Subject: See, exterminatecake, this is classic Fanon Discontinuity.
Author:
Posted on: 2013-04-04 20:15:00 UTC
The Last Airbender movie is to the Avatar: The Last Airbender fandom what the episode "Threshold" is to fans of Star Trek:Voyager. Upon hearing it mentioned, a vast majority of fans will vehemently deny that it ever existed, while paradoxically possessing very specific information on why it does not exist at the same time.
First up, I apologize for barely posting since introducing myself. Apart from being a completely antisocial idiot with severe anxiety, I also have about sixty MEP parts to do and also school and yeah.
I do have a sort of question slash discussion topic slash antelope, though. The main event that brought this up was that I was reading a Doctor Who novel last night, and I noticed several inconsistencies with canon.
(Okay, I know that there are inconsistencies with Doctor Who canon in the canon itself, I *did* watch Asylum of the Daleks.)
That got me thinking, though-do the books actually qualify as canon? They are not necessary for enjoyment of the show, they're sort of extra content that you can read or not at your own discretion. They are usually not written by regular show writers, either. Does this mean that they are essentially officially sanctioned fanfiction?
What about in other fandoms? In a lot of shows/movies/books/et cetera, there's often extra content with no particular bearing on the canon storyline (filler episodes being a more iffy example of this; more appropriate would be things like little bonus comics you might get for buying a particular offer, or mini-episodes you buy on iTunes). Are these things considered part of the canon? If so, how do we deal with contradictions to the main canon?
And this leads us to the elephant in the room-is The Last Airbender considered Avatar canon? (HORRORS UPON HORRORS.)
Another thing you have to watch out for is when canon incorporates the statements of a character who is an unreliable narrator or who lies. In some cases, fanon claims that the original narrator is unreliable (often with a good excuse, such as changing names and situations to protect the innocent,) in order to clear up inconsistencies in canon. This seems to happen a lot with Sherlockians, in order to clear up such questions as which cases happened first, how many times was Watson married, and why anyone thought that snakes could digest milk. (I'm not even going to get into The Creeping Man. I think for most Sherlockians who were unfortunate enough to read that after starting biology it was a big WTF moment, not that we can blame ACD for not knowing better any more than we can blame Jules Verne for not knowing that Nemo and company would be instantly crushed if they ventured outside of the Nautilus in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.)
The only series I have any experience of with officially sanctioned fanfiction is the Star Wars Expanded Universe, which seems to me to be a vast collection of Alternate Universes held together by the application of retcons, duct tape, and Timothy Zahn. Unless you were writing fanfiction of a specific EU book or with a specific EU character, I doubt you'd have to bring in any EU "canon" elements.
The Last Airbender - I can only presume that you refer to the TV series that proceeded The Legend of Korra, so yes, it has to be canon, doesn't it? ;)
Even though you probably didn't mean it, that last sentence juxtaposed The Legend of Korra, widely considered one of the best things to happen to the Avatar franchise, with what is undoubtedly the worst product that will ever be produced under its license. That winking emoticon had better denote that you knew about this and were deliberately trying to put them together to be amusing. Otherwise, the thunder will be brought down! Mountains will shake! The eternal flame will consume the fruits of your labor! The sea will... the sea... okay, I don't know what the waterbenders would do, unless you live next to a lake or on an island or something. They control ice, so they could freeze all of the water in your pipes and flood your house. That would be pretty nasty, I think.
Korra was cool, and all, but the best thing to ever come out of the Avatar franchise was Toph vs. Iroh.
There will always be plenty of awesome parts of the franchise to rival any others. I think Legend of Korra was the best in regards to the sequence as a whole, but there were definitely plenty of awesome bending battles. I don't personally remember Toph vs. Iroh, though. Well, there's only one way to solve that. TO YOUTUBE!
Honestly, I just wasn't that into Korra. The love triangle was irritating, and I just couldn't be as invested in most of the characters. (Aside from Bolin, because Bolin is amazing.) It just seemed to lack the depth of the original.
And I think I was thinking of Toph vs. Bumi, which was in one of the comics. Toph vs. Iroh was a fanfic. >_>
(By the way, on the subject of Toph and Iroh fanfic interactions, this one is hilarious, and one of my favorites: The Proposal. It's epic and in-character and hysterical.)
I wondered why I couldn't find the Toph vs. Iroh battle on Youtube! I knew I'd missed some of Book Three, but I didn't thought all of Youtube would have passed on the chance to post a fight scene.
