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Comment by lupusreal | Hacker News Reader

"Canon" makes sense in the context of religious documents where adherents believe some documents to represent reality and others not. But in the context of works recognized by all who care to be fiction, its just a senseless thing for internet quibbling. "This fiction is more valid than that fiction, because the legal entity presently holding the copyright says so." Get a grip.

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All TV series have bibles. For the sake of continuity, writers follow it.

https://www.startrek.com/news/a-look-inside-star-trek-series...

It makes sense to consider a set of interlocking bibles a canon.

The fans are just using industry terms (they're that into their fandom!), not inventing something new for the sake of "Internet quibbling."

"Content is king!"

Canon is a platform for fiction creation.

Not all fiction is equivalent. When you are actively world building making explicit revisions is useful for those trying to follow along. If you'd prefer a different word you should say so.

Somehow the people had less pf a problem with the Klingon change between TOS and TNG.

Or that the things that happened in one episode had little impact on the next.

As the canon grows, people care more about it. In the US at least.

Doctor Who doesn't worry about this.

The thing is, Trek canon was never that rigid or coherent to begin with, even within individual series.

I think that’s because the change wasn’t between TOS and TNG. It was between TOS series and TOS films; new style Klingons were in Star Trek 3 (1984) and Star Trek 4 (1986) before TNG started.

Imagine for the sake of argument TOS and TNG are 99% aligned on storytelling and need a patch to make the 1% agree, and that patch is provided in TNG retroactively.

Versus a new show comes along that is 20% aligned and would need an 80% patch to bring it into alignment.

As an executive trying to revitalize a property where fans are complaining about lack of alignment, do you understand why you might just erase the 20% rather than create 80% more of an otherwise-failed project?

>As an executive trying to revitalize a property where fans are complaining about lack of alignment, do you understand why you might just erase the 20% rather than create 80% more of an otherwise-failed project?

If you're an executive, you understand that the purpose of these properties is to make money. Discovery makes money. It has fans. It sells merchandise. You don't erase money because of the rancor of some pedantic nerds, most people do not care.

But it got canceled.

Cancellation is not the same as "erasure from canon." Lot of popular shows get cancelled all the time - Lower Decks got cancelled as well. Despite the narrative, Discovery was popular. It was a success.

But Discovery got both cancelled and deleted.

It was not "deleted" in any sense I'm aware of.

Discovery is still canon. The premise of this thread is a conspiracy theory which is not factual. Star Trek Discovery is still a part of the Star Trek franchise. You can still purchase official Discovery memorabilia. You can still stream it. It has an official Blu-ray release.

You can still watch it on Paramount+

if you want to build a coherent storyline across multiple media releases, you have to be able to recognize mistakes/missteps and be able to disavow them from what future releases will build on top of

Some fans react in the same way that some religious people react to those they consider heretics.

People value good stories, correct.

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.

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.

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.

Another way of saying this is that they share creative ownership with the corporation managing the commons, like open source software.

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.

If the fans stop paying attention it dies. The power to destroy something is ownership.

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.

> 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.

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.

What do you mean "reality"? Religious dogma is largely about the supernatural, not history.

I don’t think you understand what canon is if you think that. Canon is simply internally consistent story telling.

It’s agreeing that A follows B and C follows B, etc. It’s agreeing that “A” and “a” are two forms of the same thing, and make the same vowel sound. You run into trouble when you say “A” makes a “k” sound and the lowercase of “a” is “w”.

Canon is an imagination tool that allows consistent storytelling that increases in complexity and value over time.

"Darth Vader put on the One Ring and told Frodo to go back to Endor" is not going to be something that fans take seriously enough to make economically viable.

Edit: someone prove me wrong, please.

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