Canon is kayfabe for writers
Thursday, September 7, 2023 (updated 19 hours later)
Comments: 23 (latest 4 days later)
Tagged: canon, kayfabe, star trek, star wars, doctor who, myst
Chatting about "canon" yesterday a few days ago:
[...] But one of the things I love about Doctor Who is that, if you mention canon to it, it just laughs. And not a small laugh! A "Valentine Dyall as the Black Guardian" laugh. NYA-HAHA. NYAAAAA-HAHAHAH!!! -- @SJohnRoss, Sept 3
I think it’s fair to say that Star Wars and Star Trek are both happily standing on top of smoldering craters labelled “canon”. They took very different paths to get there, with very different initial intentions — whereas Doctor Who has just meandered amiably for years. But the end result has converged on “canon what canon”, no matter how many wikis people write. -- @zarfeblong, Sept 3
Reflecting dans les escaliers, I want to take that further.
Canon isn't a straitjacket; it's a game. That's why it's fun! We're not here to watch writers be consistent. We're here to watch writers come up with awesome moves in the game of consistency.
It's kayfabe! It's exactly kayfabe. The writers are selling us a meta-story that their story conforms to a great and glorious master plan, a beautiful aperiodic crystal of harmony. And we pretend to buy it -- even though we know the writers are making it up as they go. They've been making it up as they go for sixty years. (For the DC and Marvel (multi-)verses(-es), even longer.) We know perfectly well that the story will change the next time someone has a better idea, and we're fine with that. But we are united in the pretense.
There was a time, oh, call it the early 1990s, when you could at least assert that Star Wars had a single canon, and Star Trek had a single canon, and Doctor Who had a single canon. You had to wave your hands at various "well-known" retcons and push a lot of novels into the semicanonical hinterlands. But it was an observable position.
(Coincidence or not: this was the very beginning of Internet fannish activity -- the Usenet era. You could observe a community consensus because there was a single online community for each fandom: rec.arts.startrek, rec.arts.drwho, and so on.)
Then... more stuff happened. Doctor Who spun off a novel line that exploded into its own meta-drama of competing visions. Star Wars tried to codify a universal standard of canonicity levels, which worked as well as every other universal standard. Star Trek, late to the party, toyed hesitantly with retcons-in-time.
Fandom, now fractionating on the Web, followed along with sage nods.
But bigger moves were in the air. Star Wars prepped for its third trilogy by rebooting its canon levels (2014), exiling the "Expanded Universe" in favor of a grand unified timeline. (Including Clone Wars and Rebels, which were happily importing all the EU's best plotlines, ssh don't tell.) Star Trek pulled off the Kelvin Trick (2009): a reboot with on-screen temporal retcon and Leonard Nimoy for its nihil obstat.
As I noted above, Doctor Who took a gentler approach. Its 2005 relaunch was deferentially in-canon with the early show, adding only the backdrop of the Great Time War from the interregnum novels. (This was certainly a reaction to the 1996 TV movie: everybody agreed that whatever canon was, that wasn't it.) However, New Who was revolutionary in its own way. Russell T. Davies reconceptualized the roles of Companion and Doctor. Steven Moffat dug into the show's roots as a story about stories (the TARDIS is really a genre-travel device) and cajoled fans into accepting that all of the Doctor's stories could be real.
The point is, fans ate this stuff up. And the only thing fans love more than one universal consistent continuity is a new universal consistent continuity every couple of years. Call it the Lesson of Infinite Crisis.
With that assurance, the writers were off the leash. Star Wars now has half a dozen alt-quels and TV shows (I haven't remotely caught up). Are they consistent with each other or the mainline films? Who cares? Star Trek: same deal, same answer. And honestly the Fugitive Doctor is the best thing that's happened to Doctor Who since River Song: characters that can walk in on any episode, no explanation needed, and give the Doctor a much-needed kick in the ego.
Here's a lovely phrase from theater: Leonard Nimoy originated the role of Mr. Spock. Like Angela Lansbury's Mrs. Lovett, the character will always be associated with the actor -- but not owned. We can try out other takes. (Ethan Peck is the fourth adult Spock I've fanboyed, after Todd Haberkorn on Star Trek Continues.)
