Canon.
Continuity.
Lore.
The Three-Headed Monster That Guards the Gate of "What Counts."
As a fictional world grows and expands, it's often the case that there will be occasional bits of it that its fans regard as outside its parameters, regardless of whether it has the same name stamped on it.
Star Trek: The Animated Series. Highlander 2: The Quickening. Dimensions in Time. Scream of the Shalka. Spider-Man: Chapter One. NFL SuperPro. The Star Wars Holiday Special. Whether now or at sometime in the past, these are all examples of things that have been created as part of a fictional world but then ejected from "what counts" in that fiction. (Ok, I'm not sure NFL SuperPro was actually ejected, but I'm pretty sure a few people want it to be.)
But what is the source of such ejection? What does it mean for something not to "count" within the confines of something that didn't really happen anyway? Who has the authority to make such determinations and how binding are they really?
There are three words that tend to get used to describe this concept of what does and doesn't count: Canon, continuity and lore.
These three words get used pretty interchangeably by fandoms (and I'm as guilty of doing so as anyone else) but they're not actually the same thing. By that, I'm not just talking about semantics but rather noting that they're attached to three different concepts, ones that get frequently conflated but are quite distinct from one another.
Canon
What is canon? Canon is the universally agreed upon version of "what counts."
Canon draws its name from biblical canon, the list of sacred books that are accepted as genuine. It's "what counts" in terms of religion.
In terms of fictional universes, the first use of canon outside of religion as a parameter for a fictional universe was for Sherlock Holmes. (At least it's the first use I'm aware of.) Holmes fandom effectively declared that any Holmes stories written by someone other than Holmes' original author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, were not a part of its canon. They "didn't count." Authorship was the deciding factor in Holmes canon, not quality or medium. No matter how much one likes Sherlock, Elementary, Basil Rathbone Holmes films or The Seven-Percent Solution, they aren't part of Holmes canon.
Later fandoms have tried to adopt similar approaches to canon but with more limited success. It's hard to use authorship as the determining factor in canonicity as soon as you start dealing with any sort of medium where multiple authors is the expected norm, like television. I've seen it attempted (Dragonlance fans who only "count" the stuff actually written by Weiss and Hickman come to mind) but its value is limited. What use would it really be to, say, only count the Doctor Who episodes written by Anthony Coburn? That leaves you with 4 episodes in almost 6 decades (and no Daleks!)
Some fandoms are the recipients of official statements on canon. Star Wars comes to mind, George Lucas having not only made declarations over the years about what does and doesn't count in Star Wars but even going so far as to establish "tiers" of canonicity, with different works counting to different degrees. But then, Lucas doesn't own Star Wars anymore. Does that negate his statements? (Especially in light of Disney having made declarations which specifically change that canon.) From whence does the authority to determine canon actually derive? Original authorship? Ownership of the property? Does Disney get to override Lucas' concept of canon? Should Lucas' concept carry over beyond the point where he's not the person in charge anymore?
And some fandoms get no such guidance. Doctor Who has managed to go almost six decades without any sort of significant declaration on the part of the BBC as to what is and isn't canon (bar a single reference to some video games being canon a while back...but canon to what? The television show? The books? The comics? The audios?)
Along those lines, I've also seen attempts to determine canon based on medium. There's a certain appeal to this notion. If something started out as a book, television or film series, it's very tempting to only treat the installments that fall within that original medium as counting and, while I generally eschew canon as a useful concept, this is probably the version of it I have the most sympathy with. Still, there can be problems with this approach as well. I can find you plenty of people who don't think the Star Trek novels are canon, just the television series, but I won't find many who don't think the films count. And, as soon as you start deciding to include some non-original media and not others, hasn't the whole thing become pretty arbitrary? And, if it's arbitrary, isn't one person's preferred type of media as viable as another's? And how far can that be taken? Once, way back in the early days of the internet, I saw someone define Doctor Who as "what happens within the confines of the television show Doctor Who" and then proceed to explain how we can't count K-9 and Company (despite its very obvious ties to Who) because...well, because it isn't called Doctor Who. It was a definition so narrow as to be both circular and pointless.
One method I've seen attempted many times for defining canon is based on how "official" a release within a franchise is. If the people who officially own something release it, then it's canon and if someone else does, it isn't. This would almost seem to be the most obvious way to do it but it can still lead to disagreement. Does such a viewpoint mean that only the things directly released by the owners count? Or do things the owners don't create but officially sign off on count? The BBC doesn't just create Doctor Who itself. It also licenses other companies to create books and comics and audios plays and toys and Weetabix cards. Does all the licensed material count? Does only some of it count? If only some of it counts are the reasons for that arbitrary?
