In one video, an older brother watches in fear as his younger brother gets a perm. In another, a girl harasses as her 10-year-old sister buys a maroon lifeguard hoodie.
“I can’t interfere, it’s a canon event,” read the captions to the videos, with an ominous audio clip playing in the background.
Those TikToks, a mixture of concern and gloating, are among the thousands of videos driving a trend that has catapulted a new phrase into the pop culture lexicon: the “canon event,” a pivotal moment that must happen before people can come of age. become in their future selves. It is a concept based on the music and plot of the animated blockbuster “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.” But that language almost didn’t make it into the film.
“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 three and a half million followers on TikTok.
The videos play with this concept by highlighting those disappointing, humiliating, or just plain weird moments that we wish we could change: breaking up with a high school sweetheart, getting kicked out of a friend group, getting an embarrassing haircut.
Choosing to view these events as immutable canon and posting about them on TikTok is a form of group catharsis — an acknowledgment that those moments are what made us who we are today.
“Since you find out that people have this shared cringey, awkward experience, you don’t feel alone,” said Josh Referente, a 20-year-old creator on TikTok who has more than a million followers and has posted several canon videos from events. “It helps you process it a lot better. It was a step in your life that helps you move in the right direction.”
The phrase “canon event” isn’t entirely new – in comic book 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 grossed over $600 million worldwide at the box office. In the film, Miles Morales travels to a universe full of other Spider-People and discovers that each of them is destined for a series of “canon events,” including the loss of a parental figure and the death of a police commander. To disrupt any of these canon events is to invite the destruction of the entire multiverse.
Originally, the film was not going to mention a canon event, Kemp Powers, one of the film’s three directors, said in an interview. The team had chosen “convergence event,” but that term confused early focus groups who saw the film, so they switched to canon.
“One of the funny things is that the whole idea of the canon event was something that we were afraid people wouldn’t understand until the last minute,” Powers said. “So the fact that they not only understood this concept, but it took on a life of its own, I thought was really entertaining.”
Powers, who does not have a TikTok account, said he was unaware that social media was working on the concept for a while. After the film’s release, he was sitting in Los Angeles International Airport when he overheard two people joking about canon events.
“And I’m like, ‘That can’t be about our movie.’ You know what I mean? I was like, that’s weird,” he said.
But soon friends and even his two kids started sending him TikToks.
“When you’re so lucky to put something out into the world that resonates with people, it’s a reminder that right away it’s not yours anymore,” he said. “You have no idea what they’re going to do with it.”
Canon event videos follow a specific formula. They contain a scene or a caption capturing an awkward or regrettable real-life moment, accompanied by an excerpt from part of the score, “Spider-Man 2099 (Miguel O’Hara)”, and include the phrase in parentheses: “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 various algorithms to end with a “punchline” piece of audio.
He said that while composing the music, he faced his own canon events.
“I often had to fail within this score with ideas that didn’t work until I found ideas that actually worked,” he said.
To Pemberton, it makes sense that the idea of a canon event appeals to so many people.
“I don’t really do much on social media, but I think there’s always been a projection of an unattainable or unrealistic lifestyle that I’ve found quite toxic, and what I like about canon events is that it gives people a little bit more ownership about the truth of their lives,” he said.