Sometimes we get an "explanation". Doctor Who enshrined "regeneration" so long ago that we've forgotten it was a continuity hack. Star Trek loves its temporal manipulation retcons. (I haven't caught up on SNW S2 either, but I hear rumors.) But again, this is kayfabe consistency. It's a performance. We're cheering a good performance. That doesn't mean we want to see the same moves again next year. Quite the opposite!
The only problem is that not all the fans have caught on. Or they're pretending not to. (Is that heel kayfabe? But it's not fun when it's directed at the writers, or at fellow fans either.)
I once heard a writer for a major multimedia franchise (not Star Wars) say "Wookieepedia is colonialist violence." It was a joke (and not intended to downplay the reality of colonialism, yes, I see your hand). But it gets at an element of fannish entitlement which is real and toxic. Collecting trivia in a wiki is fun. Browsing a wiki to catch a show's in-jokes is fun; that's how I watch Lower Decks. Searching a wiki for reasons to get angry at the writers is way down a bad road.
I could go on. Marvel's grand MCU plan splintered trying to keep Agents of Shield S1 synced up with The Winter Soldier's Hydra reveal. Myst Online's attempt to rationalize Myst and Riven into a contemporary timeline was left flat-footed when Myst Online died. (It's a delightfully non-toxic fandom, but people get too het up about trap books.)
In all cases, the lesson for showrunners was "Next time, just wing it and make it sound good." The lesson for fans is "Just relax and enjoy it." Call it the Lesson of the Satellite of Love; MST3K was way ahead of the curve on this.
And next time someone complains about canon inconsistency in your favorite show, gently rebuke them for breaking kayfabe. That'll take the starch out of their socks.
Comments from Mastodon
@zarfeblong
Bingo. I used to play the Who 'canon' game in the mid80s and it was a very reliable way to separate people I wanted to be friends with (the folk who understood the game) and the people I would run a mile from (the 'toxic fans'.)
@zarfeblong I have such mixed feelings about this I don't even know where to start. On the one hand I am FINE with multiple canons - I read fanfic! I watch adaptations that change stuff!
On the other hand I feel like this proliferation of "who cares" variants has completely destroyed the essence of multiple fandoms and have basically had to walk away from all the ones you mentioned.
@zarfeblong Without a sense that there's some actual idea at the core of it, something that can be discussed and debated, instead of everything changing on a whim, stories feel about as meaningful and memorable as playground makebelieve. Fun for the fifteen minutes you're doing it, then forgotten.
@hanakogames I’m sorry that those shows stopped being fun!
I feel like Star Trek, at least, has a strong *thematic* core which has nothing to do with a single “history of the Trek future” storyline.
It’s true that the newer shows have branched away from “the captain and his crew on a Federation quasi-military flagship”. But really I felt like Trek sucked that one dry that one in the 1990s. Trying to jam VOY and ENT into that old mold was a major reason those shows floundered.
@hanakogames I can’t make a similar argument for Star Wars. It’s a mess and it’s not my forte anyhow.
Doctor Who, well, saying the show is wildly inconsistent is the least surprising Doctor Who take, and that was already true in 1989.
@zarfeblong Yeah I have many more Feelings about star trek than the other two personally.
I think to some extent I'm happier with specific authorial territories being clearly set aside as their own thing. I do actually still watch Lower Decks. I don't feel like it's in the same universe as other shows even if it references them, but it feels internally consistent as a separate entity and fun in itself.
@zarfeblong (my other half immediately referenced Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman as an example of a nice little story with its own consistency not related to whatever sprawling general comics history is)
@hanakogames (Haven’t read that. I am very minimal in the comics.)
@zarfeblong @hanakogames I know I'm in the minority here, but I will always defend ENT as a noble attempt to remain true to Roddenberry's vision while expanding—and even violating—his initial concept in some worthwhile ways.
My tl;dr why ENT failed: They knew the series' finale from the get-go (establish the Federation) but got distracted with side-quests and ratings-hunts.
