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Canon - TV Tropes
"Warning: The game you are about to play is canon."
That which counts, in terms of continuity.
Canonicity, as it applies to television series, is substantially different from its literary counterpart. For example, there is no question of which Sherlock Holmes stories (the first non-biblical literary works to which the term was applied) are canonical: those written by Doyle are, everything else isn't.
Television canonicity works much differently, as there are many authors involved. Works not officially sanctioned are generally outside of canonicity, but what remains inside is more nebulous. Officially licensed material, novelizations and tie-in novels are not usually considered canonical. Even broadcast material can be excluded from the canon when decreed by Word of God.
The primary issue is that canons for completed works (especially with a single author) are descriptive, whereas fans' attempts to define canonicity for ongoing works are prescriptive. If a fact is canonical, you are not allowed to contradict it.
The concept of canonicity is almost entirely an invention of fandom. The writers will ignore, include, or change whatever facts they damned well like. This is not to say that the writers totally lack a sense of continuity, but it is a much weaker concept than "canonicity" as presented by fan communities. Writers can tweak continuity quite a lot without actually breaking it by using Broad Strokes.
In fan communities based on very loose continuities, what is "canonical" can sometimes boil down to "the bits we like". Fans will attempt to find any excuse to "de-canonize" facts that they personally find inconvenient.
A related term is Deuterocanon (known here on TV Tropes as Word of Dante), which in this context refers to those persons, places and/or events which are not explicitly shown on-screen, but which are considered "official" or close to it. For canonicity that comes not from the source material but from pronouncements by the creator, see Word of God. For the contrary idea that something is canonical only if it appears in the source material (external opinions of the creator, Dummied Out content, and Deleted Scenes not included), see Death of the Author.
Continuity is another related, but very distinct term. While canonicity refers to what works do and don't count, continuity is the story groups themselves: long-running franchises may tell many stories which all have their own considerations of what's canonical to them. For example, Transformers has the 1984 cartoon, the Unicron Trilogy, Animated, and more that all have similar elements, but aren't connected to each other despite being part of the same franchise.
The concept of canonicity is related to the literary term used to describe a body of work that is considered the foremost in quality and significance. For example, if one refers to the English-language literary canon, it is understood that one is speaking of books such as A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad—in other words, most of the books you read in High School are part of the English-language canon.
Many video games (and especially Visual Novels) have the problem of the Story Branching into Multiple Endings, thus creating a number of mutually exclusive but canonical happenings. This becomes particularly relevant when the source material is adapted to a linear medium like a TV series and one of the paths has to be chosen, adding "extra canonicity" to it. The same applies to sequels. Choose wrong, and the original fans will be up in arms; and there likely is no right answer. See Tsukihime for an example. Most frequently, the "good" ending is the one chosen (because the "bad" ones usually leave too many of the principals dead).
Canonicity should not be confused with Fanon, but everyone does it all the time. See Fanon Discontinuity for when people decide en masse to disregard actual canonicity, and Canon Discontinuity when the writers do it. Alternatively, see the Continuity Tropes index for all related concepts. Official Fan-Submitted Content is when the creators ask the fans to add to the canon.
Not to be confused with the Visual Novel Kanon, or the camera company Canon, or with singer/songwriter K'naan, or with Pachelbel's Canon, or the The Legend of Zelda Big Bad Ganon, or with actual cannons.
Examples of canons in fiction
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Anime and Manga
- When it comes to the Gundam franchise, the official word from Sunrise is that all works that appeared in official releases count as being canonical unless stated otherwise. Even if they try their hardest to line up with continuity and get appearances in crossover media like Super Robot Wars, this still creates quite a lot of problems. Most of the time they act more like written guides are the most canonical, anime is more of a film/movie adaptation of what actually happened, yet much more canonical than manga and novels, and games are all non-canonical, unless retconned by any previous mentioned media and with no contradiction with the guides.
