Star Wars: Doctor Aphra #30 - "Worst Among Equals, Part V"

[laughing_tree]

Canon Time is my measure of how long passes between a thing being published and it being accepted - if at all - into shared continuity. “Accepted” is of course relative. Some shared worlds have no single, main or centralised record or resource for What Counts and What Doesn’t. This is Dreamworld As Wiki, and it says everything about the human relationship to stories, worlds, and mythographies.

Now - if there’s no one central resource to define the continuity, readers assume -- correctly, in my opinion -- that their own brains are that resource. I endorse this message wholeheartedly, right up until those same brains start trying to impose their singularity on others.

Note that mere publication is not the same as being accepted into canon. Not in the way it once was, anyway. Shared universes are littered with cute, funny, stupid or inconvenient story details that have been forgotten or ignored, for better or worse. I think it’s fair to say we're at the point that fans of some SUs won’t even assume a thing is canon until they see it repeated elsewhere. That's your (far slower) measure of Canon Time in worlds where there’s no “official” moderation. Darwinian rather than Creationist.

I have some pub-rant views on continuity as a concept, but, short version, SUs tend toward detail as our universe tends toward entropy. eg: over time complexity overwhelms usefulness. Before you know it you’re arguing about hobbit-gait on a map and forgetting to enjoy the story. Most shared universes avoid this - deliberately or not - with built-in vagueness. Canon time can branch and flow backwards. What was once accepted can be erased. eg: My run on X-Men Legacy stood solid maybe five years before being swept under.

What’s more impressive is that Canon Time is superpositional. It lets two contradictory things be true, as long as you don’t “measure” them (ie: think about them too hard or get your knickers in a twist.) This speaks far more to readers’ sophistication - and humans craving stories above verity - than it speaks to continuity itself. All stories are lies which are more valuable than the truth. The more we obsess over internal logic, the more truthful (and less valuable) they get.

IMO, the Star Wars shared universe has the shortest Canon Time of any fandom. Of course, Star Wars has its own exotic approach to continuity. If Marvel and DC (et al) peddle in delicious elasticity, SW has previously gone for a very brave Big Crunch kind of approach. Literally: wipe it all away and start again. Again, what’s lovely is that no matter how far something has been pushed out of canon, it still has value. It gets rebranded as “legend”, which is IMO the most beautifully reflective bit of art imitating life imaginable. Fictions have their own realities, hence fictions also have their own unrealities. Neither is more valuable or less true than the other.

...Anyway, this is ALL a really longwinded way of saying that stories are incredible, readers’ brains are incredible, and above all:

--it took like 30 seconds for someone to put my “A Wookie With A Railgun For A Head” onto the biggest Star Wars wiki. I AM IMMORTAL NOW.

-- Si Spurrier

Comments

[cainofdreaming]

Virus or a trojan backdoor into his programming, place your bets here.

[mister_terrific]

Either that or there's a true memory in there that shows kindness or mercy that Trip can't tolerate and he makes a big boom.

[timefire]

better yet - plot twist: this is C-3PO himself. Maybe with some time travel to account for the chronology, but this is a C-3PO having fallen into the proverbial Dark Side and is now taking 'a droid built by Darth Vader to heart''.

And the memory will be of the Original Trilogy gang :D

[akodo_rokku]

Neither of those things!

[owlbrigade1]

I loathe that droid. Not in the fun love-to-hate way you get with some villains, more in just a deeply off-putting way.

[matrix_dragon]

He's a single joke that wasn't funny the first time. And they insist on repeating the joke over and over, louder and louder, while going 'get it? GET IT?'