Editing Canon (section)

== Who is the Storyteller? ==
When all stories were told around campfires, the storyteller was whomever was telling the story. Unless someone was re-telling a story (and was within earshot of the creator or a hardcore fan of said story), the person speaking had full control of the story. Because a storyteller immediately saw their audience's reactions to their story, they made sure to make the best story possible, because otherwise their listeners would lose interest. Canon was only relevant so long as someone could recall what happened in a story from ages ago, since nobody write things down. Issues of canon only arose when someone shouted out in the middle of a story "Hey, that's not what you said last week!".

In the modern age, stories are written down, published for a wide audience, and pored over in great detail. A story can also be owned as '''Intellectual Property'''. This means that someone can buy the legal rights to a story, or assume control over the people that do, effectively making ''them'' the new storyteller. This is a very common issue in things like [[/co/|comic books]] and movies, and less so in things like literature and fables. Anyone who legally owns the rights to a story can sue someone for writing another story that includes elements of their original story. This can also mean that some pretty shitty elements can be injected into the canon of a beloved story, and nobody can do anything about it.

Stories which are within the '''public domain''' are legally the property of everybody. This doesn't strictly mean that all fan-fiction is canon, but it does mean that there is no legal storyteller. If the author is still alive and telling new stories in their universe, this is generally the most-agreed-upon source of new "official canon". If not, the fans may find themselves surrounded in fan-fiction of varying levels of quality, some of it "deserving to be canonized" and most of it "bad garbage". This is what happened to Star Wars before Disney acquired it. Though it wasn't in the public domain, George Lucas said that people were free to make and sell new stories. By the time Disney killed this huge cloud of fan works, they had amassed themselves into several "tiers" of canonicity; some people to this day demand that stories like the Thrawn Trilogy be made honorary canon on account of their popularity and high quality.