Yay, goodfic! It was a real relief to read that after all of the sporking candidates I've been looking through for the last few days. Thanks!
I have been studiously avoiding all exposure to the live action monstrosity that in a better world does not exist. I was hoping very much that by denying its existence it would cease to exist. That never works, unfortunately.
Korra is awesome.
Also, could you send the waterbenders to do the pipes in my classroom next wednesday night? I don't want to do my presentation.
Would so many people be denying its very existence if it wasn't?
I think I would have noticed if there was a movie for Avatar: The Last Airbender. It's too bad there hasn't been! I'm sure it would be a great film, in the right hands.
... I can't help but think of this.
hS
I do wish there was a movie, though! I would like to see how they handle choreographing the different bending styles and incorporating martial arts tactics with real-life actors. I'm sure that they would do a wonderful job and not just make it look like a silly dance routine.
I'm sure that, if they got Sifu Kisu involved, the Bending would be perfect, too!
Though I think they'd have to make more than one movie for each season, just to be sure they don't mess things up.
I'm sort of a mild, toe-in-the-water, Doctor Who fan, so don't place too much importance on my answer.
As Neshomeh mentioned, quite a few canons do have hierarchies, so although I don't know of an established one for Doctor Who, I'd say that the shows would come first for canonical resources, and then the novels. With DW, though, it's hard to be completely certain.
On a completely irrelevant sidetrack: I liked some of the Last Airbender. The scenery was quite wonderful in parts, but the acting was highly amateur, and most of the time Aang was completely out of context for emotional reactions. Or it seemed fake. And they pronounced his name wrong.
Anyway, hope this helped!
The scenery and costumes and special effects were the only good things about that movie. I'm most upset over how they cast it - the Southern Water Tribe, which was in poverty, was Inuit, but the Northern Water Tribe, which in the series came from the exact same ethnic stock as the Southern, was white people! And Aunt Wu's village, from the deleted scene? In the series, it's a nice place: in the movie-that-is-not-never-was-and-never-will-be, it's run-down and dirty and everyone's black! WONDER WHAT SHYAMALAN'S TRYING TO SAY THERE.
I'm stopping myself before I rant.
When General Iroh is made ee-ROH, Zuko is made ZUKK-oh, and Sokka is made SOH-ka within the first twenty minutes, the movie cannot be saved. I only stayed on the same channel as long as I did to see how badly they mispronounced Aang's name, and got to hear Avatar rendered as UH-vi-tar in the process.
It was a lot like reading Half Life: Full Life Consequences. It's a complete travesty, so I really shouldn't have been laughing, but I laughed all the way through it. All the way through here meaning as far as I got before just abandoning my attempt to finish the movie. I rage-quit after the scene where dozens of Earthbenders were held captive in a large roofless building with a dirt floor. I decided that no amount of unintentional humor could make up for the movie's other crimes when that scene started. At least Half Life: Full Life Consequences has the excuse of being as bad as it is on purpose.
I know some canons that will accept anything that doesn't directly contradict established material, and throws the entire installment it out the window when established events are broached, and others that officially license Expanded Universe works and treat them as just as canonical as the main source. Then there are others that accept any material given to them, but throw certain volumes out selectively for being stupid, driving people out of character, etcetera. Then there are universes like Star Trek, in which the episodes are the only canon, and all of the books and comics are shunted off into alternate universes that have become so tightly knit with each other's backstories and histories that they might serve as an independent canon if necessary.
Just because someone has a license to write in the universe, that doesn't mean that the creators want the material, or that they will accept it. Even if official policy makes a certain material canonical, an unaware or spiteful writer might deliberately write over it, figuratively speaking, if it doesn't mesh with his views of how the story should go, even if some of the written-over material was previously part of the "alpha" canon, which creates what is commonly called Continuity Snarl.
In answer to your two direct questions, yes, the tie-in books of most franchises are officially sanctioned fanfiction. Even the Star Wars Expanded Universe, which makes up almost all of the Star Wars material, is technically fanfiction, and the people at Lucasfilm can and will steamroll over it if they think they have a good idea for a new video game or some such.
An EU can be treated as canon, but only the central portions of the franchise are "real" in most cases, and sometimes, not even then. In continuities prone to mass retconning, like DC Comics, this latter point can be a big problem.
