“Canon” is one of the fundamental concepts of media fandom – the original work or works that one is a fan of. But canon isn’t just that stuff, that body of work, but as the term suggests, it’s in some way sacred, privileged. There are personal pleasures in a good new addition to a favorite body of work, but what’s the deal with the sacred dimension of canon?
That sacred status can be used to turn the personal pleasures of canon into a politics of legitimacy. For the individual engaging with a text, canon is literary, but in the context of a fan community of co-producers of new works, canon is political: contesting within a fan community the status of a work or performance is the stuff of power and status . Canon in fandom lies, then, at the intersection of play and politics, of literature and law.
I’ve found Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation a tremendously useful framework for evaluating the politics of canon, though her own focus is on the literary appreciation of adaptations to canon (and the concomitant academic politics, but that’s a different beast entirely).
But let’s start with the literary pleasures of canon. Over dinner the other night, a colleague enthusiastically described his experience playing Star Trek Online. He didn’t 
evaluate the game mechanics – which have gotten largely unfavorable reviews in the gaming blogs, but instead talked about the joy of immersion in the world of Star Trek, of visiting places familiar from stories he’s returned to his whole life, but this time as a participant rather than a spectator. Commanding a Federation starship, being spoken to by the famous voice of Starfleet computers – that was fun, regardless of the affordances and limitations of the game engine.
As Hutcheon observes, “what is often most significant for videogames is the adapted heterocosm, the spectacular world of digital animation that a player enters.” (p. 51) I think she’s wrong, deeply wrong, with respect to gamers approaching a transmedia game, but right insofar as she’s referring to fans of the original property who pick up the game seeking a transmedia experience.
Likewise, another colleague and guildmate of mine in World of Warcraft is reading Christie Golden’s novel, Arthas: Wrath of the Lich King. The joy for him was in recognizing familiar places in a new medium, and having those places enriched by canon lore, and learning more about iconic figures from the game.
These pleasures of new, transmedia, works slotting into canon are personal, matters of one’s own opinions and engagement with stories and characters across platforms. Of course, the transmedia experience is not always pleasant: adaptations or additions can feel like violations of canon. Everyone has a favorite book badly adapted into a movie or a movie into a game, or has seen a sequel that fails to capture the spirit of the original. But this appreciation of canon is personal, aesthetic, the stuff of humanities scholarship.
Right now I’m more interested in the other sort, the social use of canon as a tool of politics. Hutcheon describes a “morally loaded discourse” of discussion about adaptations of canon (p.7), quoting another researcher who found terms like “infidelity,” “betrayal,” “deformation,” “violation,” “desecration” used in evaluating new adaptations.
She states that such thinking is “based on the implied assumption that adapters aim simply to reproduce the adapted text,” arguing that, rather, “’to adapt’ means to adjust, to alter, to make suitable,” especially in a transmedia context, as “[w]ith each mode, different things get adapted in different ways.” (p.12). “Suitable,” of course, is in the eye of the beholder.
Hutcheon quotes Susan Stanford Friedman, who has applied the anthropological/political concept of “indigenization” to adaption, stating that the concept “implies agency: people pick and choose what they want to transplant to their own soil. Adapters of traveling stories exert power over what they adapt.” (p. 150). That power is utterly, fundamentally political. Indigenization is often applied in a religious context, of the creation of a “nativized church.” The immediate question in that context, as in the fannish one, is – is indigenization a revitalizing adaptation to local circumstances, or is it heresy?
In fanfiction, “canon” takes on some interesting nuances. Not that much fic strictly is close to canon, the sort of stories called “gen,” for general, that are typically “continuing adventures,” stories that could be an episode of the TV series, a sequel to the books or movies. Much fic explores non-canon romantic and sexual relationships – but there, attitudes towards canon still play a critical political role. A community will judge if a pairing is credible within the bounds of canon, and a fandom will typically split along “shipper” lines – Harry Potter fans into Harry/Hermione vs. Harry/Ginny, for example.
Slash – romantic/sexual fiction about gay relationships between characters that aren’t canon gay – is a staple of fic, yet even there, issues of canon split shipper communities into those who find the pairing canon-plausible and those who reject it. If you’re wearing “slash goggles,” interpreting emotional displays between male characters in a sexual context, well, certain pairings are “practically canon,” while others are too implausible to count.
In roleplay communities, canon is used to judge not a static work, like fanfiction, but an ongoing performance. There’s a shamefully un-studied world of virtual-world roleplay on LiveJournal, text-based worlds like the old MUDS and MOOs, but persistent, with roleplay permanently visible in public or semi-public threaded logs. There, it’s expected that each roleplayer will bring their own interpretation (often slashy) to the character – but within the bounds of canon plausibility, and “playing OOC,” or out of character, is a primary ground for social criticism, and to some degree, ostracizing, as people prefer to play with more plausibly canon versions of the characters.
In SL-Gor, canon takes on a more explicitly political dimension. What separates Gor from medieval roleplay on the one hand and BDSM roleplay on the other is the explicitly ideological dimension, the unforgiving male dominance, the abject nature of female slavery. “Canon vs. ‘Disney’” seems to be the fundamental political issue dividing Gorean communities, with one side arguing for the orthodoxy of “by the book,” and the other for a “nativized church” of a Gor closer to mainstream liberal culture.
Why is canon so important that it’s used as a justification even for clearly transgressive fic and roleplay? How can canon fidelity even exist as a meaningful concept when a novel or TV show is translated to text or 3D roleplay, or heteronormative narrative is slashed?
We must love our orthodoxies, even the implausible ones…
[...] There’s a shamefully un-studied world of virtual-world roleplay on LiveJournal, text-based wor… [...]