Canon formation, at its heart, has to do with defending what you love against obsolescence, but love can tip into zealotry, which can lead us away from actual criticism into some pretty ugly zones. Our mutual hypersensitivities might have yanked us away from enlightening, crucial — and fun — cultural detective work (close reading, unpacking, interpreting) and turned us into beat cops always on patrol, arresting anything that rankles. That results in a skirmish like the one during last summer’s Whitney Biennial, which culminated in the insistence that Dana Schutz lose her career for an underwhelming painting of Emmett Till because, as a white woman, she couldn’t possibly understand this black boy’s death. The protests didn’t feel like an aesthetic demand but a post-traumatic lashing out. Canceling her might be harsh historical justice, but it denies me an understanding of why the painting fails.

This is to say that fandom and spectatorship, of late, have grown darkly possessive as the country has become violently divided. Especially in this moment when certain works of canonical art are in fact at risk of becoming morally obsolete — both art that degrades and insults and the work of men accused of having done the same. There’s a camp of fans — who tend to be as white and male as the traditional canon makers — who don’t want that work opened up or repossessed. They don’t want a challenge to tradition — so please, no women in the writers’ room, say superfans of the animated comedy “Rick and Morty,” and no earnest acknowledgment that Apu is a bothersome South Asian stereotype, say the makers of “The Simpsons.” It’s all too canonical to change.

You can see the reactionary urge on every side. We’ve reached this comical — but politically necessary — place in which nonstraight, nonwhite, nonmale culture of all kinds has also been placed beyond reproach. Because it’s precious or rare or not meant for the people who tend to do the canonizing. If Korama Danquah, writing for a site called Geek Girl Authority, asserts that the sister of Black Panther is more brilliant than the white billionaire also known as Iron Man, she doesn’t want to hear otherwise. “Shuri is the smartest person in the Marvel universe,” goes the post. “That’s not an opinion, that’s canon. She is smarter than Tony Stark.” “Black Panther,” according to this argument, is canon not only because it’s a Marvel movie but because it matters too much to too many black people to be anything else.

But that’s also made having conversations about the movie in which somebody leads with, “I really liked it, but ...” nearly impossible. This protectionism makes all the sense in the world for a country that’s failed to acknowledge a black audience’s hunger for, say, a black comic-book blockbuster. But critic-proofing this movie — making it too black to dislike — risks making it less equal to and more fragile than its white peers.

The intolerance of the traditional gatekeepers might have spurred a kind of militancy from thinkers (and fans) who’ve rarely been allowed in. Bloom’s literary paradise is long lost, and now history compels us to defend Wakanda’s. But that leaves the contested art in an equally perilous spot: not art at all, really, but territory.