Let The Past Die (1/30)

This isn't not about The Last Jedi.

These are my mad ramblings about fandom and canon. I think too many people know just enough surface level information about everything and then form hard opinions on those things as though they're experts. I don't have any solution. I have not re-read a single sentence of this, nor checked it for grammar or spelling.

I’m sick of the words “lore” “canon” and “worldbuilding”. This is a strange sentence coming from me, someone whose life revolves around the gravity wells of that three body problem. But I really, truly, am. I am tired of everything being canon. I am tired of wikis, I am tired of surface level information being available to everyone at all times so that everyone can speak with authority on it. I think it does a disservice to the art we consume, and to us as audience members.

I’m not walking above the common throng, so enlightened as to have never read a wiki article or watched a lore video. I’m guilty of it, it’s nice to get caught up to speed on things. It’s nice to be in the loop on something without diving headfirst into a backlog of novels and spin-offs and errata. We live in an information age, let’s take advantage of it?

I’m not trying to come off as a gatekeeper, that the only people who can enjoy/discuss things are people like the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons. I think the ease of entry for many white, cishet, male dominated hobbies is a good thing. I like seeing losers cry that DnD is “woke” now because the starter set doesn’t come with phrenological tools to determine how inherently evil one is based on the circumstances of their birth. I think it’s a good thing that we are breaking down barriers between hobbies that have become so stratified against the plurality of people who the in-crowd have determined are the “minority”.

My gripe is, and this is very true of the aforementioned losers, is that it’s led to a very dogmatic clinging to “canon”, that everything that occurs is sacrosanct. Nothing is obscure, nothing is mentioned one off in one episode as a throwaway line. As soon as it’s said, there’s a wiki page about it and it is set in stone. We see it all the time in Star Wars fandom. Look at the drama over Ki-Adi-Mundi’s age. The most useless piece of information, mentioned only one time on a CD-ROM game. But it was said, and thus it is immutable, and any change for reasons artistic or otherwise are heresy. Canon above all. Wiki pages as sacred as tablets on the mount.

It doesn’t matter the story reasons for him showing up, it doesn’t matter that Lucas played fast and loose with his canon as he saw fit. No, it was important that on one CD-ROM that many of the people bringing up had never so much as heard of was now the most sacred piece of text since the screenplay for Star Wars.

I think caring about this is the dumbest thing in the world, and making a big deal about should be immediate case to launch you into the sun. I don’t believe that’s harsh, I believe you should be launched into the sun. Say hello to Apollo for me fucko.

When did we become so rigid? When did we stop having fun? Who gives a shit about this. The super nerds, obviously, the ones who read everything that had come out. But then there’s also legions of non-super nerds, legions of fandom cowboys riding chrome in cyberspace who have seen the wiki, or have seen lore videos, now incensed that aspects of the franchise they do not interact with and never have, are being changed. People who claim ownership over something that was never theirs.

I doubt every person who mourns every change Kathleen Kennedy has made to the sacred franchise whose worst decision was making two of the leads siblings in the third entry in the franchise that is much worse than you remember it being is perfectly versed in every single novel, game, and RPG sourcebook from a time when the Berlin Wall still stood. I very highly doubt that. I know it’s not true.

But we have ownership over our fandom, where we are ignorant we have a thousand oracles who are better versed than us (or so claim to be) who we can turn to and have information explained to us. We don’t need to engage with things directly to have hard opinions on them anymore! Hooray! Someone else can get mad about how things aren’t the same as books you haven’t read and now you can sit with smug authority to anyone that pushes back that maybe canon isn’t the most important thing in the world.

I see this very often in the MCU, the first time I saw it was during Wandavision. People confidently storming into comments waving innumerable banners that said “Mephisto”, talking down to you for not realizing that a character from comics they had never read would show up by the finale. They’d seen someone else say Mephisto, and they googled Mephisto and saw several other people talking about him and from a perusal of a wikipedia article little more than Frankenstein amalgamation of 40 years of canon haphazardly stapled together for general consumption, and decided that it was the obvious case.

We have flame wars erupting online over what’s comic accurate or not, peons who hadn’t so much as picked up a comic in 5 years now pressed into service sending screenshots of wikipedia articles, contextless panels from a 3 comic run from 1978 when cocaine was easier to acquire than lead-less paint. Why do we care so much? Where once only the superfans cared, now any deviation from “canon” is the cause celebre of anyone with internet access. The quality of the story irrelevant, the purpose of the art we’re consuming useless to any end besides building the world, expanding the lore, confirming (And never challenging) the canon.  

We’re all experts now. Armchair stans clinging to our wiki entries like our golden calf. I have never enjoyed this property before, but now that someone online is mad about it, I can’t believe the makers would change Glorbus Sneep’s second cousin’s name. It’s like they didn’t even read Tales of Glorbus: The Unheard Legends! #2 (pub 1953) written by a sex pervert who happily threw colleagues to HUAC. I’m s-ing my damn h over here! The guy who makes money from being mad online said that it’s a travesty, and that while he never read this comic, and there are none alive who have, and the information was not relevant then and has become even less relevant now, we should be mad at minorities over this assault on our beloved fandom that I’ve only been a casual part of!