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What do you do?

(For those people who don't know what I'm talking about: "canon" is how a story/work/game/series/etc. goes, officially, including interpretation of characters, setting, motives, and more; "fanon" is fan-originated opinions/beliefs as to how things go in said story/work/whatever. Many of you probably won't care at all about this; this is usually relevant for people who argue about series details such as character motives and continuity issues, such as fanfic writers--but certainly not limited to them, as I don't write fanfics.)

Do you decanonize word-of-god information from the creator/publisher?

Do you maintain both, considering them to be alternate timelines or interpretations?

Or do you quietly shelve your own interpretation/timeline/etc.?

Does this affect what you do? such as refusing to buy new games or installments?

Does whether you do this depend on your opinion of the quality of the work--for example, if what used to be a upright game series devolves into a porn series years later, or if a new sequel introduces what you deem to be major character derailment?

I personally take the middle ground and maintain my interpretation as an alternate interpretation. I definitely enjoy my own take on things, and in some cases my enjoyment of a work may derive in part from a misinterpretation of a key event.

That said, I still haven't played Chrono Cross. I don't really hate it (anymore, at least), but I still don't like various things it does to the Chrono Trigger storyline (such as killing off/incapacitating several major characters, turning the first game's story into "nice job breaking it, heroes", and replacing Magus with some random dude).

This post has been edited by Glenn Magus Harvey on 1st May 2011 01:28

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Check the "What games are you playing at the moment?" thread for updates on what I've been playing.

You can find me on the Fediverse! I use Mastodon, where I am @[email protected] ( https://sakurajima.moe/@glennmagusharvey )

Nice topic!

I deal with it in some hipster way, refusing to believe somethings are canon when they are clearly only commercial stuff. I learned to do so because I Like star wars, and like it since before the old trilogy was remastered, so i refuse to believe that anything on the force unleashed or that computer made "Clone Wars" is happening in the same timeline of such great chars such Vader or even Revan.

Thus, you can say that affects my buying choices. I will only play a game that I think it's a "filler" when it offers something to compensate the damage it does to some char/event/lore, but still, I will always play with one thing in mind: "This game coud've been so much better..."

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Live Long and Prosper!

Unless they're completely terrible I accept them. For me, if the game's good, that kind of thing doesn't matter. If it's a book series I like and he writer pulls something awful, it'll piss me off, but that's another story. With games though, it usually works out like I expect it and if it doesn't, I'll play through it again to try and understand it.

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"You know that feeling you get when you're on a merry go 'round, and you want to jump off to make the spinning stop, but you know it'll suck when you land? I feel like that all the time"- Keno

"I stab my girl until I fall down"
-Yukari
Do you like Horny Bunnies?

Generally, my view is that if it isn't directly in the story, and I don't like it or think it's a good direction, I just ignore it. The only exception is Tolkien. I mean, I guess it's somebody's work, so I just keep it to myself that I don't accept it.

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Praise Be To Helix!

It varies with me. These aren't absolutes, but I generally will acknowledge something is canon... I just won't accept it.

If it's there in the story, cool. No argument. Anything else is an AU.

If it's there in a side manual, that's just another AU to me.

If the addition is stupid, EG Advent Cashin or this moronic pile of rubbish that calls itself a Warhammer 40,000 codex I deny it exists via doublethink.

Don't get me bloody started on them Grey Knights, folks. Remember everything I ever said about how stupid FF13 is, about the Complication of Final Fantasy 7? Grey Knights is five times as worse and ten times as justified. It's a rare work that makes FF7's addons look sensible.

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"Only the dead have seen the end of their quotes being misattributed to Plato."
-George Santayana

"The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here..."
-Abraham Lincoln, prior to the discovery of Irony.

I guess it depends.

I really hate the idea of Zelda and Link as a couple, because they never have any implications of that in the game. I've even heard people say they're brother and sister in some games, which makes it creepy.