That arbitrariness flies in the face of the "universally agreed upon" portion of the definition above. As soon as we start treating canon as if it's something that can be determined on an individual basis, it ceases to have any real meaning. I see many references to "personal canon" but, while I certainly believe people are free to count and not count whatever parts of a fictional narrative they prefer, treating canon like it's completely individual also renders it effectively useless. If no one agrees about what canon is, then it's efficacy in any discussion between two fans is pretty much nil. You can't use the concept of canon to settle a debate if one person's "personal canon" is just as valid as the other's.
During my more cynical moments, I sometimes think that the ability to appeal to such faux authority is the point of "personal canon." It allows someone to add an air of official sanction to what is really just their own opinions.
Person A: "I think such-and-such happens."
Person B: "But there's a scene in Book X that says such-and-such didn't happen."
Person A: "My personal canon doesn't include the books so such-and-such happened."
Person B: "The books are in my personal canon, though."
Again, I don't begrudge anyone their own definition of what does and doesn't count but, at the same time, the concept of a personal canon means that no one's personal canon carries the weight of agreed upon authority...which is the entire point of canon in the first place. The above exchange is effectively circular, leaving Persons A and B in exactly the same positions they started with and, while it's certainly ok for people to enter and leave a debate with their positions unchanged, it's worth noting that no actual debate took place. Personal canons were used as a way of avoiding having the discussion at all, everyone just sitting tight in their own positions, rendered unassailable by their personal canons.
Heh, maybe personal canon's not that bad an idea after all.
Still, the question of how useful (or not) the concept of canon is still seems like a valid one to me. If we can't even decide what canon should be based on, how can we ever agree on what it should be and thus...well, what good is it?
And while we can't seem to agree on what canon should be based on, there's a couple things that it clearly shouldn't be based on...yet I still see people frequently trying to use them...
Canon is not based quality.
The point of canon is to have an agreed upon notion of "what counts." There's nothing more antithetical to that than the idea that "what counts" should be based on what people think is "good" and eject what people think is "bad." As soon as one starts ejecting material based on how much one personally does or doesn't like a work, canon goes from just not being very useful to being pointlessly exclusionary. In that context, canon becomes a bludgeon to be used to denigrate things others enjoy but you don't. "Oh, you like Dimensions in Time? Well too bad, it's not canon!" "I think the Doctor should always be male, therefore Doctor Who's canon stopped at Peter Capaldi." Trying to base canon on perceived quality is, to my mind, completely self-defeating. It sets aside the entire point of canon (that it's mutually agreed upon) in favor of one person trying to use it as a source of authority to discount the views of others.
I've even seen weird combo/hybrid approaches to canon based on combining the medium and quality ideas, like people who will accept all the televised parts of Doctor Who, but none of the other media like the books, comics and audio plays. While I sometimes see that one couched in quality terms ("I don't like the audios") I find that, when examined, it's less about quality than it is about interest. People don't want to be bothered tracking this stuff down or spending the money to acquire it so they want it not to count.
Which brings us to another thing canon isn't...
Canon isn't the list of stories you're allowed to like.
Whether it's based on quality or medium or official statement, canon is about "what counts" not what's good and not what you're allowed to like and experience. Don't let the concept lead you into believing that, if something falls outside canon, you're obliged to skip it or not like it if you experience it. "What counts" is not, as mentioned above, a statement about quality. I greatly enjoy the two Peter Cushing Dr. Who movies from the '60s despite most considering them non-canon to Doctor Who. I think the later Doctor Who story Sleep No More is awful while acknowledging that most would consider it canon.
Watch whatever interests you, canon be damned. You don't have to skip The Seven-Percent Solution just because Doyle didn't write it. You can read all the old Yuuzhan Vong Star Wars books and enjoy them, not worrying about if they count or not. You don't have to watch Star Trek V: The Final Frontier just because it "counts." Doctor Who doesn't stop at Peter Capaldi, but if you want to stop watching there, go right ahead (though I think you're missing out personally.)
You don't need to skip the Star Wars Holiday Special because it doesn't "count." You can just skip it because it's awful. Conversely, you don't have to skip The Star Wars Holiday Special just because it doesn't count. You can watch it because it's awful...in a "can't take your eyes from the car crash" sort of way.
