Say what you will about the style of presentation, the arguments laid out in the video below about the importance of adhering to established canon in our common cultural myths – Star Trek, Star Wars and the like – are hard to dispute.
The willingness of so many property owners to violate their own canon (an example given in the video is “Star Trek Discovery” Klingorks having a cloaking device ten years before the Romulans invented the thing) is irritating on a number of levels But for me, there are two primary sources of annoyance:
1: The cognitive dissonance, the destruction of the possibility of willing suspension of disbelief
2: The pure laziness of it.
One of the reasons why I prefer *good* science fiction to *good* fantasy is that science fiction lives in a world of rules. Even if you have established that your spaceships have hyperdrives, grav plating and deflector shields (all things that violate currently understood laws of physics), you still have rules… the laws of physics may be different in Star Trek than in reality, but Scotty will still point out to you that those laws exist. If you box your characters into a corner, they can only get out by working within the system. In fantasy, you can have magical crap happen that comes out of the blue. The wizard pulls an obscure spell out of his grimoire. A ghost walks through the wall and drags the bag guy to Hell. That sort of thing. Being forced to work within the established rules makes the writer be smarter, which makes the characters smarter.
Similarly, not violating established canon of timelines and character background and character *appearance* may make things marginally more difficult for new writers in a franchise… but that difficulty forges better product. Let’s imagine that there was an Arbiter Of Star Trek Canon who had the legal ability to utterly quash anti-canon stuff. The creators of STD would have had a massive problem. No “spore drive.” no cloaking device. No Klingons who suddenly care very deeply about the corpses of their dead and who eat their enemies. No ships that look not only far more advanced than those in TOS, but which barely look like they belong in the same universe. These and other rulings would have pretty much doomed STD as a prequel series. But you know what? Make it a post-Voyager sequel series and a lot of these objections go away. A *lot* of the fanbase would have been a whole lot happier.
Only touched upon in the video is the politics of canon-busting. If you make a sequel series to some sci-fi series from the mid 70’s that virtually nobody remembers and you decide to mess with the established canon…w ell, really, who cares. By definition it had little to no cultural impact.But if you meddle with Star Trek or James Bond or Superman, you’re meddling with something of great importance to not only individual fans but to the culture at large. This is not exactly revelatory. So if someone is changing a “cultural myth,” you have to wonder *why,* especially when there’s no good reason for them to do so… apart from political reasons. And when they respond to your opposition with accusations that have nothing to do with your opposition… then you know.