@_jimnelson_ @hanakogames I appreciate the attempt (and I’ve seen Disco S3 *and* most of Andromeda, so I know from “establish the Federation”) but I feel like the Enterprise writers just didn’t know how to write a show without saying “Shields down to forty percent”. Even before shields were invented.
Voyager was *also* a noble attempt (a crew with genuine divisions) but again, they just couldn’t get away from more-TNG-again.
@zarfeblong @_jimnelson_ I've never understood why Voyager ended up as mediocre as it did. The concept was good! (divided crew, dwindling resources, mounting pressures) I still want to lift it and rewrite it myself :D I think they just had a "no serialization, we're not DS9" rule. Alas.
Enterprise... noble concept but it felt like _no one_ was ever actually on board with it and they always badly wanted to write something else, whether that be the Temporal Cold War or the 9/11 Rift or whatever.
@zarfeblong This is a great concept/idea/lens to look at stories with!
@zarfeblong There's another layer to this. Eventually every fan has to treat all stories as stories, not historical documents. (We're all Galaxy Quest aliens.)
It's super important in games, because there's no boundary between the story (canon) and gameplay (non-canon). Did Arthur Dent really had to carefully balance the pile of his junk mail to get the babel fish?
It's the "can anyone die when you have a spare 1-Up" question. The canon is always loose.
@zarfeblong I agree with a lot of what you said. Canon is like the rules of an RPG, both a framework and a constraint. It's fun to see what you can do within its limits, and it's also fun to see how far you can bend it without breaking it. And I also agree that canon is both a mix of facts and thematic cores: it's why I think that The Orville is a better Star Trek series than Picard, despite not being a Trek series at all, because of how it embraces hope and wonder instead of just being grumpy.
@zarfeblong About Myst Online, I had an easier time with the fictional framing of the games and books than I had with Yeesha and the Bahro. Ever since the Book of Atrus, a lot of the tension in the series was about how much of the rules of the Art were true, and the responsibility you had to the Ages you visited; saying suddenly that none of the rules were real was a lot more like a core shift in the whole series than retconning details like trap books and spaceships.
@atrus @zarfeblong the Yeesha/Bahro arc always struck me as “we need an element of drama and grind” forced
@chucker @zarfeblong Also an excuse to break the rules of linking for gameplay reasons, like the Relto book or linking to the City from the City. It was a bit messy.
@atrus @chucker @zarfeblong *most* of Uru’s gameplay concessions are messy, and also annoyingly ham-handed in a way that makes for both bad new rules AND gameplay that’s still muddled AF. Worst of both worlds.
All that said, despite being quite possibly the *most* Galaxy Quest Alien member of the community, I’m all for the kayfabe approach to canon. Given that everything made by people is bound to be imperfect, I think the best we can hope for is coherency (<new thing> “feels like” <old thing>) rather than consistency (<new thing> slavishly adhered to every detail that <old thing> established).
Actually, thinking about it, the Thermians in Galaxy Quest are more in tune with the kayfabe than the Justin Long Crew. They managed to take a self-contradictory pile of source material and make a *functioning starship* out of it, while Long and his friends just argued about the inconsistencies.
@atrus I’m not sure the majority of Uru players had even read the novels, anyhow. I hadn’t at that point.
(I later read BoA and it left me cold. Sorry. :)
@zarfeblong It's fine. 😉 I liked the first two books but felt the third was rather underwhelming.
And a lot of that lore isn't even in the books, it came up on the mailing lists and forums talking to RAWA and so forth. Terminal D'nerd stuff.
Following up to myself:
I’ve been reading The Book of the Peace. Every time I think to look up a reference, I remember that the whole point of Faction Paradox canon is to be more chaotic and contradictory than any one reader (or writer) can comprehend.
That, my friends, is how to do it.
(Good stories too.)
@zarfeblong Comics got here too, but it was hilarious to watch them try to invent multiversal time travel variants and stuff.
Comic nerds take that stuff seriously enough that the writers catch flak for it constantly. In a story about a man that got bitten by a spider and fights a guy in a mask on a flying skateboard.