Doctor Who EU in particular was, at least up to the end of the Russel T. Davies era, treated as canonical if it didn't try to mess with the established material of episodes to make a story with "higher stakes" or some such. See War of the Daleks for a particularly blatant example of attempted retconning that was treated as, as I've heard said "a big no-no".
I don't know how the Steven Moffat era treats it. I've seen one episode where the Doctor mentions a few species only ever seen in the EU, and I've seen plenty more where several previously established points in Classic Who and the EU were abandoned for cheap kicks.
For your last question, the M. Night Shyamalan The Last Airbender movie is not considered canon to the cartoon. Both the fans and creators have disavowed it, and at any rate, since it takes place within the same timeframe as canonical events but treats them far differently, to say nothing about the OOC that we see rampant in the storyline, it would be an Alternate Universe story at best.
(By the way, what were the inconsistencies specific to Asylum of the Daleks? I watch Doctor Who on Netflix, so I've not seen most of Series Seven yet.)
There were several inconsistencies, but my biggest problem was WHERE THE HELL DID ALL OF THESE DALEKS COME FROM?!
The Daleks, of course, were Time-Locked along with the Time Lords in the Time War (I think this franchise needs more variety with its descriptive nouns :P). The few times that the Daleks featured in the Davies era, they had at least believable explanations for why they appeared, if the explanations seemed a little forced at times; plus *they were always portrayed as stragglers.*
There was no explanation as to where the hundreds of Daleks came from. Why is the Dalek Council there? How did they escape the Time-Lock? Or if they didn't, WHERE DID THEY COME FROM?! THIS SEEMS LIKE AN IMPORTANT PLOT POINT!
Sorry for capslocking in rage.
I just sometimes wonder if Moffat's even trying anymore.
The Dalek Council didn't escape the time-lock, for the simple reason that it was never in the time-lock. It was created by the White Dalek and his compatriots after they time-warped to who-knows-where after the (disastrous) Victory of the Daleks episode.
Of course, your rage about how they managed to spit out hundreds of bronze Daleks to sit on the council just today, and to add an addendum, your rage left out the Dalek Prime Minister. What was he even doing there? He was an Emperor-class mutant, which if I may point out, only exist if an actual Kaled is physically transformed into one(though this was established in a Fourth Doctor story and kind is of confusing, so the writers probably just up and forgot about it like they do most of Classic Who), trapped in a glass tube (despite the fact that this completely removes any usefulness he would have had to the Daleks, because he has no weapons and would need to be purposefully picked up and moved around), and it seemed like he only existed because Moffat said "Hey, guys, wouldn't it be funny if Daleks had a Parliament, despite the fact that them being governed in that fashion would go against the entire point of the Imperials-Renegades conflict of the 1980s Doctor Who era? I think so too." Oh, wait, that's Classic Who again. We can't have that, can we?
Wait a second, how did the White Dalek know how to use the progenitor in the first place? His own Strategist Glaurunging killed the only three beings in the universe who knew how to operate it!
Looks like I found yet another plot hole in Victory of the Daleks. It's not surprising. There are probably more I didn't see.
...the Daleks that escaped with the Progenitor device by the end of Victory of the Daleks? I think they had time-travel capable ships.
Heck, the Time Lock isn't even hermetic as we think: Dalek Caan flew through the Lock to rescue Davros in series 4, and that was under Russel T. Davies' watch.
Don't be so quick to blast Moffat, it looks like he's actually going somewhere in series 7 now.
This was always one of my biggest problems in Victory of the Daleks. The Daleks mysteriously have time-travel technology, and the Doctor does not use his own.
The whole "HA HA YOUR PLA-NET IS GOING TO BE DEST-ROYED IN TEN MIN-UTES UNLESS YOU GO DOWN AND STOP... IIIIT!" thing is completely neutered when you realize, hey, this is a Time Lord. He can stop the Daleks, blow up the ship, and go back in time and stop the planet from being blown up!
The Tenth and Eleventh Doctors are really phobic about meeting their past selves, but they wouldn't have to! The Ironside Daleks' ship was in the upper atmosphere, and the man-that-was-a-robot-and-also-a-bomb was on the ground in Britain. The two Elevens would be nowhere near each other! The Daleks only escaped by creating a plot hole and a preposterous plot contrivance, and then getting their worst enemy to play along.
Well, maybe they didn't create the plot hole. Maybe they just used the one the Ironside Daleks created to escape the wave of kill-all-of-the-Davros-born-Daleks that Metacrisis Ten used in Journey's End.
