[ SECRET POST #4053 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4053 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 16 secrets from Secret Submission Post #580.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think the problem is with Word of God as such. The problem is the way that people think about canon, and the existence of a construct where something is either definitely canon and "counts", or is definitely not canon and doesn't "count". If you try to rely on that framework to insist that Word of God "counts" as canon, then yeah, you're going to come to some pretty silly conclusions.

But there's nothing wrong, in and of itself, with using an author's comments as a guide to help interpret their work if you want to. It can be pretty helpful, or at least interesting. The key is to keep in mind that it's a signpost about what is going on with the text, and not something that needs to be assigned the status of either canon or non-canon.

[cbrachyrhynchos]

Well, I'm a canon skeptic as well, especially regarding collaborative franchises like Star Trek, Marvel, and DC that didn't value internal consistency to start with and have been nearly completely remade multiple times.

I don't have an objection to treating authorial comments as extra commentary, but that's not really Word of God as is commonly meant. Many authors use social media as a promotional vehicle, so anything they say on twitter needs to be viewed as self-promotion not necessarily supported by the text.

[(Anonymous)]

Sure sure.

[(Anonymous)]

I guess my larger point is that the whole concept of "Word Of God" as an approach to evaluating the things that creators say is only really possible or comprehensible within a broader structure of understanding things in a black-and-white way where something either is or is not canon, and counts or doesn't count.

Yes, the Word Of God approach leads to ridiculous outcomes, but ultimately the fundamental problem is with the underlying construct.

[(Anonymous)]

This. I used to feel like the secret maker felt about Word of God. Then I got into Tolkien. You pretty much need Word of God. You can pick and choose what you want to use because there are different versions of things and so much was only published after his death. But it makes the stuff that is clearly canon so much richer.

[cbrachyrhynchos]

I suspect that as a good Catholic and professor in literature, Tolkien would probably find fandom's idea of "canon" to be patently ridiculous.

Not to mention that the canon about the canon involves multiple works of oral history, three unreliable "historians" (including a known liar), and multiple unreliable translators including a blatant self-insert.