‘Canon Event’ TikToks Use a ‘Spider-Verse’ Phrase That Almost Didn’t Make the Film

In one video, an older brother watches in horror as his younger brother gets a perm. In another photo, a girl writhes while her 10-year-old sister buys a maroon lifeguard hoodie.

“You can’t interfere. This is a canonical event,” read the video’s caption, while an eerie audio clip played in the background.

Mixed with concern and schadenfreude, these TikToks are just a few of the thousands of videos driving trends that have pushed new phrases into the pop culture lexicon. “Canon Events” are pivotal moments that must happen in order for people to be successful. I will grow into my future self. This is a concept that references the music and plot of the hit anime Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. However, the language barely made it into the film.

“A canonical event is one that was unfortunate when it happened, but turned out to have happened for a reason,” said Jon Casterline, a 19-year-old creator with 3.5 million followers on TikTok. talk.

This video spotlights the sad, frustrating, or just weird moments we all want to change, like breaking up with a high school sweetheart, getting kicked out of a friend group, or getting an embarrassing hairstyle. This reproduces this concept.

Choosing to view these events as immutable norms and posting about them on TikTok is a form of group catharsis, the realization that those very moments made us who we are today. is.

Josh Lelente, a 20-year-old TikTok creator with more than a million followers who has posted some good arguments, said: “Knowing people are sharing this eerie and awkward experience I don’t feel lonely,” he says. event video. “It helps you get things done more efficiently. It was a step in life that got you going in the right direction.”

The phrase “canon event” is nothing new. In comic book culture and his fandom of superheroes, canon has long meant a narrative element of a character that is part of a shared, fictional world.

However, the phrase was popularized by Across the Spider-Verse, which grossed over $600 million worldwide. In the film, Miles Morales travels through a universe filled with other Spider-People, each destined to encounter a series of “canonical events”, including the loss of a parent-like being and the death of a police chief. I know there is Interfering with these canonical events will result in the destruction of the entire Multiverse.

Kemp Powers, one of the film’s three directors, said in an interview that the film wasn’t originally planned to make any reference to Orthodox events. The team settled on the term “convergence event,” but switched to canonical history instead because that term confused early focus groups who saw the film.

“One of the funny things is that the whole idea of ​​this church event was something we were afraid people wouldn’t understand until the last minute,” Powers said. rice field. “So the fact that they not only understood this concept, but that it was born independently, I thought was really interesting.”

Powers, who doesn’t have a TikTok account, said he hadn’t known social media operated with this concept for a while. After the movie’s release, he was sitting at Los Angeles International Airport when he overheard the two joking about a church event.

“And I was like, ‘That’s not about our movie.’ You know what I mean? I thought, ‘That’s weird,'” he said.

But soon, friends and even his two children started sending him TikToks.

“It’s a reminder that even if you’re lucky enough to have something out there that connects with people, it’s not yours very quickly,” he says. “You have no idea what they do with it.”

Canon event videos follow a specific format. They feature scenes or captions that capture awkward or regrettable moments in real life, accompanied by excerpts from parts of the score.Spider-Man 2099 (Miguel O’Hara)” and include the phrase in brackets. “This is a canonical event. You cannot interfere.”

The score was composed by Daniel Pemberton, who according to him, this part ran the synthesizer through various algorithms to ultimately produce the “punch”-like audio. .

He said he faced events in his own canon while composing music.

“I had to repeatedly fail within this score with ideas that didn’t work until I found one that actually worked,” he said.

For Pemberton, it’s no surprise that the idea of ​​a church event resonated with so many.

“I don’t do a lot of social media, but there was always an unattainable or unrealistic projection of a lifestyle that I found very harmful. What’s there is to give people a little more ownership of the truth of their lives. ” he said.