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Jul. 21st, 2015 12:23 pmOne of my least favorite things is when people use what I usually call peripheral canon to verbally smack or demean other fans or try to interrupt their creative play.
Peripheral canon is stuff that is by the canon's creators or their authorized proxies, is the same continuity as the canon, and is official, but is not part of the central piece of the canon text. So things like tie in comics, tie in novels, novelizations, video games, design books, toys and toy bios, officially sanctioned wikia, and things like Pottermore if there is ever a thing like Pottermore that is not Pottermore. Sometimes creators' interviews fall under this category, depending on how the fandom treats them, but usually those are more Word Of God/Creator type stuff.
Peripheral canon is great! It offers such gems as the really creepy entry on centaurs in the HP verse in Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them, and Mabel Pines from Gravity Falls calling Wendy a Warrior Princess From The Moons Of Venus, the existence of minicons in the Transformers Animated universe, and Big Finish's Doctor Who audios. Great stuff! Truly great stuff!
But people are not obligated to engage with it. (Honestly, if people contradict the actual mainline of canon with their creative play, that is okay too, but people getting shirty about people not having read/listened to peripheral canon is even more annoying to me.) Reading more of this stuff does not make you a better fan. If, say, someone writes a Transformers Animated story in which there are no minicons, they are not contradicting show canon, and that story is not automatically an au. Scolding someone for writing Susan Foreman as childless and not having encountered her grandfather again until his uh - - - Twelfth or Thirteenth depending on how you're counting - incarnation for contradicting canon is dumb. Telling someone that Elita-1 can't have been Orion Pax's good friend before the war because there's a throw away reference in a tie in that says she wasn't and by wanting that the Elita fan is hetwashing is - Obnoxious beyond the telling on several levels, actually. My point is, peripheral canon does not trump the central text, and it does not trump fans' creative play with that central text. Not everyone can access that peripheral canon (it's often expensive) and not everyone is gonna want to - it may not be in their favorite media, or they might want to play with the elements that canon leaves open or whatever - and you don't have to to be a fan!
People reeeeaaally need to stop invoking it intending to shut down other fans' creative play, instead of using it to widen that creative, collective play up.
Jerks.
Not anyone reading this. Just you know. General jerks.
Peripheral canon is stuff that is by the canon's creators or their authorized proxies, is the same continuity as the canon, and is official, but is not part of the central piece of the canon text. So things like tie in comics, tie in novels, novelizations, video games, design books, toys and toy bios, officially sanctioned wikia, and things like Pottermore if there is ever a thing like Pottermore that is not Pottermore. Sometimes creators' interviews fall under this category, depending on how the fandom treats them, but usually those are more Word Of God/Creator type stuff.
Peripheral canon is great! It offers such gems as the really creepy entry on centaurs in the HP verse in Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them, and Mabel Pines from Gravity Falls calling Wendy a Warrior Princess From The Moons Of Venus, the existence of minicons in the Transformers Animated universe, and Big Finish's Doctor Who audios. Great stuff! Truly great stuff!
But people are not obligated to engage with it. (Honestly, if people contradict the actual mainline of canon with their creative play, that is okay too, but people getting shirty about people not having read/listened to peripheral canon is even more annoying to me.) Reading more of this stuff does not make you a better fan. If, say, someone writes a Transformers Animated story in which there are no minicons, they are not contradicting show canon, and that story is not automatically an au. Scolding someone for writing Susan Foreman as childless and not having encountered her grandfather again until his uh - - - Twelfth or Thirteenth depending on how you're counting - incarnation for contradicting canon is dumb. Telling someone that Elita-1 can't have been Orion Pax's good friend before the war because there's a throw away reference in a tie in that says she wasn't and by wanting that the Elita fan is hetwashing is - Obnoxious beyond the telling on several levels, actually. My point is, peripheral canon does not trump the central text, and it does not trump fans' creative play with that central text. Not everyone can access that peripheral canon (it's often expensive) and not everyone is gonna want to - it may not be in their favorite media, or they might want to play with the elements that canon leaves open or whatever - and you don't have to to be a fan!
People reeeeaaally need to stop invoking it intending to shut down other fans' creative play, instead of using it to widen that creative, collective play up.
Jerks.
Not anyone reading this. Just you know. General jerks.
