"I heard a rapper once say there's a message in everything."
-Piebald, "Sex Sells and (Unfortunately) I'm Buying"
-Piebald, "Sex Sells and (Unfortunately) I'm Buying"
So canon isn't just the technical body of work creators reference when making new work. It's also the blobby circle of that work which the public draws from when referencing it.
Behold. A canon.
What these things mean–Star Trek, Christianity, The Boys–is determined by how it's discussed and treated by us. And also a few hundred thousand bots run by marketing companies and hate campaigns.
But let's pretend we're engaging in an internet that's only terminal and not dead yet. An internet where people read things that other people want to read (I've got personal stock in that premise).
The 1997 film Starship Troopers is today lauded as a satire of fascism. When I watched it in 1997, it was a messy, flat, action film with some boobs and bugs in it. More funny than actiony, and certainly not cerebral.
I don't know if "it's a satire, bro" is as contemptible as, "it's a prank, bro," or whether Paul Verhoeven really wanted to make a satire, but at the end of the day, if you need cliff notes to tell people your satire is a satire, it's not a good satire.
But, uh, thanks for stopping the fascism, Paul.
We get together, we talk about things, and in so doing create a less-than-rigrous social canon. Like all the folks defending the artistic merit of a movie they've never seen because of an internet factoid, not all of that talk is based on firsthand experience, personal consideration, or even honest opinion.
Consider these two exhibits of this socially-constructed canon. The Scylla and Charybdis of bad Star Trek takes:
Let's do the first skeet first. It's about the 2026 Wuthering Heights film, but that commbadge in the profile picture lets me loop it in here.
The faithfulness of an adaptation doesn't have to be important to you. You're a free person. How you interact with media is your choice. Tilt your head back, relax your throat, and swallow as much content as the youtubes can pipe down there.
On behalf of the rest of us, who do not see the world as a series of amorphous, undefined shapes which randomly coalesce into pleasing shapes and sounds, I'd like to say a piece.
Words mean things. It's their primary purpose. All these loops and lines you're looking at are linked with ideas in the reader's head. Decoding them and encoding them is a way that we smelly, mean, beautiful apes connect with one another.
You say, "I love you," and it means something to the recipient. You say, "I'm going to the store for cigarettes," and you're saying something else.
I don't know if "it's a satire, bro" is as contemptible as, "it's a prank, bro," or whether Paul Verhoeven really wanted to make a satire, but at the end of the day, if you need cliff notes to tell people your satire is a satire, it's not a good satire.
But, uh, thanks for stopping the fascism, Paul.
We get together, we talk about things, and in so doing create a less-than-rigrous social canon. Like all the folks defending the artistic merit of a movie they've never seen because of an internet factoid, not all of that talk is based on firsthand experience, personal consideration, or even honest opinion.
Consider these two exhibits of this socially-constructed canon. The Scylla and Charybdis of bad Star Trek takes:
Let's do the first skeet first. It's about the 2026 Wuthering Heights film, but that commbadge in the profile picture lets me loop it in here.
The faithfulness of an adaptation doesn't have to be important to you. You're a free person. How you interact with media is your choice. Tilt your head back, relax your throat, and swallow as much content as the youtubes can pipe down there.
On behalf of the rest of us, who do not see the world as a series of amorphous, undefined shapes which randomly coalesce into pleasing shapes and sounds, I'd like to say a piece.
Words mean things. It's their primary purpose. All these loops and lines you're looking at are linked with ideas in the reader's head. Decoding them and encoding them is a way that we smelly, mean, beautiful apes connect with one another.
You say, "I love you," and it means something to the recipient. You say, "I'm going to the store for cigarettes," and you're saying something else.
If you say, "this movie is based on the novel Wuthering Heights" or "this is a Star Trek show," and what you deliver isn't based on Wuthering Heights or Star Trek, then you're either a fool or a liar.
I'm not picky: 2007's Beowulf was about the story that would make the epic poem. John Gardner's 1971 novel Grendel is an existential story about the adventure from Grendel's point of view. It goes to some lengths to include things from the original poem which didn't involve Grendel.
We don't need to do fidelity for the sake of fidelity. Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey doesn't include the "Nobody" bit with the cyclops. That's fine.
When you're pitching "like X, but Y," knock yourself out. But if you're pitching "X," it better damned well be "X." What that is is determined by the social canon of X and the very literal existing canon of X.
The story is not the merch. It's not the Victorian dresses and the Starfleet delta. Those are just symbols. They mean nothing without context. The only symbol people are drawn to without context is the Cool S:
People like those symbols because they came from something with meaning. Because it affects them. Good art, even commercial art, is a way for us to touch each other and we're touched by good art.
You can't simply collect the symbols, create something without the meaning, and then expect people to connect with it.
If we circle back around to our religious analogy, that's idolatry. Worshipping the iconography instead of actual god. Wielding a cross and shouting the Almighty's name for your own power. Claiming to "give unto Caesar" while pushing a button that annihilates the poor and meek.
