 Have you ever had to take shelter inside of a tauntaun during a blizzard? I hear that they're lukewarm. There are exactly 184 days, 5 hours, and 38 minutes until Star Wars Episode 7 is released. I know because this website loads every time I boot up my computer. Many of my friends are Star Wars geeks in a pretty serious way, less like, man I really wish I had a lightsaber, and more like, should I cosplay as a scout trooper or an imperial guard? They're also pretty excited about the new movie. However, after Disney announced Episode 7, there was also a press release from Lucasfilm stating that all of the extended universe media surrounding Star Wars at that time, which included more than a hundred novels, radio dramas, video games, technical reference books, and a mountain of comics, were all now to be considered non-canon. Fictional canon is what's considered to be the incontrovertible core of a media franchise. Someone might write some fanfiction about Han and Chewie's adventures, but if it's not considered canon, those stories aren't considered to have actually happened in the Star Wars universe. And that's kind of a big deal. Not only is the state of fictional canon worthy of an explicit press release, but Lucasfilm actually has a massive curated database of information regarding the Star Wars universe, organized into a five level hierarchy of canonicity, from N canon, or non-canon, such as the appearance of Darth Vader in the Soul Calibur video games, to G canon, or George Lucas canon, which is considered to be indisputable fact. The demotion of the extended universe canonicity is interesting for several reasons. First, it means that Disney won't have to walk a razor's edge between die-hard fans who've read all of the books and know every single detail about them, and people who are new to the franchise. Everyone who sees episode 7 will do so with only the context of the previous movies for reference. Second, it means that they won't have to try to reconcile the numerous and frequently conflicting stories of the extended universe with the new films in any way. Considering just how much information is in that database, trying to make a movie around any significant portion of it would have been a nightmare. But perhaps most interesting is the act itself of asserting some sort of authority, not just over a franchise, but over which fictional stories in that franchise are real fiction and which ones are made up fiction? I mean, we do appreciate when media is self-consistent. It's easier to suspend disbelief when all of the bits that make up a story work with each other, so it's not really weird that the people who are creating that story would try to make sure that the new bits don't conflict with the old bits. But what is really weird is that the people who currently own the franchise can make some declaration that supposedly demotes the canonicity of other established media. There's apparently some sort of authority that Lucas Films maintains that it has, not just over the films it's produced, but over every single YouTube video and action figure that's set in the same universe as those films. Of course, this sort of supposed authority isn't unique to Star Wars. Star Wars will frequently release new information revising or retconning previous work after it's been published, from JK Rowling's tweets about Jewish wizards to the insane gymnastics necessary to maintain continuity in comic books. It's not limited to stories which everyone agrees are fictional either. There are several instances in history where religious institutions set their feet down and declared some bit of media indisputable dogma beyond question and some other bit of related media just fan fiction. So it's a relatively common and widespread practice. However, it does seem a little strange to say that whoever has purchased the rights to produce officially licensed media for a franchise can erase or even reverse widely held aspects of that franchise. I mean, even when official media is produced that doesn't necessarily agree with audience assumptions, even if it doesn't explicitly contradict anything that we've seen so far, we still get confused. What? What do you mean R2 has jump jets? How could he possibly have jump jets? What's more, the new Star Wars movies might totally contradict George Lucas' original vision for the universe. What happens to G. Cannon when J. J. Cannon comes into effect? Does that square with this idea of total authorial control over a fictional franchise? Both of these objections seem like pretty good indications that there's something more complicated going on than simply checking the Lucasfilm database to see what's actually happened in the Star Wars universe. I won't go too far into the whole what is art can of worms, but there is a certain bit of philosophy that I find helpful here. The American philosopher John Dewey objected to the idea that the artist is the sole source and authority over art's meaning, or in this particular case is canonicity. For Dewey, art isn't just a thing, it's a process, which necessarily includes an audience's interpretation in order to be art. In his work, Art is Experience, he writes, Language exists only when it is listened to as well as spoken. The hearer is an indispensable partner. The work of art is complete only as it works in the experience of others than the one who created it. That rings pretty true for me. Art and by extension media doesn't really mean anything without an audience. A painting that nobody has ever looked at and sits in a closet until it decays into dust hasn't imparted any particular artistic significance to the closet floor. In that sense, as Dewey suggests, media is necessarily a sort of joint effort between its creator and its audience, and the audience actually does a whole lot of work filling in what isn't there. We're never explicitly told that Chewie is actually speaking in an alien language instead of just roaring. We have to fill that in ourselves. Everyone who's experienced it in some way is carrying around some version of the Star Wars universe in their heads, with varying degree of detail. Some of us have only generated enough context to know that nobody has to worry about gravity on the Millennium Falcon, while others of us have intricate theories about where blue milk comes from. That's a lot of distributed power over a fictional franchise, which is pretty cool. I know the original creators might have a little bit more leverage to dictate to the rest of us what is or isn't canon, but if Episode 7 were a huge enough departure from what the rest of us considered to be Star Wars, it wouldn't matter what level it was assigned in that Lucasfilm database. For most of us, it simply wouldn't count. The opposite is also true. If enough people accept a fan-made contribution to a fictional universe as canonical, sometimes called head canon, or fan-in, that can sometimes become a real addition to that universe. For example, the original Star Trek series never gave a first name to the character Lieutenant Uhura. A fan coined the name Nyota, which gained widespread acceptance, including the endorsement of actress Nichelle Nichols, until finally, in the recent Star Trek reboot, it was canonized. So, regardless of what Disney or Lucasfilms decided or didn't happen in the Star Wars universe, the collaborative nature of media sort of guarantees us, the audience, a certain degree of control over that fictional world. If you're like some of my friends and you're terrified that the new movies are going to be awful, that maybe we've sacrificed the canonicity of some decent novels for a new trilogy exclusively about Jar Jar, don't worry so much. Anyone is allowed to take the bits that they like and pretend that the rest of it never happened, no matter who says otherwise. And if we all like something enough, even if it doesn't make it into the movies, that's still our version of Star Wars. After all, the name of that Lucasfilm database is the Holocron, a name that's taken from those supposedly non-canonical extended universe media. Do you agree with Dewey's interpretation of art? Is there any extended universe stuff that you'd really like to see in the new movies? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah, blah, subscribe, blah, share. And don't stop thunking.