Like GMH was mentioning with Chrono Cross, I really hate when the first of a series of any kind comes out and you believe the ending/relationships are one way (and like them, I suppose), then in following games/shows everything changes too drastically. In some instances, I really liked how everything initially turned out, and it seems like by changing it up the producers are just going for shock value or something.

I'm sure I'd be a terrible business woman. I wouldn't try to milk sequels for all they're worth by capitalizing on a franchise unless I legitimately saw a need to further the story. I hate that Disney has taken every movie with a princess and added an asinine sequel to it. The story was over to me. In those cases, I definitely disregard the sequels, canon or not!

One thing that really irritates me is on King of the Hill. At the start of the show, Dale Gribble had an incredibly distinct personality. He was paranoid, kept to himself, and had a lot of conspiracy theories. He didn't trust anyone. Now, he still has that, kind of, but is more of a tool (somehow) and is always chipper, and cheesy. He gets really excited, when previous Dale was very monotonous (though I liked it). It's just not a realistic personality change that came out of nowhere, like they wanted to get rid of him but didn't want to make a new character. It's grating to me! And probably only me, lol.


So if it seems like the story is suffering, and that maybe the producers were trying to keep their show on the air/make another sequel instead of living up to what they created, I get annoyed.

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You're telling me that there's no hope.

I'm telling you you're wrong.

I'm pretty much a straight-canon advocate, though in some rare circumstances I will ignore the existence of something if I find it to be both A) stupid and unnecessary to further elements of the character/plot. In the case of only one of these qualifications being present, I usually just grin and bear it. For instance, the orphan bit in FFVIII. My reasoning is that it's an absolutely silly idea and it is completely unnecessary. That's my prime usage of doublethink. I can't think of any other big ones; like I said, I'm pretty canon, and I tend to be pretty easily satisfied.

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Currently Playing : Final Fantasy V
Most Recently Beat : Elder Scrolls: Skyrim
Favorite Game : Final Fantasy X

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I'm pretty cut and dry about this. If you have a "personal canon" or "fanon" or anything of that nature, you're simply wrong and/or in denial. No fan-fictional material should ever be considered canon. I have no problems with fan-speculation or fan-fiction as principles, but they should always be separate from the real deal.

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this is a blog mostly about comics and videogames
END SPOILER

Quote (laszlow @ 1st May 2011 16:29)

I'm pretty cut and dry about this. If you have a "personal canon" or "fanon" or anything of that nature, you're simply wrong and/or in denial. No fan-fictional material should ever be considered canon. I have no problems with fan-speculation or fan-fiction as principles, but they should always be separate from the real deal.

I agree, and that's why I said that I keep it to myself if I don't like it. It's like Star Wars. I love the originals, and think the new episodes weren't good. They're still canon, but I don't think that Lucas did a good job with them, so I kind of ignore them.

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Praise Be To Helix!

Quote

I'm pretty cut and dry about this. If you have a "personal canon" or "fanon" or anything of that nature, you're simply wrong and/or in denial. No fan-fictional material should ever be considered canon. I have no problems with fan-speculation or fan-fiction as principles, but they should always be separate from the real deal.

I agree, but the problem of Canon vs Fanon comes when much of what is stated as canon is considerably worse for the canon you had so far, because money came and corrupted it to the core, and people begin to do things just for profit, ruining a descent story, descent char and etc. look, i'm not some anti profit guy, but as much as the author has the right to sell his ideas to any sequel-maker, i think i have the right to maintain my focus on the original ideas presented in the old canon. Denial? maybe, but at least i'm not that easily sold.

A good recent example of new canon being largely rejected by the comunity is the Metroid Other M game. The guys just screwed Samus char (whose personality was to have no personality), forgot all the lore over the chozo and then they come and say: The Metroid Prime games are non canon. Give me a break!

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Live Long and Prosper!

Canon is just basically authentic work that's done by an author or an artist, right? Games, like film, face a serious problem because the ideas of canon don't apply when there are multiple different companies and artists working on it. Especially considering a game 10 years old can be dug up and revamped as 'canon', without any input from any of the original artists. That's why with games we shouldn't look to the developers, artists or publishers, we should look to the game itself. It's literally the only way to do it. If you're trying to cram the term canon into games today, but not include fan fiction, it's not going to make any sense!

