578 – How Much Does Canon Matter?

Mar 8, 2026

Ask episode

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

Is there anything more terrifying than an argument about canon? Maybe an argument about having several cannons pointed at you. But a messy fight over continuity is the more likely scenario for most of us. This week, it’s time for a discussion on whether canon matters. Yes. Maybe. But also no. Did you really think that was gonna have a firm answer?

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Phoebe. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.

[intro music]

Oren: And welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Oren.

Chris: And I’m Chris.

Oren: Chris, did you know that we’ve never recorded any episodes that were longer than half an hour?

Chris: Geez. You know, I thought I remembered that, but I think that just never happened. I think somebody told me that that wasn’t real and I just accepted it.

Oren: Yeah, and it’s always been that way. And we’ve never had any other hosts but the two of us.

Chris: No, not at all.

Oren: One day we’ll have, you know, someone named Bunny to co-host and we will never have met her before.

Chris: Nope. Nope. Never happened.

Oren: Yeah. It’s our canon and we can do what we want with it. We’re talking about how much does canon matter, and this isn’t only because there’s a new Star Trek show out, although it’s not not because there’s a new Star Trek show out.

Chris: Did that Star Trek show actually do anything to change canon?

Oren: No, not really.

Chris: I mean, it takes place in like the far future when there is very little canon.

Oren: And anything that does appear to have changed is like, well, it’s been 800 years. Honestly, the weird part is how much is still the same. I was kind of winding up some trolls the other day about—because you know, people love to accuse new Trek of ruining canon in vague nonsense ways.

And I was just kind of winding them up a little bit and saying, Hey, go back to 1226 and just see how much has changed since then. The world is just a very different place in 800 years. But you know, people will still accuse it of breaking canon because canon violations are kind of like what corruption is in politics, where there’s usually some of it around somewhere if you go looking, and so it provides a very convenient cover for whatever unsavory thing you want to do, is that you can just say, well, I’m going after corruption, and like, are you? Maybe. Like, who knows? And so it’s the same thing with people who are like, that breaks canon. It’s like, okay, does it, and if it does, is that really why you’re mad about it?

Are you sure it’s not just that this character is played by a Black woman who’s loud and in your face and you don’t like that?

Chris: Yep. That definitely happens. And also, I mean, some people know better than to say, I don’t like this character because she’s played by a Black woman.

Oren: Yeah. They like to do little stealth bad faith arguments. And this is the thing that’s weird, is that so many people are attacking [Star Trek: Starfleet] Academy over its supposed canon violations when it’s trivially easy to show that that’s not the case. And you wonder, okay, if they’re being sinister already, why not just say something that’s harder to disprove? Like, well, I just, that character’s not well written, or the acting’s bad, which would also not be true, but is harder to demonstrate that it’s false.

And I think the reason is that even regressive Trekkies are still weird nerds, and we like to be able to concretely prove something and there’s this idea that like, well, I could concretely say that this is a canon violation, therefore the show’s bad, even when it’s not true.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, I do think that’s like citing facts, even if they’re fake facts, right? Because if we were to say, that character is written badly or the acting is bad, that’s clearly a subjective opinion, right? Whereas if you can claim that it’s [that] the canon is wrong, then that sounds more factual. And also, do you think that some of these nerds talk about canon as a way to kinda like brag or like, Hey, look what a nerd I am. Here’s my nerd credentials.

Oren: Oh yeah, absolutely. They a hundred percent do that.

Chris: This is like the weird fandom gatekeeping thing where like, see, I’m a better fan ’cause I know more than you or something.

Oren: Yeah. I mean it’s especially funny when they do it and they don’t even know that much. Like one guy I was arguing with was being like, oh, this new Jem’Hadar character doesn’t make sense ’cause the Jem’Hadar didn’t evolve to be that way. It’s like, you think the Jem’Hadar evolved to be like anything? All right, I guess someone hasn’t seen Deep Space Nine. I mean, I’m vulnerable to it too, right? Like I was just doing it, I was like, ha, I actually know more about canon than you do. Therefore, I’m a better nerd. So like, I get it. I understand. I just try to use that impulse for good.

Chris: Yeah. It’s funny though, because canon, with these big franchises, is ultimately such a kind of arbitrary line.

Oren: Right. And when you’re talking about a big franchise, there’s almost a hundred percent guarantee going to be some kind of continuity problems, right? It’s almost impossible for them not to be.

Chris: But I do have the answer to whether canon matters. I can just answer the question of this episode.

Oren: Oh, good. Do it.

Chris: When I don’t like the canon, it doesn’t matter at all. And when I do like the canon, it’s everything and it matters a lot.

