First off, I wanna say that I’m a meganerd, I get that. This is something really dumb , but bear with me.
As a teenager mumble mumble years ago, I was super into Star Wars, and as such was super into canon. I always kept up with canon, and what was going on behind the scenes in all the movies, books, comics, and TV shows.
I took the cancellation of the EU pretty hard, but was excited for what was to come with Disney’s new trilogy and all the exciting other content that took place in the already existing timeline, which was promised to flow better with the overall narrative presented with the six main films.
But now, it seems like they’re changing what’s considered canon so much to the point that it’s confusing (looking at recent Kanan comic and Ahsoka novel retcons and others), and I’m starting to get to a point where, I really just don’t care enough to worry about a gospel truth of a nonexistent world.
It’s frustrating to get invested into a franchise where at any moment, your favorite comic, novel ,game, or TV show can just be written off as never having happened in universe. For people who take these works of fiction seriously, it’s exhausting!
So I’ve found my solution, one which I maybe should have had long ago- I just don’t care anymore.
This started with Star Wars but has honestly just gone off into all my favorite works of fiction, to the point that the only thing I care about is whether its a great work of art and whether or not I have a great time with it.
Does anyone else have any thoughts regarding canon in fiction, and whether or not you actually care about it or whether you don’t care about it at all?
IME, Star Wars fans are less a fan of the movies, and more a fan of the toys they played with when they were kids.
It doesn’t really matter what is or isn’t canon, because they only want to revel in their nostolgia-informed headcanon.
This is quite different from, say, nerds you’d meet at a Ren-faire. They are either fans of high fantasy, which everyone agrees is entirely made-up and headcanon and whatever a person wants, or fans of era-specific historical study which is an extremely large corpus of culture and literature and artifacts that is virtually unending.
IMO, with star wars, the fandom could really do better job of emulating and embracing the first group. Just try to have fun and stop worrying about canon. If you try to obess about minutia, you’re going to have to pick something with a wider breadth than a specific disney IP cobbled together by many different people over many decades which is going to be inhearently a mess.