i m going to bed the second after this to physically prevent myself from being more annoying about this but: another reason why i'm so touchy about the usage of the word canon: people use it about _their reading_ of the text. and we ALL read the text differently.

martin said "That thing jumped literally 6 feet through the air at my face."

some people visualised that in such a way that made martin 6 ft tall. i visualised it as horizontal and a 6ft tall martin never even OCCURRED to me.
and we CANNOT KNOW which reading is correct.

in this case, jonny is still alive, we could ask him. but if he were literally dead, we wouldn't be able to. so what then? what's canon, then? regardless of the Death Of The Author stance, is that concept, of a thing that is The Intent Of The Author, even really useful?

… especially when jonny, wonderfully, very usefully for my point, has done things like have Dekker say there's nothing after life in 113, and talk about his faith in 157. even when The Author Is Alive, sometimes The Author Forgot.
and jonny did go "welp, that's in the text now."

isn't it more useful to use "canon" as in "the text, the reference we all have in common", and to keep in mind that everything else is "MY/SOMEONE'S reading of the text"

in which case, what's canon is: MARTIN SAID "That thing jumped literally 6 feet through the air at my face."

thus, equally canon-compliant readings any listener can have:
-it jumped vertically-ish and martin is about 6ft tall
-it jumped horizontally and martin is any height
-martin, who dropped out of high school, used the word "literally" figuratively when recounting a scary experience

(yes, this thread brought to you by someone who grew up with zero representation and is used to twisting a canon hostile to me to make it say things i liked more. it's cool we now get suff like explicit intended rep. doesn't magically make us all aware of The Authorial Intent.)