Canonicity 4: Judgment Day
We continue our inquiry as to whether sue-fic can be canon by arguing that the question turns on the expectations demanded of reader, as well as of the muse, are equally served in a sequel or shared world story as in the original from which it comes, namely that the characters, plot, setting, theme and style be true to the original, which mean the candidate may neither desecrate, disenchant, adulterate, nor violate any prior established element.
Which means, in other words, the writer may not insult the intelligence nor break the hearts of the fans.
Now, to be sure, the main defense offered in these days of systematic degradation – I myself can think of not one established franchise in SF or F media that has not been vandalized by social justice harpies of shrieking hate, befouling the wine, and defecating on the feast — is to say that urinating in to the eyes of the old fans, who are contemptible racists bigot fanboys and sons of swine and jackals, and then to say that new fans will spring full grown from the earth like autochthons, and make up the losses to the core fanbase, and ensure no loss of revenue.
Is that so?
We must pause to mention the difference between honest fans and vulture fans.
Honest fans are those who love the work, and may have followed it from the beginning. Vulture fans gather around the train wreck to gloat over the crushed, mangled and burning bodies of the destruction of a franchise, because they seek revenge over whatever imaginary affronts political malignancy can invent, such as a lack of diversity or a failure of authenticity or what have you.
Vulture fans admire the “deconstruction” of the work on the grounds that, for example, making Dr. Who a woman, or making the Starfleet officers of Star Trek as cynical and corrupt as a modern Chicago-machine politician, has the useful social engineering effect of displaying the heterodoxy of the original seasons, and the folly and inferiority of the previous audience of racist fanboys.
Such antics of vandalism, so it is claimed, create awareness and starts a dialog. This is a dialog, of course, where the contribution of the fans of the original is merely to shut up, and that right quick.
By their own admission, Vulture fans care nothing for the work in and of itself, but only for its utility as tool to shape public opinion, and brainwash the unwary.
Tuvok the Vulcan or Benjamin Sisko of Star Trek or Lando Calrissian of Star Wars were meaningless to the woke scolds, even though, on the surface, the actors playing these roles had the right skin color.
Now, of these characters, two were not ‘Afro-Americans’, that is, not dark skinned human beings, because they are not human at all. One is from planet Vulcan in the Alpha Quadrant, the other is planet Socorro in a galaxy far, far away.
These non-Afro-Americans of Outer Space, despite their dark and handsome hue, did not serve the political purposes of identity politics. It is for this reason that these characters are not mentioned when the identity politics talking point claiming a lack of black officers in Star Trek or a lack of black heroes in Star Wars comes up. They are swept into the memory hole.
It is for the same reason Ripley and Nausicaa and a dozen other actually good female action heroines never come up when the talking point is raise to whine and complain about the lack. Into the memory hole with every heroine from Penelope of Ithaca to Jirel of Joiry to Princess Leia of Planet Alderaan.
The whining is fake and complaining is false.
A complaint is a real complaint when and only when the object of the complaint, if the acts desired by the complainer were taken, actually would resolve the complaint, satisfy the complainer, and bring lovely silence, that music of the gods, into our quiet lives.
A complaint is false when it is uttered for an ulterior purpose, or for its own sake. There is no solution mentioned because no solution is contemplated.
Such false whining and whinging about representation in movies is not meant to produce a correction to the situation. It exists for its own sake, to poison the atmosphere of social discourse, serve as a springboard for accusations of bad faith, and to stir up envy and enmity between fan and fan. That is what it is for. That is all it is for.
Do you doubt this? A single example out of a zillion should suffice.
When I first started reading the comic back in the antediluvian days of my youth, James Rhodes was the Iron Man. He was the one with the armor, he was the one who soared off on his boot rockets to fight the Mandarin and so on.
One clever plot point (and heartbreaking to my young brain) was that Tony and Rhodey were jealous of each other, because Tony really wanted to go back to being Iron Man (but he could not because he was a drunk) and Rhodey was too proud to ask him how all the controls worked. It got so bad, the two were not even talking to one another at one point.