Frigging Victory of the Daleks. Why did nobody actually look over the episode that would revive the iconic aliens of the series to see if it made sense before they shot it?
For the bit about the time-lock, keep in mind that only inanimate objects could be sent through without going insane and slowly dying in pain, at least if the only two known examples are held up as precedent.
I never saw the point of the time-lock, really. The Doctor calls himself the " last of the Time Lords" because everyone else died on Gallifrey, but when your entire species is capable of constructing, growing, or improvising time machines, there are probably a few dozen that have been living a thousand years in the future because they like the cuisine, or hiding out in the past because they were time criminals, or some such. Heck, given the Classic Who precedent, that bit with the food seems like something they'd do in a blink.
Even if we assume that they're past selves and that they will die on Gallifrey but don't know yet, just because they're predestined to die doesn't make them any less alive at the points in time that they were living in.
Actually, now that I think about it, the "last of the Time Lords" moniker may have just been adopted by the Doctor because he likes giving himself titles. It would certainly be in character for him.
The Doctor calls himself the " last of the Time Lords" because everyone else died on Gallifrey...
Way (way way way) back in The End of the World - that is, the second episode of the revived series - we had the tree-woman saying she thought Time Lords were a myth. Over Nine's run, it was pretty clearly established that the time-lock didn't just stop things escaping from the final throes of the Last Great Time War - either it or the war itself led to the elimination of anything trapped in it from the history of the universe. In the universe as it stood in Rose, the Time Lords and the Daleks existed only as semi-mythological memories of species advanced enough to have sensed the Time War itself ("Pity the Gelth!"). There were no other escapees, and so there were no other Time Lords. Ever, before or since.
That has been shattered somewhat more recently - but almost always by things outside the universe. House had records of dozens of Time Lords - in a pocket universe. Not the main one. And that means the rules can change.
And yes, that means the Doctor's existence is an anomaly - a crack in the time-lock, as it were. And didn't someone say recently that if it's remembered it's never truly gone...?
hS
If the Time Lords were retroactively removed from history, the changes would be a whole lot bigger than just having their planet become a myth.
Back in the Dark Times, the Time Lords were the closest to stability that the universe had, and if they hadn't repressed other species from developing time-travel technology, there'd be at least a few other time-traveling races jumping around mucking things up. If they hadn't pepped up the Fledgelings to fight against the Racnoss, a sizable chunk of the universe would have been consumed, and furthermore, the Empress would have never needed to invade Earth. Etcetera etcetera. There are bits about the Daleks, too but mostly "and this and that planet wouldn't have perished in flames", which is really all the Daleks ever did.
The Time Lords were always a myth. It was an image they'd cultivated during their early days so that people wouldn't steal their time machines and instead think of them as gods incarnate, and they'd definitely be a myth in the year when the Earth was destroyed, because they tended to hang around the 100 B.C.-4000 A.D. range, to give a wild guess that's probably off a few millennia, ad the Earth ended in a year in the billions. The Time Lords wouldn't go around introducing themselves to every species that had ever existed, is what I'm trying to say here.
Not to mention that there were only five Daleks that escaped from the Progenitor, and that was stated to be either the last or one of the last (I haven't watched the episode in a while, so I forget exactly which). I might just be extremely dumb and/or not up-to-date with my Dalek procreation methods, but I'm not entirely certain that they could create thousands of Daleks in that period of time. I'm also not exactly willing to believe that that many Daleks running around would not have any effect on Tennant's and Eccleston's seasons (or even Smith's early ones).
Also, wasn't Skaro imprisoned in the Time Lock as well? Call me crazy, but I think that an entire planet escaping from the lock would probably attract *someone's* notice.
Don't get me wrong, I do think that Moffat seems to have gotten his swing back! I really liked the premiere, and I'm excited to see the rest of the season. I'm just... sort of mad about that brief period where it was all explosions and sound travelling through the vacuum of space, all the time.
... it's perfectly possible to create Daleks from cells of a pre-existing Dalek. The problems with the Parting of the Ways and Journey's End Daleks was that they were cloned from non-pure Dalek sources - which is why the Progenitor was needed in the first place. Once they had the DNA, they could make as many as they needed.
