In this terrifying age where even normies are into nerd properties, there are more and more debates about "canon." Every time a new movie or game or comic or whatever comes out you'll have people asking "is this canon" and "does this make work X non-canonical?"
And I have realized that I know longer know what the hell people are even talking about or why they care.
Take an easy example: the new Star Wars trilogy. Disney buys the license to Star Wars and decides to make their own crappy movies. These obviously contradict the previous "expanded universe" material set post original trilogy, but all of that material was declared "non-canonical" (and now classified as "legends.") Simple enough right? But ask yourself, what does it really mean?
Fans will say "the legends material didn't happen, the Disney movies are what really happened." But this is all fictional; none of it "really" happened. Am I really supposed to read a book like Heir to the Empire and tell myself the whole time "all of this is fake; none of this matters; only the Disney stuff matters" but watch The Force Awakens and say "I can suspend my disbelief now, since this 'actually happened.'" Obviously if I'm reading Heir to the Empire I'm going suspend my disbelief to the extent that I do for any other story.
Another argument used is "when you're reading the Legends stuff you're just reading fanfiction, since it was not part of the story envisoned by the original creators." But the exact same argument could be applied to the new movie trilogy and especially to the corresponding tie-in books, yet those are "canonical." The counterargument to that is "but that's being done by people with the rights to Star Wars." Yet so was the old stuff, and Disney has the rights to both make new material and sell the old "legends" material, so it's not like the old expanded universe material is an any way unauthorized like a random fanfiction posted on the internet is unauthorized.
It's possible that the rights to Star Wars could be sold, and likely it will happen eventually. At that point the new rights holders will probably make their own spin on things and declare the Disney stuff "non-canon." And it's very possible that Disney themselves might change their minds when making new properties. You see this with the Terminator franchise: in addition to more subtle retcons from Terminator to T2 or T2 to Rise of the Machines we get Genisys outright removing things from the timeline and Dark Future deleting T3 and beyond without any time travel shenanigans. So at most we can say that canon is "official fictional stuff that really happened at the moment, but in the future it might not have really happened." If you examine this way of thinking without getting blinded by nerd or NPC preconceptions, you'll easily see how incoherent it is.
Realistically speaking all "non-canon" means is "the rights holders don't want you to respect this work." I would argue that this is already sketchy when the rights holder is the original creator. For example, if an author write a book, writes a sequel and then changes his mind and rights an alternate contradictory sequel there's no reason why you can't still read and like the first sequel. The author might have rejected it, but it's still a legitimate creative work that can be enjoyed and treated seriously. I'm not advocating full "Death of the Author" in that I think it is wrong to completely ignore clear authorial intent to interpret stories freely, but on the other hand once a work has been made it stands alone and not even the author can change it. If you don't accept this viewpoint you have to accept that the author can change things based on a whim until he dies. Imagine that just before he died, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had decided that Sherlock Holmes was actually a medium for the spirit of an ancient detective. Would we be forced to classify all Sherlock Holmes stories as ghost stories? Of course not. Similarly even if the author himself tries to retcon a published work by writing an alternate version, the original still stands alone and "actually happened" to the extent that any fictional work "actually happened."
I can see why the prevoius paragraph could be controversial, but the truth is that these sorts of changes to canon are rarely done by the original creator and are more often done by faceless corporations that pick up the rights in cynical cash grabs. The idea that such an entity has any control over fiction should be absurd on its face, but nerds have embraced corporate consumerist culture to such a great extent that they no longer see what is obvious. (The NPC nerd franchise fans of course just do what they are told.)
Related to the idea of "canon" is the idea of whether something in a franchise is a "true successor" to what came before. The easiest example to work with here is Dungeons and Dragons. It is hard to talk about "canon" in D&D because each group should have its own fictional universe to play around it. Even if they are using a published campaign like Forgotten Realms, or if they are using "default" material like 3rd Edition's list of gods or the "great wheel" of the outer planes, they will make their own additions to that material and will freely ignore things that they do not like. So D&D players still (usually) reject claims like "this character 'canonically' did this and you can't have anything else happen in your game." (Though resistance to that sort of thing is getting weaker over time.) But there is controversy over whether the various editions of Dungeons and Dragons are "the same game."
Note that in many places this wouldn't even be a controversy. For example, are Civilization I, II, III etc. all the same game? Of course not, every recognizes that they are different. They are certainly related to each other but they have many differences between them. So what's even the issue with saying that AD&D 1st and 2nd edition are different games, which in turn are both different from D&D 3rd edition, etc.? Part of the issue goes back to the fact that there is variation at each table. You might have a 3rd edition party that just clears out dungeons, another that follows a long reaching storyline over many kingdoms, another that focuses on intraparty roleplaying, etc. But most people would agree that they are playing "the same game." So the argument then becomes that the same thing applies across editions. However if you look at the mechanics themselves and how people play them, it becomes hard to defend this. For example, through 1st edition there are many rules relating to building castles, fielding armies, etc. Similarly, the focus is always on having a dynamic campaign world which gives players a high degree of autonomy within it (and, as such, is often partially randomly generated for feasibility.) In later editions there is little if anything said about play beyond the "single small party adventuring" level, and the assumption is that the players will be playing in a world and story whose outline is crafted by the DM (with or without help of "official campaign supplements.") There's a lot more difference between those two situations than, say, between the game of Life and Payday. But no one would say that those are the same board game.