Oren: Absolutely. That makes sense. Okay. We can call it, wow. Most efficient episode ever.

Chris: Yep.

Oren: And the good news is that this is not as big a problem for most of our audience because we’re typically writing novels and not big giant TV show franchises.

Chris: It will be a problem if you become George R.R. Martin.

Oren: Or if you’re Terry Pratchett or you’re just really prolific, it can become an issue. But most of us are probably not gonna write and publish enough books for it to come up.

Chris: And Sanderson says that all of his books are actually in the same universe.

Oren: Yeah, sure, Brando.

Chris: If he actually makes good on that, he may run into some canon issues, or maybe he won’t, just because it’s like, well, I guess that’s happening in another of the multiverse or planet over there, and so the stories don’t actually interact with each other in any way.

Oren: I’ve been told that he actually has started having them interact, which maybe, right, like I haven’t read far enough into any Brandon Sanderson series to know if that’s true or not.

Chris: The question is, does he pay for a secretary to track all of his canon for him?

Oren: Well, we already know that Brando is obsessively tracking his magic system on a spreadsheet, right? So I could buy that he also—

Chris: From what I understand, he also employs, like, his entire family because he’s got this whole thing going. So he might, he might have an employee who does nothing but keep track of what his canon is. Because, man, that would be so hard.

Oren: I mean, when you’re Brandon Sanderson and you’re that level of prolific, that could make sense, right? Like, that could be a good business expenditure. But mostly this comes up in big TV and movie franchises, right?

Because they not only tend to have more content, but they also tend to have big teams of people working on them. So that’s when it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to have a fully consistent continuity, right. Especially when you’re dealing with something like Star Trek where the original, they just didn’t care.

They had absolutely no thoughts to give about whether or not one episode lined up with another episode. They were just not doing that.

Chris: Oof. Yeah. That would become abrasive pretty quickly.

Oren: Yeah. The episodes contradict each other left, right, and sideways.

Chris: Can I share one funny thing from an interview The Hollywood Reporter, I believe did with George R.R. Martin recently.

Oren: Oh, please.

Chris: Because he still feels like he’s gonna finish or he’s still trying. He says he’s still trying to finish his series. And the funny thing about it though, is he’s planning on giving it a different ending than the Game of Thrones show, which of course had a very unpopular ending, and he gave them his notes.

So not clear whether he was like, oops, that’s not popular, and then decided to make changes or not. Or he only gave them a broad picture, right? And so for whatever reason, like, there are characters who are dead in one and not dead in the other. And I think one of the biggest reasons he has not finished his series is because he’s trying to give creative input on a dozen different things that are part of this universe.

Oren: Yeah. He’s got a new show now.

Chris: Right. And so to deal with the canon differences between the end of the novel, end of the show, they were thinking about doing a Jon Snow sequel spinoff because Jon Snow was up by himself in the north, away from the other characters.

So it won’t call attention to canon differences in whether those other characters in the south are dead or alive, which, okay, do what you gotta do, I guess. But then apparently the actor really wanted to do a really sad, depressing story where Jon Snow, you know, drives his wolf away and loses his sword and is just like building huts.

And HBO was like, yeah, so don’t really think this is what we want.

Oren: HBO made the right call there.

Chris: They really made the right call. Yeah, because I mean, the fans who super love Jon Snow, love him as like an empowerment character they identify with. That would not go over well.

Oren: I mean, and maybe this is just the mood right now. Maybe in 20 years this won’t be a big deal, but I, at this point, if I never see another sequel where the character is all beaten down and sad, it will be too soon.

Chris: I feel you so much there. I mean, Picard, oh, can we make Picard not canon, please.

Oren: I mean, Picard is also bad, right. But even the ones that are good at this point, I have seen so many of them and I’m just, I’m tired of it. Please, something else, like, I liked Logan, right? Logan’s a good movie, but I just, I don’t want another one of those.

Chris: Yeah, it’s true. I will complain less if it’s good, but it’s just like, Hey, we had a good feeling and from the happy ending of the last story, why did we have to suddenly make it sad? And you retroactively take away that character’s victory. That’s…

Oren: Actually, everything’s terrible and you’re depressed. I was like, all right, sure.

Chris: So I really do resent when a franchise insists that unpopular and bad material is canon and stick to them, and I get that there’s subjectivity here. For instance, Star Wars with some of the prequels or sequels or, it’s like the idea, all this stuff with Data that happens in the TNG [The Next Generation] movies and then in Picard, it’s like, do we really have to do this? Like this is just a horrible fate for Data.

