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Canons, and the whys of them
May. 18th, 2007 06:32 pmI just put all this as a comment on a poll I answered. Which, er, might possibly be uncool? Bit long. But now I put it here in case that's more useful.
They asked 'what is canon' with ticky boxes.
I ticked boxes, but mostly it's not an either/or thing. There's a hierarchy of information that is more or less likely to be useful in predicting what will be held to be true in future episodes. There's another slightly different hierarchy of information that is more or less likely to be known by the widest number of fans and therefore possibly held to be true by them.
Saying "the TV show is canon" is obvious, but inadequate. For instance, take the words uttered by the characters. You'd think they said one and only one thing. But I've read different people's transcripts - people hear quite different things. There's a majority opinion, but there are solid minority opinions too. And then you add subtitles, which you'd think represented in writing what the characters are saying. Due to technical constraints that is very seldom 100% true - they represent parts of what people are saying, the parts that fit on the screen. And sometimes they are put together by people with access to scripts, and sometimes they are not, and sometimes you'd think they were but then two sets come out and they disagree. So with Torchwood - you get the subtitles as broadcast first run on the BBC, infrequently a slightly amended version on later runs (I'm thinking DW and Sphere Activated), and a *completely different* set on the DVDs. Therefore people using ears and people using eyes have a different idea of what characters said at various times. So which one is canon?
And then you get on to the vagaries of things *not* said - written props, computer screens, captions. If an episode completely makes sense except for the datestamps sometimes shown on screen, is this evidence that in canon something was wonky with time (actually more possible/likely in TW-DW) or that they decided to rearrange the scenes some time after filming and it went wonky? (Or just that the show bible doesn't say what year it is filming in!) How about if a character is reading a bit of information early in an episode but has to ask another character for it later on - Clue or Cock-up?
And then there are the non-written information sources, such as clothes. Try and get a timeline for 1-07 by watching what outfits people are wearing and you get a rather large mess.
And one time on Buffy the wrong hand was shown in a close-up. Now that being Buffyverse you can spin up a complex explanation where Buffy suddenly turned into Xander for a couple of seconds, but it's a lot simpler to say 'the wrong hand was filmed' even though it means discarding a few seconds of an aired episode as not-canon.
So even 'the show' is a hierarchy of more and less useful data sources, for predicting what other fans hold to be true (the fiddlier the print the less likely fans are to have noticed it), or for predicting future canon. What the writers/actors know can be handy for prediction. In most shows intentions remain invisible, but with DVD extras and Confidential and Declassified and websites you get massively more data from behind the scenes these days. BUT what about if it contradicts what people think they saw in an episode? What if the reading/intention of the producers doesn't match the reading/intention of the fans? Is the fan reading less valid? Is it not canon, even if it is based entirely on scenes as shown? Deleted scenes complicate this one - producers might be thinking of things that were present in the initial version but had to be cut for time, for instance.
Deleted scenes are another wonky-canon source - sometimes they contradict, sometimes they fit in, but they were always deleted for a reason. And they were always included on the DVD for a reason. Sometimes, like with the Jack&Gwen conversation in the bar in 01, you have an either/or, the scene they didn't use and the one they did. Sometimes you have a scene that would have fit if time were the only consideration but was really completely lame. Sometimes like with 1-10 you have so many deleted scenes it looks like they filmed an episode and a half and radically ran out of time, so you could guess all those scenes were 'intended' *but* they weren't present. And always only the subset of the fans that own the DVDs will have access to those scenes - therefore available to be held as canon to only a fraction of the initial millions who watch the show.
Books and other tie-in media have again a much smaller fraction of audience, and an unpredictable chance of influencing future canon. Some tie-ins have ongoing story arc, or are written by the same set of authors who take their own earlier books as canon. DW has book writers who go on to be show writers - but DW has several different timelines going on anyways and no apparent worries about contradicting any of them.
And retcon can create entirely new histories for characters. Which makes both old and new timelines canon, if they were both in the show, but only the new timeline likely to influence new episodes, even though fans are likely to know both of them.
Then there's the thing where a spin off show imports the setup from it's parent show but may or may not influence that parent show in return. Maybe only one character appears to exist in both universes. Maybe the Higher Powers seem to hang out and chat in one but never be mentioned in the other. Maybe someone's entire history seems to be different when they're on their own show. All kinds of fun going on. Do you take it all as Clues to some unified story, do you figure someone is lying to one set of characters, or do you just reckon TPTB don't talk no more?
I can also go into the difficulties you get into in, say, Highlander fandom, where no two films can exist in the same universe and the series suddenly changed its basic idea for three episodes right near the end. It's freaky. It means that you don't just have 'canon', you have to pick and choose from available texts to make some consistent background in the full knowledge that the producers may decide to up and create yet another one of their very own in the future. And then delete it, even if it makes subsequent releases of the film make absolutely no sense.
Cause that's just fun.
And to cap it all off, different showings and the DVD release can all have different numbers of minutes in them. Is the DVD version of an episode the definitive one? How about if the one recorded off the TV has a different scene, a different set of music in the background, someone putting out roses? What about the two different showings of Buffy - is the late night one the 'real' one, even though more people saw the early evening one? The evening one was cut, sometimes really significantly cut. But more people having access to it suggests more people hold that version to be 'real'. And then there's Highlander's Eurominutes - scenes only shown in some countries but not others. Are they canon? Well future episodes will hold them to be true - but the largest market won't have seen them!
Canon isn't just a word, it's a tool for a purpose. Or, most of the time, slightly different yet related purposes plural. All based on individual readings of source texts that may in fact vary depending on time and place.
