Canon, as a concept, is useful. In Star Wars, for example, knowing that the seven movies plus Clone Wars form a single storyline allows me to speculate and come up with theories and predictions, knowing that THESE are the facts available to me. That's useful and fun. The idea of holding up established canon and saying that all retellings of this story must go the same way... that's just stupid. But it's different from gatekeeping. This is about people who love something so much that they feel threatened by the idea of it changing... as if telling a new version of their favorite things somehow makes the original go away. It's dumb. Marvel's doing this right. There's been so many different versions of truth in the comics, that picking out a single "canon" only loosely makes sense. It's more about knowing that there's a million stories out there, and the majority of them all are consistent with one-another in this continuity, but there's big groups of other stories that are tied together under different continuities. And the Marvel Cinematic Universe gets to pick and choose among all the stories and create a brand new continuity.
Maybe canon is a bad word that has gained too much baggage. Maybe it would be better if we spoke of continuities. It's not that this is some set-in-stone, delivered-from-the-hand-of-god CANON that must be revered and adhered to, but rather it's a continuity, so that you know that everything contained within will be relatively consistent and will follow a set of rules that make the stories all make sense together. That's useful, because within a single continuity, you can't have Galactus pulverize our moon in an issue of the Avengers, but then have the Fantastic Four visit the Inhumans on the moon in some later issue. Continuity. And people can have their favorite continuities, while recognizing that there are many other versions out there, all equally valid.Statistics: Posted by Mike — Thu Apr 14, 2016 9:11 am
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