Clearly, our collective interpretation of media isn't as critical as bombing the Middle East. Paul Verhoeven can't make a satire sharp enough to make us stop bombing random Iraqis/Afghanis/Iranians/Yemenis/throw a fucking dart.
But the stories we tell, and the stories we tell each other about them, matter. The stories that affect us, shape us. That's why we tell them. Stories let us understand other people's perspectives. They let us answer questions with our best selves before we ever need to answer it in our lives. They surprise us with possibilities and when you empathize with a character, there's a human truth in it that you, and other people, connect with.
How we talk about them–if we talk about them–who talks about them–changes those stories. Those discussions hinge on those symbols, not on their own, with their meanings. On either side of a page or a screen, there's two contexts; one is the story itself which creates the symbols and the other is our social context that those symbols are poured into. Some slide off into a gutter, but some find their own crack in the mortar and burrow into our collective foundations.
They're important and laughing their value off as mere "canon" disregards that.
Look, I'm a big disregarder of canon.
Imagine someone reads the Odyssey for the first time. They've read the Illiad. They've read Ovid's Metamorphoses. They quickly put it down. They feel Posideon has simply been given too much power. He's a god of the sea and sometimes, horses. Wind and rain are phenomenon of the sun. "It should be Helios and the Anemoi who are interrupting Odysseus's journey," they say. "It's not canonical."
I've said it before, but you could take out the Klingons, the Vulcans, the Federation, ships named Enterprise, Starfleet, warp drives, shields, subspace, and transporters and still make a good Star Trek.
So, circling back to this number two–
–back on track, this post is about Star Trek: Voyager's Vidiians. The Vidiians are Delta Quadrant natives and they have a chronic illness called The Phage. It forces them to raid others for organs. Real moral dilemma stuff.
At one point, I think they had an organ transporter and beamed Neelix's lungs out of him. Then the crew had to decide whether they'd chase the organ stealers or let Neelix live the rest of his life nearly immobile in sickbay with holographic lungs.
I don't remember them all, but the Vidiian episodes I saw were generally interesting. And that's good. The duty is to the story. If the writers don't give a flip about cloning, then it's not canon to this episode. Hope you enjoy the episode.
Occasionally, a show tries to trade on its canon. That's great. Those first four seasons of Doctor Who's second run did a great job of running minor threads through each season that were then paid off in the finale. No one was happier than me to see recurring guest stars on Deep Space Nine. It's a nice little bonus.
But those stories all stood on their own. Each episode featured people with (presumed) deep histories and lives which existed before that story and (presumably) would continue afterwards. So whether it was Dr. Crusher's longtime friend Dalen Quaice or her own son Wesley visiting from Starfleet Academy, those intersections with histories outside of our story were established, even if they were established in earlier episodes.
Canon be damned, the story tells you the information you need. And if it conflicts with the information from another story, fuck it. Tell a good story.
Now, things should be consistent within a story. I brought up Doctor Who before so I could I look at it now, but with disgust:
If your story is one episode in a carton of twenty-six stories made every year, that story should stand alone. If your story is one story that's ten episodes long, those ten should stand on their own and have a consistency between them.
Saying, "The Viidians could've been cured with the transporter," is like saying "Jack could have fit on the door." It's pithy. It ignores the point of the story. And it's just plain wrong.
It's supposed to be some clever gotcha that plays well with people who've forgotten or never seen that episode of Voyager. If people are going to lie about TV shows for clout, why are we even bothering to fight AI? The difference isn't that big between a machine that fakes understanding and a human that just doesn't care. If we're just turning a big crank to make slop, why even give a fuck which philosophical zombie is turning it?
Look, stories matter. They say things that have meaning to us. That touch us, all of us, in different ways. A story doesn't have to be good to do that; it just has to matter to you. And whether someone has the right number of pips on their collar or forgets they have a cybernetic heart, it doesn't matter if the story affects you.
And when someone talks about that story, or looks inside themselves to create something more for that story, I hope they're being honest about it. I hope they see the same things in it you do.
And most of all, I hope they fucking give a shit. Because that apathy over those human things that matter to us, as humans, is the real villain of this piece.
I'm not picky: 2007's Beowulf was about the story that would make the epic poem. John Gardner's 1971 novel Grendel is an existential story about the adventure from Grendel's point of view. It goes to some lengths to include things from the original poem which didn't involve Grendel.
We don't need to do fidelity for the sake of fidelity. Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey doesn't include the "Nobody" bit with the cyclops. That's fine.
When you're pitching "like X, but Y," knock yourself out. But if you're pitching "X," it better damned well be "X." What that is is determined by the social canon of X and the very literal existing canon of X.
The story is not the merch. It's not the Victorian dresses and the Starfleet delta. Those are just symbols. They mean nothing without context. The only symbol people are drawn to without context is the Cool S:
Cool S.