With fanon I might take it on-board if it answers ambiguities in an interesting and persuasive way, and is entirely based upon the original material. The less assumptions the better.

In the spirit of canon I've got my own idea of how to get a quality reading on what is canon and what is somebody just ramming out a game after buying the rights to it and calling it canon. If I could do this whenever I wanted to, and people actually considered it canon, I would make Romeo and Juliet 2: of the Dead, just to show how ludicrous the idea is that new material made by anyone can be part of the original canon.

First of all, as an absolute rule, there is no incorporating anything outside of the games into the canon. So Ultimania, interviews, manuals, artwork or anything like these is a certain no. Keeping with the ideas of games as the primary source, the story must have a beginning, a middle and an end. We're not playing a game as part of some wider sphere of information, in the context of canon we're playing a game to go through a story. Although, for example, Portal might not have a great deal of story, it therefore doesn't have a great deal of canon to discuss either.

The problem with this is canonical series of games. They are canon if they are games in a series at all times. This means that the first game must be the overall beginning and the end must come in the last game, obviously with relevant middle bits within the middle games that further the plot. A good example would be Half-Life 1, then HL2, then Episodes 1-3, of which 3 is allegedly the final end. I do not put Opposing Force or Blue Shift into the canon because they are tertiary and not at all relevant to the plot. I suppose the general rule of thumb is that a game that is in a series and canon is essential to the overall story. Taking out Half-Life 2 would lose a major chunk of it, where as with Blue Shift, taking it out would mean Barney has no backstory in Black Mesa, but who cares neither do half the other characters, it's irrelevant. Making a prequel about Gordon Freeman's life before Black Mesa would be a story in itself and may rely heavily upon future events but nonetheless be irrelevant to the plot of the Half-Life series.

Also a good test is that if the canonical series is put together as one entire game, would it stand as having a beginning, a middle and an end. For example FFVII has a beginning and an end, that's canon. However Advent Children and Dirge of Cerberus are not canon to the FFVII story because they have their own beginnings and endings. Therefore putting the series into one game would not work as its own story.

Of course anyone could say how do we know what is a beginning or an end without subjectively analysing it and bringing in our own opinions. Also, as with FFVII, how are we supposed to know what 'its own story' is. This is fair. I'd say to keep this as clear as possible we go straight to the first game in the series and see what the beginning of the story is leading up to, questions its raising, what antagonists and protagonists are introduced, what conflicts are arising, and so on. From there we see clear conflicts that must be resolved. It might not be straightforward in the whole but there can definitely be a direct plot brought forward that drives the story to its finale. For example most FF games involve beating an enemy of some kind, or with FFXII Ashe has to restore her kingdom. All the other story elements are primarily driven by this. With FFXII we then had Revenant Wings, which has nothing to do with the plot of FFXII as the story of Ashe's return to the throne is resolved, so it's not canonical to the FFXII universe. To say it's canon might as well be saying that if I bought the rights and sold fans an A4 sheet of paper about a love interest between Balthier and Ashe, that's canon.

One last point, we don't learn anything about a world or characters within a game unless it affects the story, because anything we learn is the story in itself. Therefore once the story ends, so does any story information that will crawl out of the woodwork in the following year or two after release.

All these reasons are why Advent Children, FFX-2, Revenant Wings, Dirge of Cerberus and so on are all fan fiction essentially. The first game in the series leaves no room for a plot to continue, therefore the canon ends there. Anyone can incorporate any extra details or games into a single game or series but, at the end of the day, the story is complete and it forms its own canon as a result. With games, nobody can change that. In the context of publishers, rights and artists, the point of canon, authenticity, can only be achieved by looking at the game itself and seeing what's authentic to the story and the world in the manner I have explained above.

