The Purpose of Lore and Canon
Nobody wants a spoilsport to ruin their fun.
April 20, 2024 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
09:26
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| There is a great deal of controversy surrounding the connected concepts of law and canon. | |
| What is and is not canon, why internal consistency in the law is important, and whether we even need canon at all. | |
| Perhaps we could say that everything or nothing is canon and still get the same effect. | |
| There is actually a solid body of thought behind the importance of consistency in art which answers many of these questions. | |
| Plato, the original rationalist, wanted to ban art and poetry from his perfect republic because they only spoke to the lower reaches of the soul and did not stimulate the higher rational faculties. | |
| Aristotle took a much more sophisticated approach towards art and storytelling and, in his poetics, laid out the philosophical groundwork for understanding the purpose of art and storytelling, and these rules seem to be relatively timeless as they still hold to this day. | |
| Aristotle persuasively argues that the purpose of storytelling is to construct a representation of reality. | |
| In this representation, we establish premises which dictate logically the events that can happen, allowing us to explore aspects of the human experience without having to actually go through them ourselves. | |
| Aristotle thought that imitation was intrinsically pleasurable and was the mechanism by which we learn, and so fiction is at once entertainment, but also a valuable part of our moral and practical education. | |
| What this means is that the premises upon which a fictional universe is grounded have to be logically coherent and self-reinforcing with their own internal consistency to create what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called the willing suspension of disbelief. | |
| That is, the ability for a person to put aside the rational knowledge that they are in fact engaging in a kind of make-believe and take the fictional universe seriously in order to get the most out of it. | |
| If we can suspend our disbelief when engaging with a piece of art, we can in a way lose ourselves properly in it and fully enjoy the experience, whilst understanding those intricate details that can only be opened up when one allows oneself to move into the piece and become a part of the journey that it invites the audience to take. | |
| Austrian art historian Ernst Gombrich was of the opinion that art was able to create a kind of illusion in which we deliberately engage to surround and subsume our imaginations into the small universe created by the author's intentions and following the rules that they laid out. | |
| In effect, this casts a kind of magic spell which enchants the viewer into leaving their worker day life and allows them to step into this new world which follows unusual rules and opens up avenues of thought and experience that would otherwise remain elusive or inaccessible. | |
| These illusions are not delusions either. | |
| We are fully conscious that we are choosing to engage in a fiction and this engagement lasts only for as long as we allow it. | |
| We can decide to disengage from it at any time of our own volition. | |
| A fictional universe is assumed to follow its own rules consistently and it is a bad fictional universe that doesn't. | |
| In order to draw us in and create a sense of verisimilitude, it has to look, sound and generally feel enough like the real thing to fool our minds into thinking that we might actually be experiencing what the art is trying to persuade us of. | |
| This is probably why when you're watching a movie and the audio track is not properly synced to the video, that it looks so jarring and unwatchable. | |
| Dutch historian Johann Husinger observes in his book Homo Ludens that these kinds of shared illusions with which we engage are a fundamental part of human socialization. | |
| Games begin from a very similar premise as other forms of art. | |
| They establish a set of rules which are in some way meant to represent a reality and then follow their own internal logic to come to anticipated conclusions which allow us to lose ourselves within their worlds until the game is over. | |
| The game, as with any other kind of art which we might share with others, begins in a kind of social contract in which all participants agree to the premises before beginning and deliberately dispose of the expectation that the internal workings of the game will be the same as in real life to create this kind of micro-universe that follows its own rules and sets the nature of our expectations. | |
| When we submit to the illusion of a piece of art or a game or a movie or whatever, we have to concentrate on it and allow ourselves to be taken in by its framing and guide our thoughts until the experience ends. | |
| Huzinger points out that someone who goes out of their way to bring something inappropriate from outside of the frame is deliberately intruding upon this shared experience and takes on the position of a spoil sport whose disbelief breaks the illusion. | |
| Obviously, one can't enjoy a shared illusion with someone who is going out of their way to be a spoil sport. | |
| We must all agree to the nature of the illusion before we can engage in it together. | |
| And if someone attempts to attr upon the framing with something that is inappropriate and tied to the real world, then they ruin the experience for everyone. | |
| We can see then how this relates to modern issues of law and canon. | |
| We can see how these principles inform what needs to be considered. | |
| The law of a fictional setting is the internal history of that setting, in which fictional events tie the universe together and create the premises from which the internal logic of the universe will operate. | |
| It is important that these things display internal consistency for our ability to buy into the illusion of the universe. | |
| If things don't make sense on their own terms, then we simply cannot suspend our disbelief to enter into the experience. | |
| Canon is that body of texts from which the law is drawn. | |
| Those things which are canonical must themselves follow certain rules. | |
| They must themselves create premises which are not in contradiction to established canonical texts and must not intrude on law which has already been established and upon which further logical steps are grounded. | |
| If the law of a setting establishes that A leads to B, which as a consequence creates C, a text which purports to be canonical, that erases premises A or B, but seeks to maintain C would be problematic and would cause internal inconsistency. | |
| For this reason, what is and is not canon should be carefully considered. | |
| The law must make sense on its own terms, and the presuppositions which underpin it should flow naturally from what has already been established. | |
| The reason that we can accept dragons, elves, and talking trees in Lord of the Rings is because Tolkien's world has established that the kind of magic required to create these things exists and has been operating for thousands of years, but we indeed are too bigoted to accept a 2021 BMW 5 Series 530i with optional seated heating because it would destroy the logical consistency of the original premises of Middle Earth. | |
| I'm sure you can see where I'm going with all of this. | |
| Modern politics has no place in a fantasy or science fiction universe. | |
| Anything of that sort is an intrusion on the established law and canon, which is done for reasons external to the logic of the setting itself, and done therefore for reasons other than the good of the art itself. | |
| It doesn't matter whether you think you can find a law-appropriate reason to insert the external politics into the setting or not. | |
| It doesn't matter if you simply declare inappropriate texts as canon. | |
| It is far too late for all of that, because it was simply in the attempt itself in which the illusion of the fictional universe was broken, and you revealed yourself to be the spoil sport. | |
| Moreover, you did this for your own selfish reasons. | |
| You decided that you mattered more than the people who were already engaged in the shared behaviour which created the fictional universe in which you presumably wanted to participate. | |
| Don't worry though, you are finally visible. | |
| We do indeed see you. | |
| And we know the kind of people that you are. | |
| Nobody is pleased that you're doing this. | |
| And everyone knows that you are just a distraction from the reason that we are all here. | |
| You aren't welcome, no matter what the powers that be say. |
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