firstorderforceuser:

yesbothways:

Here’s the thing.  Canon holds no real authority.  Stories aren’t spoken into concrete production.  Expensive means of production make it seem that way.  But hear me out.  Stories only really exist in people’s imaginations.  With the canon, it’s all just a matter of whose imagination got the funding that determines what you’re seeing.  So when canon turns bad, you don’t have to take that in as fact.  You can be like, “Whose imagination are we in?  It’s terrible here.”  And you can go somewhere else.  The trappings may be run on a shoestring.  But the stories there are just as real.  

^^^^This.

When I first got into doing professional theater, I was fascinated with belief. Five people sat around, having purchased the rights to a script, and turned their ability to believe in these characters into something a whole audience could also believe in. They did this with their voices. With their bodies. But most of all, they did this with their willingness to walk around in a reality that didn’t exist and take it seriously enough to make it extend out beyond the edges of what we were given. And then inhabit that invisible world, where these characters had a past and a future and a present, in public. We had several talented writers in our group, so it was also evident that scrips weren’t magic: we could flat-out make things that had just as much heart as what we were paying people to let us borrow from them.

Canon’s only authority is conferred to it by the people who choose to go and live there.