And we wonder why we get in arguments about it.
They asked 'what is canon' with ticky boxes.
I ticked boxes, but mostly it's not an either/or thing. There's a hierarchy of information that is more or less likely to be useful in predicting what will be held to be true in future episodes. There's another slightly different hierarchy of information that is more or less likely to be known by the widest number of fans and therefore possibly held to be true by them.
Saying "the TV show is canon" is obvious, but inadequate. For instance, take the words uttered by the characters. You'd think they said one and only one thing. But I've read different people's transcripts - people hear quite different things. There's a majority opinion, but there are solid minority opinions too. And then you add subtitles, which you'd think represented in writing what the characters are saying. Due to technical constraints that is very seldom 100% true - they represent parts of what people are saying, the parts that fit on the screen. And sometimes they are put together by people with access to scripts, and sometimes they are not, and sometimes you'd think they were but then two sets come out and they disagree. So with Torchwood - you get the subtitles as broadcast first run on the BBC, infrequently a slightly amended version on later runs (I'm thinking DW and Sphere Activated), and a *completely different* set on the DVDs. Therefore people using ears and people using eyes have a different idea of what characters said at various times. So which one is canon?
And then you get on to the vagaries of things *not* said - written props, computer screens, captions. If an episode completely makes sense except for the datestamps sometimes shown on screen, is this evidence that in canon something was wonky with time (actually more possible/likely in TW-DW) or that they decided to rearrange the scenes some time after filming and it went wonky? (Or just that the show bible doesn't say what year it is filming in!) How about if a character is reading a bit of information early in an episode but has to ask another character for it later on - Clue or Cock-up?
And then there are the non-written information sources, such as clothes. Try and get a timeline for 1-07 by watching what outfits people are wearing and you get a rather large mess.
And one time on Buffy the wrong hand was shown in a close-up. Now that being Buffyverse you can spin up a complex explanation where Buffy suddenly turned into Xander for a couple of seconds, but it's a lot simpler to say 'the wrong hand was filmed' even though it means discarding a few seconds of an aired episode as not-canon.
So even 'the show' is a hierarchy of more and less useful data sources, for predicting what other fans hold to be true (the fiddlier the print the less likely fans are to have noticed it), or for predicting future canon. What the writers/actors know can be handy for prediction. In most shows intentions remain invisible, but with DVD extras and Confidential and Declassified and websites you get massively more data from behind the scenes these days. BUT what about if it contradicts what people think they saw in an episode? What if the reading/intention of the producers doesn't match the reading/intention of the fans? Is the fan reading less valid? Is it not canon, even if it is based entirely on scenes as shown? Deleted scenes complicate this one - producers might be thinking of things that were present in the initial version but had to be cut for time, for instance.
Deleted scenes are another wonky-canon source - sometimes they contradict, sometimes they fit in, but they were always deleted for a reason. And they were always included on the DVD for a reason. Sometimes, like with the Jack&Gwen conversation in the bar in 01, you have an either/or, the scene they didn't use and the one they did. Sometimes you have a scene that would have fit if time were the only consideration but was really completely lame. Sometimes like with 1-10 you have so many deleted scenes it looks like they filmed an episode and a half and radically ran out of time, so you could guess all those scenes were 'intended' *but* they weren't present. And always only the subset of the fans that own the DVDs will have access to those scenes - therefore available to be held as canon to only a fraction of the initial millions who watch the show.
Books and other tie-in media have again a much smaller fraction of audience, and an unpredictable chance of influencing future canon. Some tie-ins have ongoing story arc, or are written by the same set of authors who take their own earlier books as canon. DW has book writers who go on to be show writers - but DW has several different timelines going on anyways and no apparent worries about contradicting any of them.
And retcon can create entirely new histories for characters. Which makes both old and new timelines canon, if they were both in the show, but only the new timeline likely to influence new episodes, even though fans are likely to know both of them.
Then there's the thing where a spin off show imports the setup from it's parent show but may or may not influence that parent show in return. Maybe only one character appears to exist in both universes. Maybe the Higher Powers seem to hang out and chat in one but never be mentioned in the other. Maybe someone's entire history seems to be different when they're on their own show. All kinds of fun going on. Do you take it all as Clues to some unified story, do you figure someone is lying to one set of characters, or do you just reckon TPTB don't talk no more?
I can also go into the difficulties you get into in, say, Highlander fandom, where no two films can exist in the same universe and the series suddenly changed its basic idea for three episodes right near the end. It's freaky. It means that you don't just have 'canon', you have to pick and choose from available texts to make some consistent background in the full knowledge that the producers may decide to up and create yet another one of their very own in the future. And then delete it, even if it makes subsequent releases of the film make absolutely no sense.
Cause that's just fun.
And to cap it all off, different showings and the DVD release can all have different numbers of minutes in them. Is the DVD version of an episode the definitive one? How about if the one recorded off the TV has a different scene, a different set of music in the background, someone putting out roses? What about the two different showings of Buffy - is the late night one the 'real' one, even though more people saw the early evening one? The evening one was cut, sometimes really significantly cut. But more people having access to it suggests more people hold that version to be 'real'. And then there's Highlander's Eurominutes - scenes only shown in some countries but not others. Are they canon? Well future episodes will hold them to be true - but the largest market won't have seen them!
Canon isn't just a word, it's a tool for a purpose. Or, most of the time, slightly different yet related purposes plural. All based on individual readings of source texts that may in fact vary depending on time and place.
And we wonder why we get in arguments about it.