Oren: Well, okay, here’s the thing. There are instances where you, as the new person brought into helm, a big franchise, have a bunch of constraints created by the last people who helmed the franchise. And if you’re JJ Abrams, sometimes those last people was also you, which is very funny.

But that does happen. But in a lot of these cases, that’s not really what’s going on. Like in Picard. Yeah. Okay. So Data dies in Nemesis. Terrible movie, but nothing in Nemesis required them to do what they did with Data in Picard. That was all them. Nemesis even ends with the implication that actually Data has been brought back to life in his weird clone brother they found. It leaves them that door and they decided not to go with it and instead to go with the idea that Data has been trapped in a box for 20 years, which, there’s nothing in Nemesis that even hints at that. They just made that up.

Chris: It’s like, now that it happened and it’s horrible, I just want it to be not canon and to just forget that ever happened, right. And so then the franchise is like, no, that’s totally canon. Picard is all canon. Then now, there might be references to that or I just, I want it to not be true, basically.

Oren: Yeah. I mean, I get it. Picard was awful and it made me feel bad watching it. And I don’t want that to be—but then of course season three of Picard happens where they try to undo all of that and it’s just as bad.

Chris: I just wanna take an eraser and just be like, this show never happened.

Oren: Yeah. I mean, I think in general you have to decide what are you going to reference and what are you not going to reference. Like, it’s weird to me how much of the prequels modern Star Wars seems to be interested in channeling.

George made a mess in the prequels, right. I understand that much. But I’m not sure we had to continue with the idea of the Jedi as child kidnappers. Like, yeah, that is what George said, but I think if we just didn’t talk about that, no one is gonna be wondering, Hey, what about all those children the Jedi kidnapped?

That’s a very strange choice. Especially since they’re not gonna end up by being like, actually the Jedi are terrible. They can’t do that. They still need you to buy Jedi toys.

Chris: Yeah. This is just like, the only solution to the droid slavery problem is to just quietly forget the droids are slaves and never speak of it again. Just quietly make them actual people with rights and just forget all that.

Oren: Yeah, and then of course we should also consider that sometimes canon’s bad and you should just ignore it. The one that always comes to mind for me is there’s a lot of bad Star Trek canon because there are a billion Star Trek episodes and some of them were just bad ideas and it would be weird if you were constraining the franchise with that, like, I don’t think you need to pay attention to the part where they establish women can’t be captains, or the part where they establish that going to warp destroys space. Those are both bad ideas. They should not have been included and we should just ignore them.

Chris: They were remarkably consistent with that warp speed global warming thing, or were they?

Oren: No, they abandoned it after two episodes.

Chris: Really?

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Maybe I was just surprised they remembered it for two episodes.

Oren: Yeah, no, they have like two episodes where they—there’s like one episode where they mention we’ve been given permission to break the warp speed limit, even though that will cause space global warming. And then I think there’s some line, I don’t remember if this is actually in an episode or if it’s in a technical manual somewhere, but there’s a line about how Voyager’s new engines don’t do space global warming. So we fixed it. Don’t worry about it.

Chris: Oh, okay.

Oren: And it’s like, yeah, that was the right choice, because this is a show about exploring things at warp speed. Doing that probably shouldn’t destroy the universe.

Chris: See, it would be better if they talked about how there was now a cap and trade program where they could trade in their licenses to go faster than, you know, warp five.

Oren: No, I don’t like this. This is a bad idea. I hate this.

Chris: Hey, just, you know, be an example of what we need in the world if we’re going there anyway.

Oren: And of course, the place where it gets the most messy is when you’re dealing with franchises that are multimedia franchises. And there’s like, there’s no way to win there.

Like you’ve got—hey, this show has a bunch of tie-in novels. Like, okay, are we expecting the people who watch the show to have read the novels? Because most of them won’t.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, there are some—it’s not impossible to keep those things as canon and work around them and have references that aren’t too noticeable.

I think the problem is that if the novels are about anything important, right, which is what will sell them, then they will put constraints on the movies, which having a much bigger budget, the storyteller of the movie isn’t—you know, director or whoever is not gonna want to have those constraints because that makes it harder for them to tell a good story.

I mean, if all the novels were like, Hey, this is Jon Snow up north, right, then maybe we could avoid that problem.

Oren: Hey, this novel is about when Data went to a violin tournament. It’s like, okay, yeah, that probably fits. That was what was so annoying about the start of the Abrams movies, was there was this weird marketing push, if I remember correctly, where these comics were supposed to be totally canon.

Like everything that happened in these comics, it’s like it happened in the movie, which admittedly, I guess is sort of true because the movies also don’t make sense with each other. So I guess it’s kind of true.

Chris: Mm. Sounds like false advertising to me.

