Fanon versus Canon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_issues_with_fan_fiction#...

>Also noteworthy is the series of Darkover anthologies published by Marion Zimmer Bradley, beginning in 1980, consisting largely of fan fiction extended into her canon. These books led to a much talked about controversy. Bradley read something in a fan story that meshed well with a Darkover book she was currently writing, so she wrote the fan author, Jean Lamb, offering her "a sum and a dedication for all rights to the text." In a 1991 Usenet post, Jean continued, "I attempted at that point to _very politely_ negotiate a better deal. I was told that I had better take what I was offered, that much better authors than I had not been paid as much (we're talking a few hundred dollars here) and had gotten the same sort of 'credit' (this was in the summer of 1992)...a few months later I received a letter from Ms. Bradley's lawyer threatening me with a suit."[52] After Bradley's death, more information has come out supporting the fan's story.[53]

>The rumor, however, was that Bradley had a skirmish with a fan who claimed authorship of a book identical to one Bradley had published and accused Bradley of "stealing" the idea, and the resultant lawsuit cost Bradley a book. Either way, her attorney advised her against reading fan fiction of her work. Versions of this incident are credited by many to have led to a "zero tolerance" policy on the part of a number of other professional authors, including Andre Norton, and David Weber.

The only author/fan collaborative project I'm closely familiar with, Homestuck/Paradox Space/Homestuck 2.0, did not... entirely... dissolve into recriminations and lawsuits, but was not terribly profitable.

They had other children.

For the sun part, this probably refers to Genesis 1:3 "let there be light" and dividing day from night, and Genesis 1:16 "And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night" and often in between there's "morning and evening". The way this happens after the fourth day is with the sun and moon lights.

I wasn't there at the time, but I assume reality pre-day four was running prior to OpenGL 2.4 and was using global illumination, and then afterwards switched to RealEngine 4, probably. Just a guess.

Humans being created before and after animals likely refers to Genesis 1:26 and 2:19. That is a bit curious, agreed. The way I take it, since Genesis 2:4-29 happened after the 7th day, is something like "hold up, let's go back to those days when plants, animals, and humans were created, and get slightly more specific about it.

The origin story in the Bible is short on specifics, so it leads to a lot of interesting fan theories, and divides many of the staunchest fans. "These are literal days here" "no, these are phases, a day could be any length of time, the sun wasn't even there yet" and so on, as if that was the main point of the passages, when it isn't.

To be pedantic, the creation of the first day was light and darkness. The fourth day was the things that emit light: the sun, stars, and moon. I mean, it's still somewhat weird because it seems like it's inventing effect before cause, but the sun is very clearly not being invented on the first day.

The more fun contradiction is that Jesus' genealogy from David is given twice... and both of them are completely different.

The term largely descends from its use in Christian scriptural politics, where early church councils had to pick which documents were going to be considered true and the basis of their faith and which weren't. In this case, deciding on a canon of scriptures was important because it defined their religious teachings and what it meant to call yourself a Christian.

...but really, I come at it from a fan works perspective, and I just think it's useful to at least know how you're diverging from the shared understanding when you create something. Even your Truce at Bakura example relates to there being a Star Wars canon, it's just that we can accept that there's nested variants of it -- the original movies always holding primacy, and then either layering Legends or the Disney properties on top of it. Having no concept of a Star Wars canon at all would leave us with something like Star Wars: Visions, where "Star Wars" is more of a vibe that stories are inspired by than a setting that stories happen in.

Suppose Rowling said in an interview that, oh yeah, BTW, Ron Weasley was actually descended from King Arthur. I'd argue that no, he's not. If he was, she should've said so when she had the chance to make it, well, canon. Now, if she wrote another Harry Potter universe where Ron's great^20th grandpa was Art, fine! She just hadn't gotten around to that part of the story yet, and now she has. It's now canon. But until then, it's just chit-chat.

For a real-world analogy, in American courts where 2 parties are arguing about how to interpret the words in a contract, judges tend to rule against the party who wrote the contract. After all, if their intention at the time they wrote it was the same as it was while they're debating in court, they should have phrased it that way.

This runs headlong into the whole idea of textual criticism and the death of the author. If the author can have new ideas about a work which supersede someone else's head canon, they can undo a whole academic treatise with a magisterial wave of the hand, and that's unsupportable. Academia must be allowed to exist, which means the text stands alone.

More simply: The academic is working with a specific text, not a text and whatever random ancillary material the author crapped out years or decades later. Their thesis is, therefore, not invalidated by that paratext and superfluous commentary.

Imagine my amusement when it was said by somebody I know!

Yes, but do you see how this question has a fundamentally different nature to it from the questions about Captain Kirk? The answer to “what were Richard III’s motives”, in some sense, is tied to some actual historical person, or our understanding of that person. We may find new historical evidence that sways our opinion one way or another, but that evidence either exists or it does not, it cannot be created.

Douglas Adams talks about these kinds of questions about fiction, like, “What kind of Apple Mac did Arthur Dent have?”

https://douglasadams.com/cgi-bin/mboard/info/dnathread.cgi?1...

> So what you're doing if you ask me what sort of computer Arthur Dent had is 'please would you make up a story for me which has to do with what sort of computer Arthur had'.

> ...

> So you see the problem? "What kind of Apple Mac did Arthur Dent have?" is a completely unanswerable question.

Whereas if we were talking about a real person like Richard III, the questions often have answers, even if we don’t know them. I don’t think that this is some detail to gloss over—if you want to make the case that the questions about real people have the same nature as questions about fictional people, then I think you would have to support that case very carefully. Like, if we are arguing along those lines, then we can talk about George Washington cutting down the cherry tree as fact, because George Washington’s relationship to an actual historical person is increasingly incidental.

I’m not saying that you can’t argue along those lines, just that this kind of argument doesn’t crop up by chance, and isn’t made by the article.

> This feels reasonable to me. "We know facts X and Y", is true. "As such, Z is what we think explains X and Y" can be convincing, but is also inherently speculation.

This is true for history, but fiction works differently.