It may be very hard for people to decide what canon is...but we know what it isn't. It isn't what we're "allowed" to like.
Oh, it also isn't...
Continuity
Canon is what "counts." It's an external concept, a judgment on what is and isn't a part of the official story.
Continuity is what "happens" within the story. It's an internal concept, the notion of what did (or didn't) take place within a fictional reality. It's the events within the story, as opposed to what things are the story.
These are two concepts that get conflated a lot, far too much in my opinion. I can see why that occurs. It makes sense, in terms of figuring out continuity, to have a baseline for what parts of the story "count" ahead of time. If I'm trying to write a biography of Luke Skywalker, I need to know if I should put his visit to Chewbacca's family on Lifeday in it or not. I also need to know if I should put in all the things that happen in his Marvel comics adventures, the gazillion little kids playbooks he's in and the various (and sometimes divergent) things he did after Return of the Jedi.
Canon can be a useful concept when figuring out continuity. Indeed, that original Sherlock Holmes canon has been used to create exactly the kind of biography of Holmes I was discussing with Luke above.
It doesn't work well in the other direction, though. Don't get me wrong, continuity, as a concept, is a bit less malleable than canon. Events either happened or they didn't. The Daleks were either created by Davros or they were created by Yarvelling. The first captain of the Enterprise was either named Robert April or it wasn't. Han and Leia either had a single child named Ben or three named Jacen, Jaina and Anakin.
While it's very tempting to use continuity as the basis for canon it gets problematic if you start ejecting stories wholesale from canon on that basis. That starts leaving massive holes in the stories. Do we eject The War Games from Doctor Who just because the Doctor says Time Lords can "live forever, barring accidents," something we'd find out wasn't the case a few years later? That'd be a bit of a problem considering The War Games is the story that introduced the Time Lords in the first place. The dates in Mawdryn Undead don't match up with some of the dates from the previous UNIT stories. Do we eject those stories? There's a ton of them, seasons' worth! Do we, instead, eject Mawdryn Undead? That'd be problematic too, as it's the story that introduces Turlough and begins the Black Guardian Trilogy.
Do we reject Children of the Gods, the pilot episode of Stargate: SG-1 because the physics of the Stargate work a slightly differently than they do in the rest of the series? Seems problematic, given that it's the episode the entire rest of the series springs from.
Do we discount On Her Majesty's Secret Service because James Bond and Blofeld don't recognize each other, despite having met in the previous film, You Only Live Twice? The death of Bond's wife, Tracy, in On Her Majesty's Secret Service is referenced several times in the future. Do we discount You Only Live Twice instead? No, that doesn't really work because Bond is only looking for Blofeld because of the events of the earlier film.
Do we discount every DC comic that happened before Crisis on Infinite Earths? New 52? Rebirth? That almost seemed to be the intent of these events yet, after each, invariably, bits of pre-event continuity seem to find there ways back into the post-event stories.
Do we try to be more precise, discounting not just whole works but pretending that individuals scenes, or even lines of dialogue don't exist, in order to square up the continuity into a viable timeline? It may be more precise but it's also more than a bit silly. If you want to go through and ignore or edit out individual bits of dialogue from works of fiction you knock yourself out, but that seems a bit extreme to me. Eventually you'll get to the point where you're cutting single words out of sentences.
There is another option though.
Crazy as it sounds, we could simply accept that continuity in fiction is not a pristine and perfect concept. At the end of the day, the continuity of a piece of fiction is malleable in a way that the continuity of the real world is not. We can't go back and change what's happened but authors can...and do. Jean Grey is revealed to be alive in Fantastic Four # 286 because they wanted to do something with the character in 1986, despite her previous death in Uncanny X-Men # 137 which was the story they'd been telling in 1980. There are continuity contradictions within that original Sherlock Holmes canon because Doyle changed some details of Watson's backstory after it was established. Writers change things all the time because they're trying to write the best story for right now, not for back when earlier stories were made. Retcons are a thing and not always a bad thing.
Fiction can mimic reality but it isn't reality. The events of a fictional timeline are artificial constructions, not depictions of real events. Further, pristine continuity isn't the same thing as quality. Fiction is...well, fiction. Mimicking reality is only one approach to fiction and there is a very decent argument that making a current story slavish to a continuity point from decades ago is a serious misplacement of priorities when trying to build a good story. Does it really matter if Dr. Watson took a jezail bullet in the shoulder or in the leg?