(As to why time-travelling Daleks never caused trouble in earlier seasons... well, once you figure out why both Daleks and Cybermen linked their technological progress to the Doctor's regeneration cycle in Old Who - and why the time-travelling Master did the same thing with his regenerations and his plans - then I'll try and come up with an answer. :P)
Also also wik: what period of time? Was there a date pinned on Asylum that I've forgotten about? That story could have taken place ten thousand subjective years after the last one. Heck, it's at least two hundred for the Doctor, judging by the ages he gives.
Or... wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey. It just works like that. :P
hS
(Re: Skaro... yes. :P No answer to that, it should be gone from history. Unless, and this is just a theory, maybe the near-breaking of the lock during End of Time let a few things slip out? Not the Daleks themselves, but the ruins of their planet...?)
I just thought of something. During The End of Time, Gallifrey was completely removed from the time-lock for about fifteen minutes due to Rassilon messing with the Master's personal history. Well, the Time Lords were stated in an earlier episode to have used their TARDISes as vehicles in which to fight their enemies in the Time War, and since Gallifrey's cities and dominion were still (barely) standing at the point in Gallifrey's personal timeline that the version pulled out of the lock in The End of Time was, wouldn't at least a few of those TARDISes still exist?
Most of the Time Lords native to that Gallifrey's era would have stayed on Gallifrey the entire time, of course, because Rassilon had promised them a new Time Lord empire if his plan went through, but at least a few might have done as the Master did and just decided they'd had enough. They'd have had plenty of time to get out while Rassilon was monologuing and name-dropping the episode title. There were something like five billion people on Gallifrey; it's statistically impossible that at least a few weren't tired of endless time-looped years in a devastating war against a species that only a few of them had met before the combat started.
On another note, how did the Master escape the lock in the first place? He turned himself human and fled to the last point in space-time he could go, but how did he get there? Just because he's human shouldn't let him navigate through the damage to the time vortex that kept the time-lock up, and it should in fact have hindered him severely. Adding to that, his human form Yana had no time machine and little technical ability, so after he turned human, so how did he get so far into the future in the first place?
Did the Master just steal a TARDIS from one of the other Time Lords and hoof it right before Nine used The Moment? And if so, why did he need to turn human at all?
Another note regarding the Progenitor: I'm not exactly sure how much closer to "pure Dalek DNA" you can get than the cells of the being in the universe who is not only from the same species that became your ancestors without going back to the Tom Baker era and just abducting one of the Renegades. Of course, it's always possible that Dalek evolution was stabilized by the high radiation levels on Skaro, and that Daleks are now indisputably a separate species from how they started out. This raises the question of how the Progenitor would still work, though. It was a Second Doctor artifact, and at a point that close to the origin of the Daleks, they'd still be more Kaled than not.
Of course, the Kaleds were introduced in a Fourth Doctor story, but we're not going to get anywhere in discussing Doctor Who if we refer to show airdate chronology as if it's a straight line relative to the Daleks' personal timestream.
Some of them have sort of a canon hierarchy—for instance, I know Star Wars has a ranking system for canon materials, with the six films and Word of God at the top. Lower-ranked materials tend to be considered canon only if they don't contradict the materials ranked above them. Same goes for the Warcraft universe: World of Warcraft is at the top, followed by previous games, followed by books and other stuff. Using elements from lower-ranked materials in a fic supposedly set in the "alpha" canon can be problematic, but if it's justified and works well in the story, there's not much to complain about. Doctor Who probably works like this, but someone more familiar with the fandom can tell you better than I can.
Others, like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings, have separate movieverse and bookverse (and gameverse and whatever-elseverse) canons. They're protected equally by the PPC, but are distinct from each other, and trying to use movieverse elements in an explicitly bookverse fic (or vice versa) can be problematic and sometimes charge-worthy. I think the A:TLA movieverse vs. showverse fits into this category.
I hope that helps!
~Neshomeh
You seem to be under the impression there was a movie for A:TLA. Let me assure you, as a devout fan of the Last Airbender franchise, no such movie has ever been or ever will be made. And if it is made, M Night Shyamalan will not be anywhere near it.
I understand now. Just like there's only one Matrix movie. Of course. *nodnod*
~Neshomeh, who has not seen that movie that doesn't exist.
Cookie?
The Last Airbender movie is to the Avatar: The Last Airbender fandom what the episode "Threshold" is to fans of Star Trek:Voyager. Upon hearing it mentioned, a vast majority of fans will vehemently deny that it ever existed, while paradoxically possessing very specific information on why it does not exist at the same time.
One we will likely never solve.