Saturday, 5 November 2022

The Problem With Canon

quote [ 'Rings of Power' and 'Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' did the impossible, adapting behemoth pieces of IP without pissing off fans. (For the most part.) Turns out, Star Wars and the MCU have much to learn. ]

Said baby this not canon
[SFW] [tv & movies] [+3 Interesting]
[by ScoobySnacks@5:09amGMT]

Comments

stv179 said @ 5:41am GMT on 5th Nov
The reference to the way classical theater plays are constantly reinterpreted shows one important thing - the change that happens when copyright ends ..
EvilNinjaX24 said @ 8:05am GMT on 5th Nov
"Rings of Power" pissed off a LOT of Tolkein fans - its blatant disregard for many things Tolkein himself wrote on, in small or large fashion, was incredibly off-putting. Now, I enjoyed the show, but I had to constantly remind myself to let the canon go, and it was a struggle. I'm not one of those vociferous "fans" that go waaaay overboard with their criticisms, but their loudness and toxicity doesn't invalidate many of their concerns.

Star Wars (for the most part) has respected its canon, at least with regards to the prequels and tv shows (the sequels are... not something I care to think about). The MCU has created its own canon, obviously separated from the comics, and I don't get what the author of this article gets from pulling those properties in, aside from clicks.

(Strange New Worlds, though, is AWESOME, and it's very respectful toward the canon without adhering 100% to it.)
ooo[......7 said @ 12:57am GMT on 8th Nov
I think LOTR ROP pissed off a lot of the LOUD fans on the internet, however everyone I've spoken to in person has been quite satisfied and is excited for the future of the series.

Myself included.
EvilNinjaX24 said @ 5:33am GMT on 9th Nov [Score:1 Good]
I'm more curious than excited for the future, but I'm going to be watching regardless (unless it gets so egregiously off-putting that I can't enjoy it for what it is anymore).
ooo[......7 said @ 6:36pm GMT on 9th Nov [Score:1 Underrated]
I mean, did you watch GOT all the way through? If so, I think you can handle almost anything.
EvilNinjaX24 said @ 5:33am GMT on 10th Nov
That's fair. That being said, I didn't have the same attachment to GoT that I do to LotR.
TimmoW said @ 1:34am GMT on 8th Nov
There's certainly a loud chunk of angry internetters re: LOTR. I was disappointed personally, but not angry. I just find Amazon's grand fantasy concent actually looks off-putting. There's a little too much "look at how much we can 3d print" into the sets and costumes. Sometimes it looks great, but sometimes you end up with armor that looks like it's made of cardboard. Wheel of Time had a similar thing.
cb361 said @ 10:44am GMT on 5th Nov
Canon is difficult, and goes to the heart of storytelling in somebody elses’s settings.

One the one hand, it’s just a story. Who cares what a writer adds to a setting, so long as it’s a good story. On the other hand, it’s not just a story. A fictional landscape and history and characters are real in our heads, even when we know they’re not. Fry’s dog Seymour never existed, but thousands of real people have suffered and empathised with him, so in way, he is real. If you break that, people do notice.

I think that writers are not morally constrained to observe canon, but if they’re not going to, what’s the point? If the story they want to tell doesn’t gel with canon, they should be making their own IP. Laziness or commercial desire to piggyback onto an existing fan base aren’t good enough reasons.

Writers can do amazing things, working within canon. I like to imagine an alternative timeline in which a really good SF writer, like J. Michael Straczynski wrote the Star Wars prequels. Instead of the plodding, predictable story of Anakin Skywalker’s fall, I think JMS would have given us something that mattered.

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