To some people it clearly does. That's their prerogative. But, as with canon, I'd suggest that using continuity as a guide to what one should or shouldn't watch and experience is a self-defeating exercise. Fiction is, as mentioned above, not reality. When we watch or read or listen to a work of fiction, we're not doing research into something that really happened. It's "veracity" isn't actually that important.
And, like canon, continuity isn't a guide to what you should and shouldn't be able to experience.
The Doctor may not ever have looked like Peter Cushing in continuity, but that doesn't mean you can't watch and enjoy the two films where he plays Dr. Who. Disney may have declared Jacen, Jaina and Anakin Solo nonexistent but it's not like you're obligated to clear the books where they appear off your bookshelf. I am, at this very moment, looking at my copy of Highlander, wherein Connor MacLeod wins the Prize by defeating the last other living Immortal...despite it being on same shelf with no less than three stories which not only contradict that conclusion but also contradict each other in how they contradict it.
Like canon, continuity is not a guide to quality. Watch what you like, in continuity or not. It's all fodder for...
Lore
This is my favorite head of the beast. The other two slobber and growl and snap. This one is pleasant and inviting. Why? Because it's inclusive.
Canon is about deciding what "counts" so, by definition, it excludes that which doesn't.
Continuity is about deciding what "happens" so, by definition, it excludes that which didn't.
Lore, however, is just a body of knowledge about a subject. It includes...well, everything there is about that subject. For Doctor Who, it's the show, the books, the audios, the comics, the annuals, the Cushing Movies, Scream of the Shalka, Dimensions in Time, Death Comes to Time, Tom Baker getting a message from the Brigadier in a movie theatre and the stageplay The Ultimate Adventure in which the Doctor looks like Jon Pertwee...and the stageplay The Ultimate Adventure in which the Doctor looks like Colin Baker...and the stageplay The Ultimate Adventure in which the Doctor looks like David Banks.
For Star Wars, the lore includes all those books that "don't count" anymore, no matter how much they contradict the ones that do.
For Star Trek, it included the Animated Series even back when they used to declare it didn't count.
For James Bond it includes the books, the comics, the films and every version of Casino Royale there is.
For Indiana Jones it includes every movie, even if the fourth one was terrible, and all of the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.
Lore is inclusive, it's the whole body of knowledge about a fictional universe, it's everything that can be drawn from to make the story interesting. It doesn't need to be justified like canon or continuity. It's just a giant grab bag of things that can be enjoyed, or ignored, at whim. It's the version of "what counts" where the parameters are what you're enjoying at the time, not how it fits with other things you may or may not have enjoyed. It allows us to see the Doctor leave Susan behind in The Dalek Invasion of Earth and feel that as a genuine bittersweet moment...not an act of unmitigated cruelty which it likely becomes if you start glomming on the concept of Time Lord lifespans to it that were added into continuity and canon later.
Lore's what could allow Kleptons to show up on Doctor Who next year, despite only being a product of the comics, just as it allowed the Chelonians to get an offscreen cameo despite never having been seen out of the books. It lets all of the 8th Doctor's audio companions get namechecked in The Night of the Doctor and "Lifeday" to get a mention in the first episode of The Mandalorian.
Lore's the one that validates it all, the concept that reminds you that you're not the only one who likes Kroton the emotional Cyberman or Kaldor City.
The Value of the Triumvirate
In truth, the title of this musing is misleading. There's no contest between canon, continuity and lore. They're different concepts, not competing ones.
But there are differences in value between them. Canon and continuity share a lack of value outside their specific contexts. Unless you're talking about an agreed upon notion of what counts, canon is meaningless. Unless you're discussing what happened within the narrative, continuity is useless.
When something is declared non-canon or out of continuity, that doesn't mean it's bad or that one is obligated to skip it. Canon works aren't better than non-canon ones. Star Wars is still better if Han fires first no matter what version is canon. Something that's out-of-continuity isn't worse than something that's in continuity. John Byrne's Man of Steel is still the definitive Superman origin story, regardless of whether it's been replaced since then.
(And, of course, my opinion on those works isn't the final word on their quality either. I've met many people who prefer other Superman origins. And I'm sure, somewhere out there, someone other than George Lucas himself must like Greedo firing first...although I've never met this hypothetical person.)
But lore...lore's got value outside its context, or rather its context is all-encompassing. Lore's about appreciation, not exclusion. I can debate canon for hours and I can contemplate continuity for days but lore? Lore I can enjoy forever.
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