Squire Grooktook wrote:That there is a concreteness to a story is important to the suspension of disbelief and agreement between storyteller and audience.
If I think the ending of King Lear is too sad, I'm not supposed to just stop reading/watching and then write my own happy end fanfiction. I could, nothing is stopping me, but treating stories in such a way would destroy their emotional power and impact. It's part of the ritual of imagination. What the author says happens, happens.
When a sequel comes out - technically a separate work - it is easier to say "they fucked it up, ruined the ending. This shouldn't be part of the story, so I'm imagining it's not". But I can still empathize with people who feel that the direction the author takes is inviolable and that a terrible continuation really can ruin a story.
You should take stories seriously and mentally treat them as "real," yes. This is something your brain will do naturally, you don't need a special mindset to make it work. It's a completely separate issue from treating the original author (or copyright law) as an inviolable authority. Also, there's nothing inherently wrong with someone taking someone else's work and creating what they believe to be an improved version. Many of the humanity's best works were created that way.
Mortificator wrote:Juvenile view: "It's canon that Darth Vader really is Luke Skywalker's father!"
Mature view: From the storytelling perspective of the 1977 Star Wars film, Darth Vader killed Luke Skywalker's father. From the perspective of The Empire Strikes Back, Vader is Luke's father in disguise.
Right, though there's nothing wrong with viewing one story as existing within the context of another story. It's fine to watch A New Hope with the mindset that Vader is Luke's father, it just isn't necessary to do so. The version where Vader killed Luke's father used to be the only Star Wars story. It stood on its own just fine, and nothing created afterwards changed the original work itself.
Mischief Maker wrote:There's a much more straightforward reason to be concerned with "canon."
"Canon" determines which stories get made into movies (shitty ones) and which ones are lost to the ether (Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy).
Tie Fighter was made while Thrawn was still canon, and so it has a much better story than most/all post-prequel Star Wars games.
That's because of intellectual property laws. They're a grotesque evil, to be sure, but not quite the same as the idea of canon.
