“I can’t interfere, it’s a canon event,”
read the captions on the videos, as an ominous audio clip plays in the
background.
Those TikToks, a mixture of concern and
schadenfreude, are a few of the thousands of videos powering a trend that has
catapulted a new phrase into the pop culture lexicon: the “canon event,” a
pivotal moment that must happen in order for people to mature into their future
selves. It’s a concept that draws on the music and plot of the animated
blockbuster “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.” But that language almost did
not make it into the film.
اضافة اعلان
“A canon event is something that’s
unfortunate at the time it happens, that turns out to have happened for a
reason,” said John Casterline, a 19-year-old creator who has 3.5 million
followers on TikTok.
The videos play with this concept by
spotlighting those disappointing, mortifying, or simply weird moments that we
wish we could change: breaking up with a high school sweetheart, getting kicked
out of a friend group, or adopting an embarrassing hairstyle.
Choosing to see these events as immutable
canon and posting about them on TikTok is a form of group catharsis — a
recognition that it’s precisely because of those moments that we’ve become who
we are today.
“Since you get to know that people have
this shared cringey, awkward experience, you do not feel alone,” said Josh
Referente, a 20-year-old creator on TikTok who has more than 1 million
followers and who has posted several canon event videos. “It helps you process
it a lot better. It was a step in your life that helps you move toward the
right direction.”
The phrase “canon event” is not entirely
new — in comics culture and superhero fandom, canon has long meant those
elements of a character’s story that are part of a shared fictional universe.
But the phrase was popularized by “Across
the Spider-Verse,” which has topped $600 million at the box office worldwide.
In the film, Miles Morales travels to a universe full of other Spider-People
and learns that each one is destined for a series of “canon events,” including
the loss of a parental figure and the death of a police captain. To interfere
with any of these canon events is to invite the destruction of the entire
multiverse.
Originally, the film was not going to
include any mention of a canon event, Kemp Powers, one of the film’s three
directors, said in an interview. The team had settled on “convergence event,”
but that term confused the early focus groups who saw the movie, so they
switched to canon instead.
“One of the funny things about it is the
whole idea of the canon event was something that we were worried people weren’t
going to understand right till the last minute,” Powers said. “So the fact that
not only did they understand this concept but that it took on a life of its
own, I thought was really entertaining.”
Powers, who does not have a TikTok account,
said that for a while he didn’t know social media was running with the concept.
After the film’s release, he was sitting in Los Angeles International Airport
when he heard two people cracking jokes about canon events.
“And I’m like, ‘That can’t be about our
movie.’ You know what I mean? I was just like, that’s weird,” he said.
But soon friends and even his two children
started sending him TikToks.
“If you’re so lucky to put something out in
the world that connects to people, it’s a reminder that it immediately doesn’t
belong to you anymore,” he said. “You have no idea what they’re going to do
with it.”
The canon event videos follow a specific
formula. They feature a scene or a caption that captures an awkward or
regrettable real-life moment accompanied by a snippet from a portion of the
score, “Spider-Man 2099 (Miguel O’Hara),” and include the parenthetical phrase:
“It’s a canon event. I can’t interfere.”
The score was composed by Daniel Pemberton,
who said that segment was the product of a synthesizer being run through a
variety of algorithms to end up with a “punchline” bit of audio.
He said he faced his own canon events while
composing the music.
“I had to fail a lot within this score with
ideas that didn’t work until I found ideas that really did,” he said.
For Pemberton, it’s natural that the idea
of a canon event has resonated with so many people.
“I don’t really do a lot of social media
but I think there has always been a projection of unattainable or unrealistic
lifestyle that I found quite toxic, and the thing I like about canon event is,
it’s giving people a bit more ownership over the truth of their lives,” he
said.
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