There’s only one problem with true canon: It doesn’t exist. And in an effort to hold people to it, enthusiasts strangle criticism, hamstring creators, and make fan communities far more toxic for everybody.

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Where does canon come from in the first place? The simple answer is love. Fans are people who find intense joy in minute details, from the stitching on a costume to the intricate backstory of a character. The desire to play in fictional worlds created the necessity for distinguishing between “official” work by creators—canon—and the unofficial work of everybody else. There are other sorts of canons of course: The critical canon enfolds art considered to be superior, while the Church canon comprises the rules and beliefs as dictated by Rome. But the canon of geek culture encompasses a strange balance of power. It has its own self-appointed priests, its own heretics, its own endless struggles and outside influences. It’s a metric created by fans, for fans, that nonetheless pays lip service to the supremacy of the creator’s vision. This is canon’s inherent friction: It’s an attempt to lock down and categorize the imaginary creations of other people.

These other people don’t always cooperate. The idea that creators dictate an ineffable and consistent canon has always been a bit of a convenient fiction—storytellers tend to have a looser relationship with their own work, changing details to fit the need of a current story, coming up with ideas they like better, or simply losing track of things. George R. R Martin’s immense and ongoing Song of Ice and Fire saga is a typical case—Martin’s often admitted he needs the help of semi-professional fans to keep it all straight.

Works with multiple successive creative teams are even more ramshackle, as everything established by one author is often cheerfully contradicted by another. (Comics are especially notable for this. One legendary example: Is Hawkman a policeman from an alien planet, or a reincarnated Egyptian prince, or a god, or some combination of the three, or neither?) Engaging with canon thus is an act of personal curation: a chance to play textual games with absent authors, draw quasi-talmudic connections, craft subversive readings, or spin ideas that weave neatly between the lines of primary texts. But the common understanding of canon also could be a ruler: hard, minutely measured, and often used to slap people’s knuckles, which has happened more and more as the loose canons of fan culture have become codified by corporate influences.

Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, DC and Marvel began recruiting a new generation of writers and artists from fan communities. These fans-turned-creators and their successors carried with them an appreciation for canonical minutia and details, as well as a tendency to sneak old ideas into newly official contexts. Not only did the companies find official canons editorially useful for keeping their invented universes straight, but fan audiences also loved them. Multimedia properties like Star Wars and Star Trek soon followed a similar trajectory, drawing from passionate fan bases and instituting official (often contradictory) canons of their own. Companies began selling spinoffs and ancillary guides expounding on official canon, all aimed at dedicated fans. The prevailing illusion was one of cozy intimacy between fan and company, with both equally invested in true canon and the purity of intellectual property.