Growing up, people told me they'd read The Bible and I never thought too much of it. I assumed it was something everyone got around to doing. Like having sex or getting a driver's license. As an adult, I now realize not everyone has sex in their lives. And also, fewer have read The Bible.
I should specify: the Christian Bible, not the Star Trek: The Next Generation series bible <https://archive.org/details/star-trek-the-next-generation-bible>.
Personally, I think it's more important that Doctor Crusher can diagnose diseases at a glance, than יְחִי הַמֶּלֶךְ שְׁלֹמֹה, whatever that means.
The Bible is just a collection of books written in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. It's a collection of books and scrolls. Accounts and even just collections of letters from a couple of guys.
What collections of turn-of-the-Anno Domini writings are and aren't in The Bible isn't a matter of some unified history with one authority over them. It was a system of shared, hand-written texts that would have yearned for the anarchic underground zine resources of the late 20th Century.
A Bible–the bible most of us think of as The Bible–wasn't formed until, I think 1546 and the Council of Trent . And look, Orthodox Christians, Mormons, and Latter Day saints all have their own take. Mostly because those later two–or should I say "Latter Two"--didn't see anything particularly unique or magical about 1546. As long as their god may deign to speak, The Bible is a living document.
The christian Bible itself takes text from Judaism's Tanakh and canons of both Judaism and Christianity have had parts incorporated into the Muslim canon (but not the Quran).
And we're talking about texts in Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew. Translated and retranslated and if you're not familiar with the Revised Standard Version explicitly translating arsenokoitai as "homosexuality" instead of, well, any of the other things it could have translated to. And that was embraced by people with no opinions on Greek translations so it would condemn a behavior it didn't properly condemn before. Y'know, "Good Bible," as it might be called in Oceania.
And without being all, "the gulf between each human experience is spanned by the most delicate, but most important strands of silk," up in here, language translation is more important than that. I was looking up the Chinese word for "setting" the other day and prepare to lo and behold with an equal amount of sarcasm: "setting" can mean a lot of things and there's no easy, 1:1 translation. Theological concepts might just surpass "how do you prepare a fine dining table in the place and time this story occurs" and "is that phaser in a state to kill or stun me" in terms of complexity.
I want to say it explicitly: I don't think I know anyone who has ever read The Bible. There have maybe been some people who've read The Bible (Gutenberg's Version) or some other author's interpretation–King James I and IV, I'm sure was a big fan of Aramaic–okay, actually it looks like he was a Scotch King who wasn't fond of Scotch--but those people are no more credible to me than someone who says they've "read Dracula" when they may have seen Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) or Dracula 2000 (2000).
Imagine Swedish Chef having a euphoric religious vision while remixing a Rosetta Stone salad of ancient middle-eastern languages. Every 15 centuries one of a variety of compelling men running institutions of child sexual assault say 'when,.' They slap the flash frame of that salad into a book, ship it, and everyone who buys it demands other people live their lives by its texts according to what *THEY* think Paul *REALLY* meant when he (allegedly) wrote those letters to the Ephesians.
"Bible" is just a word for authoritative texts and the title of this work is "canon," so let's pause a bit and imagine where I'm going with this.
<5 second pause with music if this is a video. A few line breaks if it's not>>
If you didn't say Star Trek…you should have said "Star Trek."
So let's talk about Star Trek canon. Canon is the set of works that are referenced when making more works. Canon is also the foundation of interacting within a concept. "Just and Unjust Wars" might be in my personal canon of books about warfare, "VanVelding's War Canon."
When folks discuss their Christian faith, The Christian Bible–plus or minus that person's medications–is their canon.
Nerds like to think canon is the–stupid nerds.
Stupid nerds like to think that canon is the continuous set of rules by which a fictional universe ticks, even when we're not witnessing it. A "reality," of its own which none the less structures itself by conventions of story and has slick, informative dialog.
The canons of Star Trek include Romulan Ale being illegal, you can't beam through shields, and genetic engineering being illegal in The Federation. Except the embargo was dropped, subspace transporters exist, and The Federation created Darwin Station for genetic engineering experiments.
"Canon" is which of those things writers chose to accept or ignore when writing new episodes. Roman Ale becomes illegal again in Star Trek: Nemesis, no one ever uses subspace transporters despite them being really, really useful, and we all pretend the episode, "Unnatural Selection," never happened.
My personal canon–not headcanon–of Star Trek is The Original Series (TOS), TNG, DS9, most of VOY, Picard (PIC), about half of Strange New Worlds, and Lower Decks. Now that's not what I consider "canon"; a big corporation named Paramount decides that. It's just that Star Trek I see and reference when I'm talking about Star Trek. Even then, it's only the parts that I remember.
If I were to create some original Star Trek of my own, or even idly imagine some, I use a different headcannon, though I'd prefer "workname Star Trek Canon." The RPG I ran uses what I'd term USS Taiwan Star Trek Canon. The first nine films, TOS, TNG, DS9, most of Voyager, and episodes of Enterprise with Andorians in them. Nemesis is in-universe propaganda.
What my headcannons are not is me dictating what does and doesn't "count as Star Trek." I could not imagine a less useful distinction, and I already consider canon-canon as a fairly useless distinction. If I like what they're writing, if what they're writing makes the "watching Star Trek" part of my brain happy, then they're doing good. Otherwise, I'll watch something else.
A lot of folks can't distinguish between that thing I said about fictional worlds being a contiguous set of rules by which a fictional world, etc. etc. and their own headcanons. Both are inventions, surely, and a person's reckoning of fictional clockwork does usually happen in that person's head, but the internal contradictions which plague real canon also plague headcanon.