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Scepticism, that dry rot of the intellect, had not left one entire idea in his mind.

Me on the Starcraft.

Quote (sweetdude @ 1st May 2011 18:53)

In the spirit of canon I've got my own idea of how to get a quality reading on what is canon and what is somebody just ramming out a game after buying the rights to it and calling it canon. If I could do this whenever I wanted to, and people actually considered it canon, I would make Romeo and Juliet 2: of the Dead, just to show how ludicrous the idea is that new material made by anyone can be part of the original canon.

I think you bring up an interesting point. That's not only ludicrous to even imagine, but it's ludicrous that people have probably thought of doing somthing like that before. In fact, I bet it has been done; I mean, how many versions/remakes of Romeo and Juliet are there anyways? It's just a way of capitalizing on an already-finished story, adding parts that are essentially unnecessary.

Really, this all started with Tolkien and the idea of mythopoeia, or myth-making. The idea is that you create more than just one story. You create in essence a whole other world with an imagined history. When he did it, it was really good. But I think that's because Tolkien started out with the mythology of the world, creating the Silmarillion during WWI. He then created the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings out of that mythology. That's why it works, that and the fact that it was thorough. When Lucas did it though, it just didn't seem well thought out. It's as if he made it up after he got the main idea for the story. Because, when you think about it: Star Wars doesn't really need a backstory. You have all the elements you need. FFVII doesn't need one either. For that matter, Lord of the Rings doesn't. You have the plot elements and that's all that is necessary.

The only difference is, like I said: Tolkien had all his backstory deeply planned, and even when he started writing LotR, it took him 12 years to get fully in order. That's why those stories fit, and the mythology is seamless. I feel like you do about AC. It doesn't seem to fit in with the original story. And that's because it really wasn't made for that reason.

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Praise Be To Helix!

Quote

I agree, but the problem of Canon vs Fanon comes when much of what is stated as canon is considerably worse for the canon you had so far, because money came and corrupted it to the core, and people begin to do things just for profit, ruining a descent story, descent char and etc.

And there's also the problem of conflicting official canon, as well as canon that got derailed for various reasons (death of the author, executive meddling, etc.).

(Yes, I'm using trope names because they're convenient.)

For example, Zero in Mega Man Zero (the first game) is supposed to be the same Zero who accompanied X in the Mega Man X. However, the X timeline was supposed to end with X5 and Z1 was designed with that in mind, but then Capcom wanted Inafking (Keiji Inafune, the series creator) to make more X games and then he had to make MMZ!Zero different from MMX!Zero, a point that's developed only starting in MMZ3 I think.

Or for that matter, MMX!Zero was the original design of X.

This post has been edited by Glenn Magus Harvey on 2nd May 2011 20:10

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Check the "What games are you playing at the moment?" thread for updates on what I've been playing.

You can find me on the Fediverse! I use Mastodon, where I am @[email protected] ( https://sakurajima.moe/@glennmagusharvey )

I, myself, do not really engage in fanon, but I do often come up with an interpretation of each part of the story, including the world behind it (though some may argue there's not really a difference). I find that it does enrich the experience if you are able to view a work as more than what's there on a plain reading/viewing.

I am a comic book fan, where fanon can get really problematic, as the fans eventually become the creators of pre-existing characters and worlds, and many try to make their own fanon into canon.
A good example is with Superman, my favorite character, especially in regards to the recent controversy. Because of the nature of Superman (as essentially the ultimate superhero and the standard of what superheros are), people will project their own ideals onto him, while ignoring the history or evolution of the character (or both), and turn him into their own personal Mary Sue Superman.
For those who haven't heard, in a recent issue, Superman renounced his US citizenship (and the internet went apeshit). It was in one of a few stories in an anthology anniversary issue. The whole thing reminds me of a few years ago when a writer on a fill-in issue made Superman an atheist (apparently giving him the religious background of the writer himself). Both situations seemed to me as the writer just trying to sneak his own opinions into the Superman mythos through a minor story that the editors wouldn't be paying much attention to (the religion one happening in a last-minute rush job, the citizenship one happening in a minor side story in an anthology issue). The Superman is an atheist thing was ignored, and no writer since has taken it as part of the way he's written the character, and the same thing is going to happen with the citizenship story. Comics have a weird way about having a loose canon like that.
This kind of problem is fairly unique to comics, though, (or at least the way this problem manifests) as the stories tend to continue for decades after the original creators are done with the characters.
*Sharp turn away from overly-long example and back into topic*

