[ SECRET POST #5443 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5443 ⌋

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


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 31 secrets from Secret Submission Post #779.
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

Exactly. The thing OP loves is still around. The EU was a muddle of different writers trying to each get their contradictory versions "canonized," when in reality, none of it was canon. There was always a possibility or even likelihood that things would be changed later, especially if more films eventually got made. It's like the Doctor Who novels and Big Finish Audio episodes for that canon.

[(Anonymous)]

OP here.

OK, OK, you mentioned the Doctor Who non-TV stuff, I'm going to talk about the ways that canon, what is considered canon, and the very definition of an "EU" has always been treated differently between what might be considered the "big 3" sci fi franchises: Star Trek, Star Wars, and Doctor Who. Keep in mind that this is something I've thought about A LOT, and I feel that the way that these various franchises have treated canon historically and how that's changed with the relatively recent franchise boom is really interesting.

Now, Star Trek has never tried to meld the TV and non-TV stuff in any way whatsoever. There have been literally hundreds of books, comics, etc., but there's always been an understanding that the TV stuff is completely unbeholden to the non-TV stuff and, to a certain extent, even vice-versa. For example, there's a Star Trek book series called The Department of Temporal Investigations that adheres to the few mentions of time travel in Deep Space 9 and some of Enterprise but blatantly contradicts a huge portion of Enterprise - all in service of a good story. Because the EU has never pretended to be beholden to the TV shows, there is very little drama when it comes to the EU being contradicted by the TV shows - to the point where there are literally two separate fan wikis for the TV canon and everything else (Memory Alpha and Memory Beta).

Star Wars is an interesting case where the base canon was very, very limited for a very, very long time. Even when the Prequel Trilogy came out, they were just that - prequels - and therefore they didn't contradict more than a small portion of the EU canon. This created a situation where Lucasfilm itself had this sort of unofficial hierarchy of canon that went movies -> stuff Lucas had imput on (mostly TV shows) -> stuff not contradicted by the Prequels -> stuff contradicted by the prequels. In the 2000s in particular there was a concentrated effort to make the EU consistent with both the movies and itself, which led to fans who were into the EU treating it as, essentially, canon on nearly the same level as the movies. When Disney bought Lucasfilm and swept away this massive web of *stuff* in one fell swoop, some EU fans felt betrayed as a direct consequence of the way the EU had previously been treated by both the EU writers and Lucasfilm in general.

Now, the Doctor Who franchise's treatment of both TV canon and EU canon is probably my favorite. The thing with Doctor Who is that even the main canon is very, very self-contradictory. There are at least three Cyberman origins in Classic Who, the Daleks went from needing static electricity to move around to literally flying up stairs, hell, the Doctor went from "probably a human from the future" to "alien" over the course of the first season. With a main canon that is so self-contradictory, the EU being contradicted or contradicting itself is pretty much just par for the course. I mean, Big Finish has put out two different versions of the Sixth Doctors regeneration, both which contradict both the TV version and each other. If you're mad about what one bit or another of Doctor Who is doing - and oh boy do people get mad - you can rest assured that it's probably going to either get folded into preexisting canon or just plain contradicted.

This is why, imo, you have to look at different aspects of these franchises to access their "health" as a whole. Star Trek's health as a franchise can easily be judged solely based on the current or most recent TV shows. Star Wars is on shakey ground right now - with the Sequel Trilogy being so controversial and Disney having to rebuild their non-mainline canon nearly from scratch, it'll be a bit before we can judge how durable the franchise will be moving forward. Doctor Who, no matter how controversial, has a certain durability as a franchise, imo, specifically because the relationship between mainline and EU canon is so open. My only concern with it atm is that BBC Books has massively slowed down their output.