[ SECRET POST #4835 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4835 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 38 secrets from Secret Submission Post #692.
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)]

da

He's using fandom language to respond to a fandom question. Adjusting your language to suit your audience is both perfectly reasonable and an important writing skill.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think fandom should use it either

This is my endless crusade

[(Anonymous)]

DA

Yeah, good luck with that, bb. You're at least ten years too late.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm interested in why. Why don't you like the idea of canon, comment OP?

[(Anonymous)]

The way that we think about canon implies that there's one official, valid, authorized way of interpreting a series or work and what happens within it, and everything else is secondary and unofficial. I don't think that's a justified assumption in general, and I don't think it's a useful mindset except in really specific circumstances (most of which have to do with brand management, which fans should not care about).

Instead, it's better to think in terms of the text and interpretations of the text. This is better because, one, it doesn't justify one way of interpreting the text as "more valid" - instead, it's comfortable accepting and dealing with the idea that there can be multiple interpretations of something, even allowing for peoples' ability to entertain multiple conflicting interpretations at the same time without worrying which one is "right". Those interpretations can be more or less plausible readings of the text, but that's the most that can be said about them. Second, this is a better way of looking at and dealing with times when the text itself is contradictory or complicated - for instance, in large franchises where different releases conflict with each other, you don't have to say "oh, this one doesn't count", you can just accept that they're different works that conflict with each other.

And it *doesn't* involve kowtowing to the creator, or even more annoyingly to me, the owners and managers of a franchise. It's less of an issue when it's someone like Gaiman, and Gaiman in this case quite rightly refuse to do it, but even still, it's not really up to Gaiman to tell people how to interpret his works, and thinking about his work in terms of canon encourages people to do things like this - go to the creator and ask him to make one interpretation of the text official. Gaiman is fundamentally unable to do that. The book says what it says, and we can interpret it differently, but they have to be evaluated as differing interpretations. And in the case of a very large franchise, that's even more the case.