So, in other words, the setup was similar to Terry McGinnis in the far future year of 2029, except imagine if his mentor was not the kick ass old grumpy man Wayne, but a whiskey-bleared sot version who envied him, and they bickered.
My point being, that Rhodey was a real person, flaws and strengths, and Tony gave him the armor for a real reason, the curse of alcoholism, and nothing was being done just in order to shove politically correctness up the reader’s nose. Rhodey was not meant to upstage Tony, and, in fact, Tony’s fear that he was, was a plot point.
Whereas Rey from LAST JEDI is a pure Mary Sue without flaws or personality, merely strong female Jedi person with no personality characteristics, male or female, no point and no plot continuity with any previously established Jedi in the continuity. (This was awkwardly retconned in RISE OF NAMESTEALER or whatever the name of the unwatchable sequel was, but those events are out of canon and can be ignored.)
Rhodey had the Iron Man armor for a reason. Rey has Jedi grandmaster powers for no reason and with no training. She exists for no reason but to belittle Luke Skywalker, take his name, and upstage him. She exists to steal valor from Skywalker, to wear his laurels without making his sacrifices.
Rhodey earned his right to wear the armor. Rey took Luke’s lightsaber, position, and name in an act of fraud and theft.
I submit that if the true purpose of the complaining about diversity and representation was meant to solve the problem of race relations, that the collective characteristics of any given character, that is, those traits with which he was born, and over which, since he has no control, cannot be either praiseworthy or blameworthy, would be ignored.
Likewise, any trait the worldview embraced by the story as praiseworthy — for an adventure story, this is bravery; for a war story, loyalty; for a love story, fidelity; for a murder mystery, the praiseworthy trait is intelligence — must be one, since within his control, is either praiseworthy or blameworthy, because it is a moral trait.
Moreover, the character displaying that trait, whether or no he is admirable at first, by the finale of the tale, would win the admiration of the reader, would be a praiseworthy hero, and would inspire imitation.
To do so, the hero must earn the praise his praiseworthy quality deserves by doing the act which displays it: he must be brave, loyal, faithful, or what have you. The plot events must be events that call on him to pay the cost and shoulder the risks these virtues demand, and, whether or no he hesitates at first, he must make the sacrifices involved willingly.
That is what a hero is: one who sacrifices himself for the greater good, whether literally or figuratively.
Now, if the woke scolds actually wanted peace between the races, their goal would be the one and only thing that always and everywhere produces peace, namely, justice. Justice is praising the praiseworthy and blaming the blameworthy, that is to say, justice is judging each man by the content of his character, without fear or favoritism.
In a just system, no man is higher or lower than any other, save by merit and merit alone. There is no reason to form a collective, or to subsume individual identity into group identity, because the groups have no legal standing and no social status.
If the woke scolds wanted this, they would promote this. It is the opposite of what they want. We know this because they promote the opposite.
The Vulture fans who gather merely to see established and well beloved franchises destroyed are delighted when a character is introduced who is neither good nor evil, and has no personality traits at all, except that he carried whatever marker, skin hue or genitalia or what have you, serving as the uniform to show his group identity.
The cipher – we cannot call him a character – thereafter is merely a placeholder or symbol for the group identity of the group, much as the figure of Uncle Sam in his striped and star spangled top hat and tails, or the Lion of Britain, or the Eagle of Rome is a symbol of America, or England, or Rome.
The placeholder person can have no flaw, lest this be taken as an insult to the group he represents, for the same reason Uncle Sam cannot, except in parody meant to criticize the United States, be portrayed as sleeping, or drunk, or blindfolded.
No flaw means she – the traditional name for such a darling is Mary Sue – can have no character arc, because a character arc is either a growth from weakness to strength. Nor, likewise, can she have a tragic end, because that is a fall created by her own tragic flaw, and she is flawless.
No growth means the character cannot have a training sequence, nor can any drill sergeant yell at her. No flaw means she cannot fail and learn better. She cannot get knocked down and stand up again, because no one and nothing can ever knock her down.
This means she wins at everything, not just a sword fights with a weapon she never touched before, and not just by mastering Way Cool mind-powers until yesterday she never knew existed, but also every man wants her on his team or as his girlfriend, and she can repair the spaceship better than the man who built it.
