. The people who work on these worlds have to take fiction seriously, and need a way to communicate with the fans which other works they are going to building on. It is a bit tiresome and over played, but is a natural consequence of large corporations handling these fictional universes.

croes 2y ago
And if the fans don’t like it they stop watching it. That’s how it works. Harassing people because they don’t like how it’s done is plain wrong. Sometimes you have to realize it’s not always to make existing fans happy but to try something new to get new fans. Otherwise is always the same in repeat.
- big-green-man 2y ago
  But they don't stop watching it, their identities are invested in it. There's sunk cost fallacy going on there. They don't want it to suck, they want it to keep getting better. And it doesn't. And they complain. But they keep watching anyway. I know a guy that watched every episode of discovery, complained how bad it was, then watched the next one. It didn't matter that it sucked, you can't miss knowing the canon! They're entirely captured by the corporations that produce this stuff. Their minds are trapped arguing over the validity of literal nonsense because it's profitable to some company for that to be the case.
  - throwpoaster 2y ago
    Another way of saying this is that they share creative ownership with the corporation managing the commons, like open source software.
    - big-green-man 2y ago
      They don't share ownership of anything. The owners do whatever they want, then lip service the fandom after the fact, and the fandom takes it because they can't cut loose from their attachment. A die hard fan that won't drop something the minute it begins to be destroyed is a sucker for abuse, and their willingness to look past it afterwards is why the owners get away with it. And they'll do it again.
      - throwpoaster 2y ago
        If the fans stop paying attention it dies. The power to destroy something is ownership.
    - lupusreal 2y ago
      On the contrary, if they assign importance to "canon" they are putting the corporation on a pedestal, as it is the corporation which defines the canon.
throwpoaster 2y ago
> It sounds like you don't take fiction seriously, and are showing contempt for people that do. Investing time in fiction has been shown to increase empathy. Potentially causal.
lupusreal 2y ago
You can take fiction seriously without treating it as representing some sort of quasireality from which coherency across decades of story telling from multiple generations of story tellers is expected. Two story tellers having contradictory accounts of what happens with a fictional character shouldn't cause distress or consternation to people who enjoy stories about that character; people who enjoy fiction should be able to take that in stride. The whole premise of a "canon" to fiction is actually an artifact of the legal construct of copyright; with folk stories which exist outside of copyright the premise of a consistent canon isn't talked about because anybody can make their own story, many people have, and everybody accepts that the stories are judged on their own independent merits rather than their conformity to the supposed canon. With franchises under copyright though, it is the copyright holding entity which is, by people who "take fiction seriously" as you put it, granted a special privilege to determine the relative validity of different works written by different people. This isn't even a privilege given to the writers, as seen in this case where the privilege is assigned to the Paramount corporation; not to the original writers of Star Trek, nor even the writers of the show supposedly erased from the "canon". See also, the demotion of Extended Universe in the tiered canon of Star Wars by... who? George Lucas? No. The EU writers? No. By the corporation who bought the legal rights to Star Wars decades after most of that stuff was written. It's not fiction which you are taking seriously. It's copyright. Canon in fiction is an expression of territorialism from the entity owning the legal rights, not some sort of intrinsic attribute of the collection of stories.

by hx8 2y ago

croes 2y ago

And if the fans don’t like it they stop watching it. That’s how it works. Harassing people because they don’t like how it’s done is plain wrong. Sometimes you have to realize it’s not always to make existing fans happy but to try something new to get new fans. Otherwise is always the same in repeat.

big-green-man 2y ago
But they don't stop watching it, their identities are invested in it. There's sunk cost fallacy going on there. They don't want it to suck, they want it to keep getting better. And it doesn't. And they complain. But they keep watching anyway. I know a guy that watched every episode of discovery, complained how bad it was, then watched the next one. It didn't matter that it sucked, you can't miss knowing the canon! They're entirely captured by the corporations that produce this stuff. Their minds are trapped arguing over the validity of literal nonsense because it's profitable to some company for that to be the case.
- throwpoaster 2y ago
  Another way of saying this is that they share creative ownership with the corporation managing the commons, like open source software.
  - big-green-man 2y ago
    They don't share ownership of anything. The owners do whatever they want, then lip service the fandom after the fact, and the fandom takes it because they can't cut loose from their attachment. A die hard fan that won't drop something the minute it begins to be destroyed is a sucker for abuse, and their willingness to look past it afterwards is why the owners get away with it. And they'll do it again.
    - throwpoaster 2y ago
      If the fans stop paying attention it dies. The power to destroy something is ownership.
  - lupusreal 2y ago
    On the contrary, if they assign importance to "canon" they are putting the corporation on a pedestal, as it is the corporation which defines the canon.

throwpoaster 2y ago

> It sounds like you don't take fiction seriously, and are showing contempt for people that do. Investing time in fiction has been shown to increase empathy. Potentially causal.

lupusreal 2y ago

You can take fiction seriously without treating it as representing some sort of quasireality from which coherency across decades of story telling from multiple generations of story tellers is expected. Two story tellers having contradictory accounts of what happens with a fictional character shouldn't cause distress or consternation to people who enjoy stories about that character; people who enjoy fiction should be able to take that in stride. The whole premise of a "canon" to fiction is actually an artifact of the legal construct of copyright; with folk stories which exist outside of copyright the premise of a consistent canon isn't talked about because anybody can make their own story, many people have, and everybody accepts that the stories are judged on their own independent merits rather than their conformity to the supposed canon. With franchises under copyright though, it is the copyright holding entity which is, by people who "take fiction seriously" as you put it, granted a special privilege to determine the relative validity of different works written by different people. This isn't even a privilege given to the writers, as seen in this case where the privilege is assigned to the Paramount corporation; not to the original writers of Star Trek, nor even the writers of the show supposedly erased from the "canon". See also, the demotion of Extended Universe in the tiered canon of Star Wars by... who? George Lucas? No. The EU writers? No. By the corporation who bought the legal rights to Star Wars decades after most of that stuff was written. It's not fiction which you are taking seriously. It's copyright. Canon in fiction is an expression of territorialism from the entity owning the legal rights, not some sort of intrinsic attribute of the collection of stories.