The difference is literally just some legal stuff. That difference can land you in court, but aside from a few skills and random trivia, neither canon possesses a stronger metaphysical link to the contiguous etc. etc. of a fictional world than the other, because that world doesn't exist.
The Star Wars sequels didn't ruin Luke Skywalker's character; it could have been anything until they wrote it. The Boys finale didn't mess up Homelander's–let me suppress a gag and take a drink here–"power scaling"; that's literally how Homelander's powers work. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds isn't fanfiction, because it's literally canon.
In The Boys, we have Sage. The Boys is a show about a world where a corporation can make super-people, "supes," and a band of guys–the titular boys–tries to kill them. Sage is introduced in the fourth season as the smartest person alive. She decides to work with Homelander because she wants to foment an apocalyptic war between supes and non-supes because her grandma died and no one would listen to kid Sage about how to save her. And also so she can read forever because smart people love reading.
Homelander is the series villain, a guy who managed to become corrupted by having half of Superman's power, and tries to fill a big void inside of himself with that power, but only manages to create a narcissistic storm around himself. When that storm blows apart Homelander's plan, Sage saunters up and reveals she fixed everything at the last minute because writing intelligent characters is all about making sure they say, "Yes, this was all according to my intricate plan."
Eventually, Homelander wants to live forever, Sage thinks that's bad, and she tries to stop him. She's ultimately foiled when another character does a heel-heel turn, gets all sentimental, and gives Homelander the magic potion that lets him live forever.
It turns out, the character with "super-empathy" written on her official superhuman profile couldn't predict a moment of sentiment. In fact, she claims she can't understand emotions well at all.
She eventually gives up on being smart and stands in a magic ray to get rid of her superpowers, which I have to remind you, were "recovering traumatic brain injury" and "being smart, but not too smart to stand in magic rays that make you stupid."
So why did she not see that heel-heel turn coming? Why did she abandon her plan to foment war? Why would she work for a murdering narcissist when the one thing she doesn't understand is people's emotions? Why did she give up her powers?
There are some possible explanations. She did say that the guy who turned on her was hard for her to read. It's not an insane thought that some folks are harder to emotionally read. And he was an eighty year-old popsicle with tons of experience working with supes and in emotional tumult himself. That's unpredictable in a way that a simple, murdering narcissist isn't.
And, hey, her plan to start a war was emotional and ultimately self-defeating. And her first words when she loses her powers are that her brain is quiet, when the goal of the apocalypse she planned was quiet. And it was a time-efficient way to test the magical ray that makes you stupid.
Or as an alternative to all of that, maybe she was pooping one time and completely rethought her life simply by reviewing her experiences and questioning her previous assumptions.
All of those things could be true, but none of them matter. None of them change canon. None of them are canon, no matter how well or how poorly you think they fit. Firstly, because they aren't in the canon of The Boys and also because they aren't making any more The Boys (they are making a prequel series, but who cares).
"There's no reason to consider past works when you're not making more works," is a simplistic answer which allows me to wrap this up and to throw a little more contempt at people who argue over things like canon.
Except that I did start this by talking about The Christian Bible, a canon that has seen very few modern installments. And while I don't want to disregard the works of Joseph Smith and a (presumed) modern Catholic academia, the canonicity of The Christian Bible matters a lot to Christians.
You can't insist The Monster at the End of This Book, is Biblical canon, no matter how harrowing you find The Book of Revelation and there's no one writing The Book of Revelations II who's including Grover.
No, canonicity is also the informal, collective reckoning of what the work says and, if it says that, what we must do. If one were to hoist a boxed set of Supernatural over one's head (perhaps with the assistance of a powered exoskeleton), and proclaim it was a model for living one's life or divinely inspired, they'd be expected to occasionally slay a vampire, exercise a ghost, or watch their girlfriend get murdered. They'd definitely need to square the fate of Chuck with a definition of "divinely inspired."
It's much easier for me to diminish the ideological value of The Boys, than it is for me to look at all those times Captain Pike turns to camera for a moralizing speech and dismiss the ideological value of Star Trek. Hoisting the collective canon of Trek above your heads (perhaps with the assistance of a friendly gravity well) is far more credible than Supernatural, putting it somewhere between The Boys and The Christian Bible in order of determining the importance of this form of canonicity.
But then, there's a non-zero result for conservative star trek fans on DuckDuckGo <<https://duckduckgo.com/?q=conservative+star+trek+fans>>. There are conservative themes and values in Star Trek, but most of those values are progressive. While we might all agree that Enterprise is a ship, the…"public canon" is far more subjective.
Insomuch as controlling the narrative of Christ is simply an effort to jockey for power and tell other–presumably lesser–people how to live their lives, declaring headcanon to be personal canon in a robe of objective canon is simply another way to position one's subjective, personal views as an objective reality others have already accepted.
Argumentum ad populum for a completely fabricated "populum."
-Nerds arguing about canon is dumb.
-Nerds saying X or Y isn't canon is not so much about the facts of a story, but about their attempt influence / engage in the creation of a public canon.
-Maybe if your reckoning for how a story turns and ends is different than what Hollywood has made, you should make your own, canon. A "beta canon" if you will.
So canon is irrelevant for anyone but Star Trek writers and the layperson discussion about canon is itself pathetic social jockeying for a narrative too large for anyone to ride.But it seems like we have to dig into this in part two.
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