Good thing there never was any apple because it’s all fantasy improv. Just decide on a fruit and you are as right as everybody else.
You can still approach the story on its own terms. If we said Captain Sisko drank tea rather than Raktajino, it’d still be wrong, even though Sisko and Raktajino don’t actually exist.
There is a original writer on startrek. They could recon Sisco to a tea lover tomorrow. The Bible is more like meme history, there is no regulating mechanism other than popularity. If you made the apple a banana tomorrow and most people agreed, it would be a banana and you would be right.
That’s more of a cultural thing, and one that I have broader things to say in terms of how copyright law has altered our culture.
Fantasy stories come from pre-copyright sources. Greek gods, elves, mermaids, etc. were all folk tales that developed without anyone caring about ownership. If the term “canon” meant anything at all, it was because the community accepted a certain set of stories by consensus. Biblical canon was done that way. Even this tends to be a written culture thing; oral cultures have a much more fluid understanding, and care less about consistency.
When copyright comes along, you start having big corporations controlling canon. We tend to only accept Star Trek things from Paramount as canon, and even that has limits; Star Trek comics and novels aren’t usually canon, even though Paramount licenses them.
Lord of the Rings will be copyright-free in about 20 years. It itself borrowed a lot from those pre-copyright folk tales. I’d be interested to see if the community starts to come to a new consensus on stories from new authors becoming LotR canon.
Good thing there never was any apple because it’s all fantasy improv.
The validity of the story was never in question for me… I’m atheist. Doesn’t mean we can’t discuss the story for what it is. It’s clear the writers of the story called it an apple because that’s what all fruit would have been called. That’s it. Don’t need to shit on someone else’s belief in the process.
Just like the majority of colors were more or less unnamed in a LOT of cultures until relatively recently.
Edit: Typo
Of course, and I did not shit on any beliefs. I only commented on the phrasing that you chose, namely “what the fruit was”. Even if you were talking about a short story fan fiction this would be the same situation.
The story had dozens of authors and rewrites. There is no correct answer. Possibly some authors and editors would give you different answers. My take is that there is no correct answer to be found and we can’t rely on checking facts of the event.