Everyone loves her, except the villains, and that is always for no reason whatsoever. Nothing is earned. Everything fall into her lap free of charge.
One Mary Sue character inevitably ruins all the characters surrounding. In order for everyone to love her for no reason, except the bad guys who hate her for no reason, such cardboard dummies simply can have no logical motives, no interior lives, and no consistency of character when speaking to her.
As with characters, so with plots.
The only way to have everything fall into her lap, from swordfights to spaceships, free of charge and no training needed, the plot lines must warp and weave and ignore the laws of cause and effect.
Odd coincidences simply crop up for no reason. The plot logic cannot have integrity in a world where reality warps to fix the outcome, for the same reason the roulette wheel must be gimmicked if we see the house win every spin.
Likewise with setting. Whether the story is science fiction, and takes place in a world not like our own, or is not, and takes place here, the rules of how the world work must be consistent across the franchise, or else the tale is a cheat. But if the plot cheats, then the cause and effect is also a cheat, and the rules of verisimilitude that would otherwise govern the setting go by the wayside. If the rules established in the word for how the world works get in the way of the unearned victory of Mary Sue, they must fold.
Likewise with style. Style in a novel is word choice, the lyricism called for by the scene, and in film involved many dimensions of lighting, costume, acting, pacing, background music, and framing the shot. But in both cases, the style is subservient to the characters, plot and setting, that is, the style is meant to bring out the dramatic traits of these other elements by the craft of how they are portrayed, presented, described.
But in the world of the Mary Sue, the setting has no heart because it has no integrity. The plot has no brain because it makes no sense. The character arcs both of our heroine and all the satellite character surrounding her have no real internal life, which means, no virtues hence no courage. And so likewise the style or the craft or portraying these various elements falls by the wayside, as such craft would be unnecessary, or even distracting. Such skill as makes art artful has no home in such a land.
One can see the hyper realistic art form of Soviet propaganda posters follow this: no craft is required, aside from the mechanical skill of draftsmanship. Likewise, and for the opposite reason, the vomit and psychotic delirium of modern art: not even mechanical skill is needed here, only a communality of purpose with the art establishment, who will award your garbage and filth the accolades due to other men, not because it is earned, but because it is not.
In the same way that justice, rendering each man his due according to his worth, regardless of birth or other innate traits, quells hatred between races, so, too, and for the very same reason, does injustice, rendering each man what is not his due, rewarding it solely by birth or other innate traits, provoke hatred between the races.
This is for a simple reason: if each man is given his due, regardless of race, because it is his due, the natural harmonies of interest formed by the occasions of mutual benefit have no bar, and two men born differently can both get their due, and be sated. If each man is given not his due, he must take from another who takes a loss thereby.
The occasions of mutual benefit are deterred, because anyone of another identity group to your own is automatically a competitor for what is due by right to you: and the supremacy of one group over another is arbitrary, depending on nothing but current power over the apparatus that dishes out rewards and punishments, both based on nothing by whim, mutual hostility, and mutual resentment.
Professional sports in the 1950s discovered, despite Jim Crow laws in Democrat controlled areas, that teams which recruited on merit alone, even though blacks were but a tithe of the total population, had a larger pools of skilled athletes from which to select, and hence won a clear competitive advantage. So too with readers willing to read books, or audiences willing to see films, written and staffed by skilled artists and performers based on merit alone.
But once the new form of Jim Crow, called Diversity Hiring, is enacted, where who drinks from which water fountain, or who plays Dr. Who or captains a starship or busts a ghost is determined not by merit, the pool shrinks, and, in the case of trying to force females into male roles, shrinks sharply.
It is an openly, insolently unjust system, and the muse, always elusive even at the best of times, grows offended and spreads her purple plumes of glory, and wings her sad and silent way with no backward glance back to heaven.
Hence, the presence of fans or income does not mean a tale remains as canon, if the muse is absent. This tells us what canonicity is not. So, what, finally, is canonicity?
The answer awaits our conclusion: Canonicity 5: Revenge of the Muse
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