Ultimately, I don't really have a problem with fanon, as long as people aren't too rabid about it or try to force their fanon into canon (like the above unsuccessful Superman example or the similar successful treatment of Captain America).

As far as fanfiction goes, I was writing one a while ago that I ultimately discarded because a sequel came out (15 years later). It wasn't very good and I was no longer enjoying trying to write it, so I don't begrudge the sequel. It just happened to be the tipping point of me giving up on it.

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"I had to write four novels before they let me write comic books."
-Brad Meltzer

Well, actually putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) is different from simply planning out or imagining a story.

What do you mean about "the similar successful treatment of Captain America"? I'm by and large not familiar with comic book fandoms.

Also, you could say that those individual interpretations of Clark Kent turned him into...
*sunglasses*
a Mary Sueperman.

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Check the "What games are you playing at the moment?" thread for updates on what I've been playing.

You can find me on the Fediverse! I use Mastodon, where I am @[email protected] ( https://sakurajima.moe/@glennmagusharvey )

Basically, whenever there's a Republican in the White House, Captain America either dies or retires out of disgust with how America doesn't match up with its ideals anymore.

I had to fight really really hard not to make that pun.

But that kind of thing happens with pretty much all of the major superheroes (the B and C-listers tend to be the ones most consistently written), but Superman is the one who gets the Sueperman treatment the worst. Even stuff that is supposed to be official, like in Birthright, which was supposed to be the official updated origin of Superman, the writer made him a vegetarian because he now has "soul vision" (it was dumber than it sounds). Soul Vision hasn't popped up in comics since, and I remember seeing Superman eating a hotdog in one of his books a year after Birthright ended. Writers can put in and ignore whatever they'd like (it's the editor's job to keep things consistent), which has made comic book canon more malleable, for better or worse.

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"I had to write four novels before they let me write comic books."
-Brad Meltzer

i'm pretty much with laszlow here. trying to replace official canon with your own is akin to shoving the writer away from his desk and saying "beat it, kid. i got it from here."

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moé in the streets, senpai in the sheets

Unless said canon really really sucks, as far as I am concerned, such as much new FF7 canon for example, I usually am okay.
Also, I very strongly recommend you play Chrono Cross, Glenn, assuming you liked Chrono Trigger, which I assume you did, seeing your name.

The basic issue for me, I guess, like most of you, is whether it adds to the material. No matter what it is, if it doesn't add to the story, it may hurt the story. The important thing, after all, is the quality of the narrative.

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Praise Be To Helix!

Same here. It all depends on the quality of the writing and whether something truly adds to the story or just makes a big ol' mess. I would never consider my own personal ideas, character interpretations, etc. part of official canon, but by that same token, I feel no need to respect canon when things like executive meddling, character derailment, ass pulls, filler arcs, shameless sequels made for the sole purpose of cashing in, and such come into play. Just because something is official doesn't mean I have to watch it, read it, play it, or buy it. When things like that happen, I try to ignore them and focus on the parts of canon I do like. If they conflict with canon, my own ideas are just an AU.

This post has been edited by Psiren on 6th May 2011 15:41

Great topic!

For me, I am always aware of the fact that my interpretation exists separately from the canon. When my interpretation of events or of characters differs from canon, I will discuss (and on occasion, argue for) my own interpretation with anyone willing to listen. I never ignore canon, but I often find myself looking for ways to "improve" canon, and if I come up with something, then yeah, I tell whomever will listen. I never argue for an alternate universe per se, but what I'm doing is more or less the same.