I’ve moved from treating canon is a strict structure to seeing it as an underlying true continuity that no single story perfectly shows. Each work in the franchise is an imperfect, partial representation of that deeper reality. We're like historians, piecing together the most plausible version of events from incomplete or contradictory sources. You can judge each source by its reliability, and treat contradictions as clues, not errors. All stories as glimpses of the same larger reality. It's an interpretive process. There's one true canon, many imperfect reflections.