Of what is and is not

 
I got the opportunity to talk to my daughter sroni by phone last night, and among other things she told me about a brief fanfic she’d done. (I’d read it already, on her LJ, so I knew what she meant.) She had a question for me about the nature of canon. In her chosen ficverse, one of the characters had made a statement, and sroni’s narrative revealed that the character had been fibbing slightly. A friend told her this was changing canon; sroni took a different position, but wanted my thoughts on this.

I told her that she had, at most, stretched canon, maybe just a little but not more than a little. Canon is a slippery beast under the best of circumstances. Within a fictional world, canon is the totality of what happened and what is, as depicted by that reality. A specific example: J.K. Rowling offering her famous opinion that Dumbledore was gay. So, was he? Canonically, we don’t know … because canonically — what Rowling said within the stories — there was no explicit statement or depiction, and no reliable clues or even substantial hints in that direction. She could easily have written him as gay; he was her character, she owned him. She didn’t write him that way. Operating within the canon of her creation, she was the absolute master; outside that canon, she is a voice you absolutely can’t afford to ignore but, ultimately, just one more opinion. Her opinion carries enormous weight, but her opinion isn’t canon.

Canon can contradict itself; more to the point, it can appear to contradict itself. In Buffy Season 1, Sunnydale High records show Buffy’s birthday as being in October, yet in every subsequent season she celebrated her birthday in January. Spike said Angel was his sire (“School Hard”, S2-3), but we subsequently saw that Drusilla was the one who made him a vampire. Yet these contradictions within the course of events aren’t necessarily contradictions of canon.

I used to have a set of dogtags that list my blood type as B-positive. I got rid of them, because they were wrong. In real life, people make mistakes, and sometimes the mistakes go into official records. (Buffy’s birthday according to SHS records.) My daughter, in one of her blogs, occasionally refers to one or another very close friend as her brother or her sister. In real life, people speak figuratively, using statements they know to be not factually accurate as a way of expressing a different aspect of reality. (Spike’s naming Angel as his sire.)

On a television show, canon is what we see and hear. Only what we see and hear. Canonically, it’s accepted that the first time Xander ever had sex was with Faith … but we don’t absolutely know that’s true, we only know that he told her he’d never been “up with people” before. I’m not challenging the accepted view; watching those sequences, I’m thoroughly convinced that he was telling the truth. It’s not canon, however, that he was telling the truth; it’s only canon that he said what he said. Because we saw (heard) him say it.

That doesn’t even touch on deeper instances of distinguishing canon, even within the Buffyverse itself. (Joss Whedon has said that the “Season 8” comics are canon; does that mean that the Buffy comics before weren’t canon, or weren’t quite? How about the ‘authorized’ novels? And the Angel comics, from a different publisher, permitted but not explicitly endorsed by Joss … do we count those as canon, or not?) It’s just the foundation from which everything else must flow: canon is what the source material says, or shows, the reality of that universe to be.