Oren: I mean it absolutely was, right. And that’s always how it’s been.

That’s why, you know, people got upset when Disney was like, the extended universe Star Wars novels aren’t canon and like, they never were, guys. No matter who owned the rights, if they ever made more Star Wars movies, they were never going to continue the Star Wars universe from where the novels were, that was just not going to happen.

Chris: I mean, I do think the fun of having a vast canon is, of course, when you have something like Lower Decks come and it has tons of references, right? It is definitely fun and very immersive to see them do the references and get them right. But yeah. What is the thing, if you were to take one thing and make it not canon anymore, what would you choose?

Oren: I mean, pfft, you can be really mean with this one, right? It’s like, that movie that other people like, and I don’t, I would get rid of it.

Chris: Enterprise, Star Trek Enterprise.

Oren: I’m not really interested in telling people that I would excise whatever their favorite is. As far as from Star Wars, I would take out the thing about the Jedi being child kidnappers. George obviously didn’t think that through, did not consider the implications and now we have this weird elephant in the room whenever we talk about the Jedi, that no one is willing to really acknowledge. What about you?

Chris: If I had to choose one thing, I could just choose Jar Jar Binks. Just like, the whole character is now non-canon.

Oren: I mean, he definitely doesn’t, you know, have a big impact, right. So it’s not like taking him out is gonna change much.

Chris: Granted, he does appear later and he is much less obnoxious when he appears.

Oren: Yeah. He’s in Clone Wars and he’s fine, right?

Chris: Right. Or I could non-canon Ben killing Han Solo.

Oren: Not a fan of that?

Chris: No, I think it was a really bad move. It was clear that they still wanted people to sympathize with Ben—Kylo Ren, but that was not gonna happen after he killed Han Solo. So I think what happened is, you know, they realized Harrison Ford really wanted his character killed off. The storytellers couldn’t resist doing something dramatic that they would not normally get to do because Harrison Ford was leaving. So they put in that twist, but they didn’t really think very hard about how it would impact a character that they actually wanted to be a likable villain. A sympathetic villain.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: And it led to one of the reasons Kylo Ren really doesn’t work very well. So yeah, that should just be zapped.

Oren: Yeah, fair enough. So we’ve been talking a lot about when canon is not really that important or when people overexaggerate it or when it was never gonna be true in the first place. But coming at it from the other side, I do think continuity is not a bad thing.

And if you can have better continuity, I think you should if you don’t have to give up something critical for it. And there are just some choices you could make that will help you have better continuity, and the one that keeps getting me is why prequels? Who is it at Hollywood that is just demanding more prequels?

Like you guys know you can just make sequels, right? You can just keep going forward. Time doesn’t stop.

Chris: I mean, they’re probably desperate to reuse story elements that people will recognize so it still feels like part of the franchise. ‘Cause you can keep making sequels, but at some point it becomes really hard to use existing characters and we have to be like, it’s their children or something.

Oren: Yeah. But a lot of these prequels don’t use existing characters either. I guess when you’re doing a Star Trek prequel, you can use the really long lived characters. Like, you can have Spock show up and maybe that’s the entire reason for doing Discovery as a prequel, but man, does it create weird problems.

Chris: I wonder with Discovery, with Star Trek in particular, there is the fact that TOS [The Original Series] was like in an old timeline, and maybe they’re trying to associate it with classic Trek. And there’s also the fact that the technology in Star Trek is very out of hand, and certainly with Enterprise, at least, right, where they didn’t have transporters—

Oren: Well, until they did.

Chris: Until they did, right? That might have been something that they were trying to do. It’s just very weird with Discovery because then they add all of this technology that seems even more advanced than TNG. There was also a change in creative leadership happening there, right, and other weird things.

Oren: Yeah. I feel like the reason Discovery is a prequel is locked inside Brian Fuller’s head and we’ll never find out until he writes a book about it.

Chris: Yeah. Whereas, I don’t know, the whole young Han Solo, that was the one that everybody was like, why? Why are we doing this, a young Han Solo? What is it about Han Solo that means that we need to see?

And I think maybe that was just, Hey, we wanna do a recognizable character, but we also want an excuse to cast a new actor because Harrison Ford totally defined that character so much. Maybe that was what was going on there.

Oren: Yeah. And then it didn’t work out very well and Disney decided they were just gonna do deepfakes from now on. And it’s like, oh great. Thanks Disney. That’s what we wanted.

Chris: Whereas far past prequels can work better, right? For Star Wars has like, oh, the Old Republic Glory days, right. I can see the attraction of that. And then you don’t have many constraints, so that’s one option. But yeah, I don’t know. I think they’re just looking for something recognizable.

