As a fellow fan of fictions (not to mention accidental alliteration oh there I go again) I've recently come to the realization that canon (to me) is a bunch of bull. It hit me while finishing the canonical Season 8 of Buffy The Vampire Slayer (the comic book continuation of the tv show, given Joss Whedon's blessing and (debatable) watchful eye), when I realized it reeeeally, reeeally sucked! Like, no redeeming qualities whatsoever. This is coming from someone who's fairly easy going with suckage. The last couple of seasons of the show weren't perfect but they redeemed themselves in their own ways, and in the end I accept them for that.
ANYWHO, it sucked. In terms of the shit that was happening, none of it felt coherent. Not logically, in terms of character motivation and in-world logic, or more problematically to me anyway in terms of subtext. If the ending to the show was empowering, season 8 was about how Buffy actually fucked up making a slayer army, and this led to her essentially damning the world by the end of the S8 run (all to fucking sync up with a in-canon comic Joss wrote about future vampire slayer Fray). Ugh. So many issues here.
And Then I thought hey, why do I give a shit? This is fiction. By definition none of this ever happened. So why does it matter when the creator tells me that this is more real than those other stories (either the fan fictions other people wrote, often which have been better, or even better than that the very vague fan fiction in my head).
What I'm asking everybody, is how much does canon mean to you? Because within geek circles in general I'd say it carries way too much weight.
Is a good say, Star Wars story that's not considered canon hold any weight? What about those stories that were considered canon before Lucas created his shit second trilogy? Shouldn't the quality of the story mean more than who's stamp of approval is on it?
Or we could go the other way and say for better or worse, we owe it to the author to accept his continued telling as the only one that matters, because without the creator we wouldn't even have these stories.
I think I'm actually fairly middle of the road, stories are stories. They each serve the purpose of their storyteller.
Loki for instance, he's both a semi-harmless trickster in Norse mythology and later an evil mastermind of sorts. Does one of these interpretations have to cancel out or undermine the other? No, because Loki isn't real. He's a fiction, serving the purpose of many story tellers.
What do you folks think?