People like those symbols because they came from something with meaning. Because it affects them. Good art, even commercial art, is a way for us to touch each other and we're touched by good art.
You can't simply collect the symbols, create something without the meaning, and then expect people to connect with it.
Ahem.
If we circle back around to our religious analogy, that's idolatry. Worshipping the iconography instead of actual god. Wielding a cross and shouting the Almighty's name for your own power. Claiming to "give unto Caesar" while pushing a button that annihilates the poor and meek.
Clearly, our collective interpretation of media isn't as critical as bombing the Middle East. Paul Verhoeven can't make a satire sharp enough to make us stop bombing random Iraqis/Afghanis/Iranians/Yemenis/throw a fucking dart.
But the stories we tell, and the stories we tell each other about them, matter. The stories that affect us, shape us. That's why we tell them. Stories let us understand other people's perspectives. They let us answer questions with our best selves before we ever need to answer it in our lives. They surprise us with possibilities and when you empathize with a character, there's a human truth in it that you, and other people, connect with.
How we talk about them–if we talk about them–who talks about them–changes those stories. Those discussions hinge on those symbols, not on their own, with their meanings. On either side of a page or a screen, there's two contexts; one is the story itself which creates the symbols and the other is our social context that those symbols are poured into. Some slide off into a gutter, but some find their own crack in the mortar and burrow into our collective foundations.
They're important and laughing their value off as mere "canon" disregards that.
Look, I'm a big disregarder of canon.
Imagine someone reads the Odyssey for the first time. They've read the Illiad. They've read Ovid's Metamorphoses. They quickly put it down. They feel Posideon has simply been given too much power. He's a god of the sea and sometimes, horses. Wind and rain are phenomenon of the sun. "It should be Helios and the Anemoi who are interrupting Odysseus's journey," they say. "It's not canonical."
I've said it before, but you could take out the Klingons, the Vulcans, the Federation, ships named Enterprise, Starfleet, warp drives, shields, subspace, and transporters and still make a good Star Trek.
So, circling back to this number two–
First, I want to say that nerds debating Star Trek canon on the internet is ultimately a sad endeavor, so the half-dozen drafts of this I had kicking around that were essentially Morbo saying transporters don't work that way won't be making it to the final cut.
–back on track, this post is about Star Trek: Voyager's Vidiians. The Vidiians are Delta Quadrant natives and they have a chronic illness called The Phage. It forces them to raid others for organs. Real moral dilemma stuff.
At one point, I think they had an organ transporter and beamed Neelix's lungs out of him. Then the crew had to decide whether they'd chase the organ stealers or let Neelix live the rest of his life nearly immobile in sickbay with holographic lungs.
I don't remember them all, but the Vidiian episodes I saw were generally interesting. And that's good. The duty is to the story. If the writers don't give a flip about cloning, then it's not canon to this episode. Hope you enjoy the episode.
Occasionally, a show tries to trade on its canon. That's great. Those first four seasons of Doctor Who's second run did a great job of running minor threads through each season that were then paid off in the finale. No one was happier than me to see recurring guest stars on Deep Space Nine. It's a nice little bonus.
But those stories all stood on their own. Each episode featured people with (presumed) deep histories and lives which existed before that story and (presumably) would continue afterwards. So whether it was Dr. Crusher's longtime friend Dalen Quaice or her own son Wesley visiting from Starfleet Academy, those intersections with histories outside of our story were established, even if they were established in earlier episodes.
Canon be damned, the story tells you the information you need. And if it conflicts with the information from another story, fuck it. Tell a good story.
Now, things should be consistent within a story. I brought up Doctor Who before so I could I look at it now, but with disgust:
If your story is one episode in a carton of twenty-six stories made every year, that story should stand alone. If your story is one story that's ten episodes long, those ten should stand on their own and have a consistency between them.
Saying, "The Viidians could've been cured with the transporter," is like saying "Jack could have fit on the door." It's pithy. It ignores the point of the story. And it's just plain wrong.
It's supposed to be some clever gotcha that plays well with people who've forgotten or never seen that episode of Voyager. If people are going to lie about TV shows for clout, why are we even bothering to fight AI? The difference isn't that big between a machine that fakes understanding and a human that just doesn't care. If we're just turning a big crank to make slop, why even give a fuck which philosophical zombie is turning it?
Look, stories matter. They say things that have meaning to us. That touch us, all of us, in different ways. A story doesn't have to be good to do that; it just has to matter to you. And whether someone has the right number of pips on their collar or forgets they have a cybernetic heart, it doesn't matter if the story affects you.
And when someone talks about that story, or looks inside themselves to create something more for that story, I hope they're being honest about it. I hope they see the same things in it you do.
And most of all, I hope they fucking give a shit. Because that apathy over those human things that matter to us, as humans, is the real villain of this piece.
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