Every fictional universe has some set of stories and story-elements which are considered canonical while others are not. Generally, most of the stories produced or authorized by the copyright holders are considered canon, while fan stories are not; however, in some circumstances some stories and plot development which were once “official” are later quietly disregarded (usually because they cause too many continuity problems, like the ridiculous “Warp 5 speed limit” introduced in a latter-season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and promptly ignored by every other writer). But it’s not at all unusual for fans of a sci-fi or fantasy series to also have a “head canon”, a set of stories and elements that they consider “official” in their own internal picture of that universe, which is separate from whatever the corporate owners might declare. Such mental structures allow the fan to include or exclude elements which might affect his willing suspension of disbelief or otherwise alter his appreciation of the imaginary world. For me, one of those elements is chronology; for example, I have absolutely no tolerance for the loosey-goosey sliding past of comic books, in which superheroes always stay the same age for decades and their origins keep changing to suit a contemporary framework. So whenever I read or watch a series, it’s important for me to keep a timeline (on a notepad or computer file if it’s too complex to organize in my head) so that I can keep track of the order in which things happen, how long it was from x event to y, and so on. That’s why I especially appreciate shows like Babylon 5 and novels like The Lord of the Rings, in which the creator maintains a close watch on dates and sequences of events, and characters age and change as they do in the real world; when the person or persons in charge don’t pay attention or even blatantly disregard such recordkeeping, this is what my head does. So I think we can all agree that it would just be better if everyone plotted their stories with a calendar handy, so as to save Maggie’s brain all that extra work.
Head Canon
April 29, 2021 by Maggie McNeill
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I’m going to say that I agree with you on the sliding timeline bit. However, the DC multiverse was created as a means to mitigate that.
And then destroyed by Marv Wolfman & Co in the ’80s.
And then recreated… then destroyed… then recreated…
If you don’t like DC continuity, wait a minute.
For a really extreme example of all this, check out the 1632 series, more than 50 books, most of which have no fixed ordering.
P.G.Wodehouse apparently thought of all of his stories as set in the present, and so some of his later Blandings Castle stories have prefaces expressing his ever-increasing embarrassment over having established, long ago, that the Earl of Emsworth was at school in “the sixties”. He could have made it easier on himself by leaving everything in the same period; instead there are some awkward (but thankfully slight) intrusions of the present, like a depiction of a young man with monocle and (iirc) spats dancing rock’n’roll.
Wodehouse’s friend Rex Stout wrote one story in which a client from a previous story reappears, having aged twenty years while Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin had not. I don’t know if he made any explicit comment on that.
I like to imagine a sprawling fantasy epic, spanning the ages, in which major characters mention each other as legends. Wouldn’t be surprised to find that Michael Moorcock did that in the Eternal Champion meta-series, whose threads are in temporally independent universes.
William Faulkner set most of his novels and short stories in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. Yoknapatawpha somewhat resembles the actual Lafayette County, Mississippi geographically, but not exactly by a long shot.
BTW – that’s pronounced “la-FAY-ette” locally.
In the entire Faulkner canon, Yoknapatawpha county timelines and locations are not always perfectly exact. The fictional timeline runs from roughly 1800 to the middle 1900s. Some characters appear, disappear, then reappear in remarkably interesting ways.
My favorite is the minor character Percival Brownlee. He first appears as a defiant, effeminate and somewhat inept slave. He is emancipated before the Civil War, but refuses to leave the plantation. He then reappears during Reconstruction as a preacher, then in the entourage of an army paymaster, and finally as a fat old man, proprietor of a “select New Orleans brothel”.
There is an ongoing project at the University of Virginia to make as coherent as possible history of Yoknapatawpha County. It’s called Digital Yoknapatawpha.
You can find it here: http://faulkner.iath.virginia.edu/
Bechdel test. Learned something new. Thanks.