On Canon, Narrative Tendencies, Etc.

[brainwane]

I was having lunch with a friend and we were talking about what we're reading and watching, and he said that he doesn't love when the people working on a series/franchise/universe choose to go backwards rather than forwards -- to get into doing prequels, filling in backstory, rather than stories about what comes NEXT.

And so I've been thinking shaggy thoughts about that, and about how safe it is to know where things are going to end up, and about how if your audience is really knowledgable about and attached to existing canon, to the point where it becomes part of their identity, then it's really pleasurable to do prequels and revisits and so on. And time travel stories are part of that.... a time travel story is a way to turn something into a bit of a prequel or a revisit to an earlier part of the current story. And this spoilery post about MCU and HP by ghost_lingering reminded me of how the two are similar in this way, and I just watched the Discovery Season 2 finale which also hooks in because it's thoroughly about time travel (within a prequel show). And I do like prequel-y stuff but also I want to stop trying to squeeze more story into a diorama that was already pretty full.

I'm pretty handwavy about all this.

Comments

[sciatrix]

Oh, that's a thought. I don't... love that, exactly, in part because prequels require you to work with what you have and retcon, and when writers combine those things with a desire to increase more diversity than they previously had, often the whole thing gets more than a little strained. Hi, JKR, I'm staring unblinkingly at you.

Also, I'm an optimist, and I don't like getting invested in what I know is going to be a tragic ending. Which is depressingly common in prequels.

I've been thinking of a similar thing that annoys me about MCU and HP (and, I think, the Dresden Files), which is that I apparently Do Not Like attempts to wrap up series with big world-saving Finales that are supposed to tie up all the strings for a whole bunch of people at once. Partly, I think I just don't like the stakes; again, optimist, and these things always culminate in Tragic Battles with High Stakes that leave me torn between going "well, these characters just went through a whack ton of trauma, not sure I buy everything's going to be fine" and "goddammit, half my faves are dead and the other half are scarred all to hell; what am I doing?" and "look, life doesn't end as neatly as all that, I see eight other stories that could branch off of this one, and the attempts to sew them up neatly and echo the beginning points mostly just feel constricting now."

Related, but a different thing, I think.

[audrey_eee]

I haven’t seen any of the ones you mention, but I was talking to my partner about narrative time-arranging yesterday because I’m sick and a thing I like to do when I’m sick is watch the Fast & Furious movies. It’s interesting how they wrote the series into a corner because they didn’t expect it to continue, then had to pivot a couple of times before they could claim that *now* is when the third movie takes place. I don’t mind that as much as the thing where it seems like the creator just doesn’t know how to move forward.

[cbrachyrhynchos]

Discovery is an interesting case. Star Trek has a very loose canon in modern terms. ToS wasn't written as even a 60s serial, much less a 21st century TV series with the obligatory season arc. There's plenty about ToS that's best forgotten (my candidate, the planet that fought the Korean War for hundreds of years, with the Declaration of Independence as a religious text). The stage crew were doing the best they could to portray ubiquitous computing with blinking red lights and rear-projection screens. Disco Season 2 managed to make two of the weakest ToS episodes better by adding some much-needed motivation to The Cage and The Menagerie.

McGuire has been doing interesting things with prequels in Wayward Children. The first story begins with Nancy introduced to all these other children who had their own magic-portal fantasy. The followups mostly explore the origin stories of those secondary characters.