And this brings me back to the earlier point about canon. People who say that they are the same game will always come back to the same point of "They're all called Dungeons and Dragons!" or "Wizards of the Coast owns the rights so they are the ones who define what the game is." The intepretation adopted by nerds here is a little different than the canon/non-canon distinction (i.e. rather than saying that old stuff "doesn't count" the conclusion is the old stuff "counts, but is actually the same as the very different new stuff.") But the reasoning is the same. The reasoning is that a corporate entity with the proper legal rights said so. This may be said explicitly, or implicitly used (the "it has the same name" argument relies on it impliciitly; if I make my own RPG and call it Dungeons and Dragons they will not say that my game is the same but will instead say "but you aren't authorized to use that name!")
You will see arguments about canon also pop up in the anime community, becuase as a rule Japanese creators do not really care about canon the way that the West does, and especially not for franchises. Take Mobile Suit Gundam. When discussing the exploits of White Base in the One Year War you have at least four differnt stories which could be counted as "official:"
This is in addition to a huge number of video games, one-shot manga, model manuals, etc. as well as some things that tell only a very small part of the story, like the recent Cucuruz Doan movie. Even if we just restrict ourselves to the four works above there are a huge number of contradictions. The novels are so at odds with everything else that few people even try to fit them into "canon", despite being made by the original creator (and better reflecting his original intentions for the story than the TV show.) But the remaining three differ on both small and large plot points (for example, what was the role of the White Base in Odessa? Did they make it there during the battle, and if so did it happen before or after they reached Jaburo?) And if you're using The Origin, there's also an anime adaptation which introduces further contradictions! You will find Western fans trying to piece things together either by saying that some work erases the previous work (ex. the movies "retconned out" the G-Fighter) or by trying to find strains of each that don't contradict each other (ex. using the Movie Trilogy for the "main" story, using the TV series to fill in the parts skipped over by the movies, and then using The Origin to flesh out the background of Char, Sayla, etc. but not using any of the scenes in the "present.") Or some people try to take one work as "true" canon and then disqualify other works as "non-canon" if they contradict it. It's always a mess.
In Japan there is not such an obsession. Despite what many Gundam fans will tell you there is not any list of "canon" works from Sunrise, but only "official" works (which include things that contradict each other.) In one of the Gundam: The Origin volumes there is an essay that compares the Gundam situation to Arthurian Romances. The idea is that the Arthurian Romances all contradict each other if taken as a whole. For example, who is the "greatest" of Arthur's knights? Gawain, Lancelot, someone else? How important is the Grail, and if it appears who, if anyone, recovers it? You're not going to get a "canonical" answer. But if you are looking into a specific adaptation, such as TH White's The Once and Future King, then you will get specific answers which apply to that story. Similarly any adaptation of Gundam will make decisions about what, among the various possible answers, is true for that adaptation, or it might keep things ambiguous (whether and why Zeon zum Deikun was assassinated is a good example of that.)
Western fans have trouble stomaching this sort of thing (even though, as the Arthurian Romances show, there is nothing inherently anti-Western about it.) So when the Zeta Gundam compilation movies came out there were idiotic arguments about how they made ZZ Gundam "non-canonical" due to the ending being inconsistent with the beginning of ZZ Gundam. (I suspect this happened due to wanting a satisfying final conclusion rather than a lead-in to a sequel series, since there were no plans to make a ZZ Gundam compilation trilogy and to this day no such trilogy has been released.) For a long time any time anyone brought anything up about ZZ Gundam on a western mecha board, it would be met with a response of "oh, that information is no longer canonical." Some people went so far as to say that no one should watch ZZ Gundam anymore, not because of its quality, but because "it didn't actually happen.
Things got dumber when Gundam Unicorn got an adaptation. The issue is that while Gundam Unicorn primarily serves as sequel to Char's Counterattack, it directly references plot elements from ZZ Gundam such as the Zeon remnants in Africa or the Puru/Ple clones. Some people said that this meant that ZZ Gundam was once again "canonical." Others said that since it only referenced elements of ZZ Gundam, but not the show as a whole, it only meant that in the "true canon" some similar things to ZZ Gundam happened but the show as a whole did not. Others discussed "alternate canons" and tried to classify where each show ended up. This last interpretation is probably the most common one now, and you can even find big complicated charts to keep track of which things fit where. I understand the autistic appeal of making such things, since trying to find order where none exists can be fun, but too many people take it way too seriously (and worse, claim that the creators fucked up when a new work further complicates the already arbitrary timeline.) They cannot accept that while each work may reference each other and there is an overall "idea" of a Universal Century Gundam, in the end there is no expansive "true canon." They desparately want Sunrise to step in and tell them what "really happened" and what didn't like Disney or Wizards do, but Sunrise is never going to do that and they probably don't even understand why anyone would care in the first place. (See the various Legend of Zelda timelines for an even clearer example of people demanding an official canon where none exists, but that gets more retarded since Nintendo actually threw them a few bones.)
I could go on for several pages more, but hopefully I've at least gotten you to try to look at these questions about canon from a different angle. If you really think about things you will realize that the modern sense of canon is retarded and only benefits those who buy up rights for cynical purpose. There is a sense where canon can be useful, but only in terms of internal consistency of a work (i.e. did the creator actually make a story that could make sense as "actually happening") or between related works (ex. does a sequel make sense as something that could have occurred after another story.) If an author wants to do more consistent worldbuilding, as say JRR Tolkien did, you can end up with a greater consistency between works that allows for a greater sense of "general canon." (Though note that even Tolkien changed his mind repeatedly on several issues, leading to no "canonical" answer to many questions, such as what the remaining two wizards were doing.) There's no point in trying to enforce something beyond that level. If you try you are going to find yourself a pawn of a heartless corporate entity that doesn't care, and this is true whether you try to enforce their "canon" or try to rebel against it. Don't even play the game in the first place.
August 20, 2022