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

[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.