I still, you know, think about Obi-Wan [Kenobi], the midquel.

Oren: Oh man.

Chris: How very well they did considering it was a midquel.

Oren: Yeah. The ratio of terrible premise to pretty good execution is unusual in that show. It’s like, yeah, I mean this is one of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard, but yeah, you know, it’s not bad, you know, you kind of made it work.

As long as I ignore half of the implications. The idea that Leia had an adventure with Obi-Wan and knows him really well, is deeply funny.

Chris: And then got amnesia afterwards, of course.

Oren: Or even Rogue One, right? It’s very funny to watch New Hope and imagine it in the context of, Vader just saw Leia’s ship escape from the big battle and then look at their dialogue with that in mind.

Chris: Yeah, or unfortunately, we decided to have a go at watching Rogue One again after Andor, and gosh, I wish they lined up better.

Oren: Yeah. Not so much.

Chris: But no, they don’t quite line up and that’s too bad. Yeah.

Oren: They mostly, at least from what I could tell, they mostly don’t line up in terms of tone. The biggest continuity thing that I noticed is that for some reason in Andor they made K-2 invincible.

Chris: Yeah. That was really strange, yeah.

Oren: I don’t know why they did that.

Chris: Now you have to find reasons to leave K-2 behind. I think they wanted to leave K-2 behind anyway though, because it’s a very serious show and K-2 is a comedic character.

Oren: Yeah, it’s really funny to see how little K-2 there is and it really feels like the reason is ’cause he makes jokes and we don’t make jokes on Andor. That’s not a thing we do here.

This is a little less flashy, but another thing that just helps that I wish more storytellers in big franchises would consider is to think about the implications of the stuff you’re introducing. If we go all the way back to TOS, they introduced the transporter to save money on landing scenes because the shuttle set and effects were not ready yet.

And Star Trek has been dealing with that choice for more than 50 years now, and it has been a plague on the franchise ever since.

Chris: Why did they add the transporter back [in] Enterprise?

Oren: I don’t know, for the same reason why they decided to have “polarize the hull plating” fill the same role as “raise shields.”

Chris: Maybe they brought in a bunch of Star Trek writers who just didn’t know how to write episodes without it.

Oren: Yeah, I mean, it’s hard to say exactly, like we know that Rick Berman and Brannon Braga had a lot of creative control for the first three seasons, and they just, you know, don’t seem to have been great at it.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, I do think the thing with the shields is because, again, the problem with guns, it’s like a gunfight, but at ship scale where usually shooting is gonna become deadly and maneuvering is not that—I mean you can make it interesting in some cases, but if it’s just like a bunch of empty space, right?

Trying to fly around and communicate strategy there is gonna be difficult. So we need a way for fights to last a little while and to build tension. And I feel like the shield is just a very convenient, okay, it’s down to 80%, 60%, 40%, and it’s not very good, but it does something. It shows that the ship is in more and more trouble and it allows the fight to last longer.

And without that, you kind of have to do more work to come up with an actual battle and communicate what the impact of, you know, the shooting is without just letting the ship instantly explode. And so I can see why, you know, that just might become a nightmare and it’s easier to just [be] like, okay, we need shields.

Oren: Yeah. And a lot of continuity problems are introduced because the writers added something as a way to get out of a problem they didn’t otherwise know how to get out of, like the Avatar State in the Avatar setting is like this. The Avatar State causes a ton of problems in [Legend of] Korra because it’s way OP and Korra can use it for most of the series, and so they just have to keep coming up with excuses why she doesn’t use it.

But in the original show, the Avatar State was clearly a way to put the characters in a situation where they couldn’t possibly survive and then give them a way to survive it. That’s the main purpose that the Avatar State serves, and as a result, it causes all these problems later and it’s like, well, maybe you could have just not done that, you know, just a thought.

Chris: Yep. Yeah, I mean it’s that oneupmanship I talk about with plotting, right, where you make a problem for your character, don’t know how to get them outta that problem, so you give them a new ability, new gun, new weapon, whatever. They use that to solve the problem, and then somehow you have to create a problem that’s even harder because they have the new thing, and then you keep building the problems and the character’s capabilities until it just becomes impossible.

Oren: Yeah, the power creep is real. All right, well, with that, I think we’ll bring the canon of this episode to a close. It’s over. Nothing that happened in this episode is actually canon, so if you get mad at it, you can’t ’cause it’s not real.

Chris: But if you would like to see more actually canonical material in the Mythcreants Universe, you can become our patron. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants

Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.

[outro music]

This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.

578 – How Much Does Canon Matter?

Show Notes

Transcript