Another episode of me thinking too hard about stuff
This is a meta post about Canon That Never Happened. A little preface is needed before I dive into the meat of my thoughts.
On the new Coldplay album, there's a song I love called Life In Technicolor. It's the opening track, completely instrumental. But I discovered something interesting about the track...
It happened, but it didn't happen.
And this is something you find once you delve a little too deep into fandom, especially once you start to scour the web for interviews by producers and writers of the show. With Firefly, for example, there is the story from a few years back about an episode that had been planned before the show got canceled. It was VERY dark; Inara is charged with killing a noted abuser of Companions by injecting herself with a toxin that makes sex with her lethal. Then while she's separated from the crew, Reavers show up. And she allows the Reavers to rape her to that she can kill them and Mal finds her broken and traumatized OMFG. Another example of canon that never happened.
In Dragonball Z, I'm pretty sure the creator wanted Goku dead so that Gohan could take over as the main character. But fanboys loved Goku so damn much that the creator was forced to bring the damn Saiyan back from the dead over and over again. It wasn't his original intention, but that's how things turned out. Goku staying dead: canon that didn't happen.
In CSI fandom, I have the feeling that if Gary Dourdan hadn't had his little run in with the law, he wouldn't have been written out of the show. I know the writer's strike terminated a very important storyline exploring Zack's time in Iraq for Bones. I don't even want to know how many abandoned plot lines there are for Lost. I'm fairly certain the writer's strike fucked over a lot of shows by forcing execs to cut out whole plot lines (like Zack having PTSD from Iraq goddam) that would have happened otherwise.
I'm a fic writer and it's no secret that what I write is only one version of the reality I was trying to capture. Often, I have a (visual) idea in my head when I start writing, but the nature of words and writing takes me in a different direction. There's an alternate reality to everything just out of reach, it seems.
On the new Coldplay album, there's a song I love called Life In Technicolor. It's the opening track, completely instrumental. But I discovered something interesting about the track...
It was formerly described as an acoustic-guitar driven and jangly, one of the few tracks that seems built from the Coldplay template of songs like "Don't Panic," only a bit more, well, panicked: "Baby it's a violent world," Martin sings.And I don't know about anyone else, but every time I hear Life In Technicolor and the music swells to a crescendo... I mourn for the song that never happened, the lyrics that never materialized, the reality that's just out of my grasp because the song is great the way it is, but as a fully fledged song it would have been amazing. And the fact that the earlier conception of Life In Technicolor actually does exist somewhere in Coldplay's collective head makes me dearly wish for that version, even if I know it will never appear.
However, since this description was publicized, Life in Technicolor has been stripped of its lyrics and turned into an instrumental track on the album, which Chris Martin reportedly did in response to a comment that the song is "the obvious single".
It happened, but it didn't happen.
And this is something you find once you delve a little too deep into fandom, especially once you start to scour the web for interviews by producers and writers of the show. With Firefly, for example, there is the story from a few years back about an episode that had been planned before the show got canceled. It was VERY dark; Inara is charged with killing a noted abuser of Companions by injecting herself with a toxin that makes sex with her lethal. Then while she's separated from the crew, Reavers show up. And she allows the Reavers to rape her to that she can kill them and Mal finds her broken and traumatized OMFG. Another example of canon that never happened.
In Dragonball Z, I'm pretty sure the creator wanted Goku dead so that Gohan could take over as the main character. But fanboys loved Goku so damn much that the creator was forced to bring the damn Saiyan back from the dead over and over again. It wasn't his original intention, but that's how things turned out. Goku staying dead: canon that didn't happen.
In CSI fandom, I have the feeling that if Gary Dourdan hadn't had his little run in with the law, he wouldn't have been written out of the show. I know the writer's strike terminated a very important storyline exploring Zack's time in Iraq for Bones. I don't even want to know how many abandoned plot lines there are for Lost. I'm fairly certain the writer's strike fucked over a lot of shows by forcing execs to cut out whole plot lines (like Zack having PTSD from Iraq goddam) that would have happened otherwise.
I'm a fic writer and it's no secret that what I write is only one version of the reality I was trying to capture. Often, I have a (visual) idea in my head when I start writing, but the nature of words and writing takes me in a different direction. There's an alternate reality to everything just out of reach, it seems.
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