- Dragon Ball is a tricky beast because after several decades of adaptations and additional stories, what is canonical is a very open question. Not helping matters is that there's no word for canon in Japanesenote Toei often use "takes place in an alternate universe", which doesn't accurately convey the concept, and Toei prefers not to say in case they torpedo popular GT merch. For most fans, canonicity is Serious Business, and plenty a Flame War has erupted over what is and isn't canonical. Complicating this is that many properties (plus a lot of Filler) have been developed without Akira Toriyama's direct influence, and many of the franchises' beloved characters either weren't thought up him or plain don't fit in anywhere. There are also many fans who feel the need to explicitly tell other fans what parts of the series they are allowed to "count" and what parts not, to the point where they insist that separate scenes in an episode should be disregarded. In the more reasonable parts of the fandom, it's generally agreed that there are several "categories" of canonicity with a sort of pyramid arrangement:
- Manga Canonicity: anything that has the involvement of Akira Toriyama, and the "absolute" canon: the original manga, additionally with Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods, Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection 'F' and Dragon Ball Super. Super adapts the two aforementioned movies with some minor differences, with the version being "truly" canonical being up to fan preference as none of these differences have any bearing on the long-term plot. There is also a 2008 OVA special that was confirmed to be canonical in Battle of Gods. Dragon Ball Super also has a manga drawn by Toyotarō that does cause some issues in that later arcs that are wholly original to it, alongside other minor differences to the anime. Word of God is usually considered canonical as well, but due to Toriyama's forgetful and sometimes self-contradictory nature some fans take this with a grain of salt.
- Anime Canonicity: All of the anime-exclusive Filler and Non-Serial Movies that don't contradict the manga or have small plotholes that are easily explained away. They aren't canonical to the manga and thus will never be referenced in those materials, but you could be excused for "counting" them. Examples include the Ginyu-takes-over-Bulma subplot (which was actually referenced in Super), antics during the 10-day wait for the Cell games, the driving episode, Dragon Ball Z: Cooler's Revenge, Dragon Ball Z: Broly – The Legendary Super Saiyan, and Dragon Ball Z: Bojack Unbound. The Other World Tournament used to count as well, but has since been demoted as Resurrection F explicitly retconned all scenes in hell.
- The Anime can also be split into "Classic" and "Modern" canons. The former would include works like Dragon Ball GT from the 80s and 90s, while the latter would include only modern additions like Dragon Ball Z Kai and Super, the latter of which contradicts GT the more it goes on.
- Non-Canonicity: All anime-exclusive materials that contradict the manga, all unique video game plots (many of which are What-if's anyway), and all non-Toriyama or non-Toyotaro manga. Examples include Dragon Ball Z: The Tree of Might and Dragon Ball – Episode of Bardock; in fact the movies contradict the anime so much that some find it easier to put it in its own canon altogether.
- Naruto:
- Naruto, like Dragon Ball, is another Long Runner with a lot of Filler, as such the majority of the fandom hold the claim that "If it was written by Masashi Kishimoto, it's canonical"; officially though what's also considered canonical by Word of God are the Naruto Hiden novels (some of which were adapted in the Shippudden anime, and some of their filler villains and characters even appearing briefly in the manga during the Fourth Ninja War). For the movies, while Naruto the Movie: Road to Ninja was made with the author's involvement it is not considered part of the Canon since it doesn't fit in any part of the continuity and because of the author's own admission. The next movie The Last: Naruto the Movie, on the other hand was the first movie to be explicitly stated to be part of the manga continuity, and had Kishimoto directly involved as a story supervisor.
- For the Spin-Offspring Sequel Series, Boruto, things have become a little...complicated to say the least: at first Boruto: Naruto the Movie was considered absolutely canonical since it was also written by Kishimoto, but then the Boruto manga series came out and started by adapting the events of the movie with some significant differences, then the anime came out starting from a chronological point before that with it's own story arcs which were considered Filler by most of the fandom...until the manga started referencing the anime only arcs; adding to the confusion there's the fact that Kishimoto acts as a story supervisor and editor for both the Boruto manga and anime. To this date, Word of God has confirmed that both the anime and manga are canonical and it's becoming more and more apparent that the aforementioned Boruto movie was in reality the Pilot Movie for the new series.
- For Macross, Shoji Kawamori has said that all the installments are canonical. Yes, that includes both Super Dimension Fortress Macross and Macross: Do You Remember Love? note or the movie and TV versions of Macross Frontier and Macross Delta, which are mutually contradictory versions of the same events. Kawamori has explicitly stated that whichever version is the actual story is up to the individual viewer's preference.
Comic Books
- Superhero comics have wildly fluctuating levels of canonicity with generally the most popular stories written by currently established writers being considered canonical, often even if they weren't originally. For example, Kingdom Come, originally an Elseworlds story, was eventually retconned to be the official future of the DC Universe (and later retconned to be one of the Fifty Two earths with the Superman of that universe interacting with his mainstream universe counterpart.) Often after a major retcon or reboot, classic stories are considered canonical until proven otherwise by new canonicity. Birthright was considered Superman's origin story even after Infinite Crisis until Johns wrote Superman: Secret Origin.
- Marvel tends to be very inclusive with their canon; many works are included thanks to their utilisation of more than one Alternate Universe.
Film - Animated
- Titan A.E. had two short novels that came out with the film, to help explain the two main characters' pasts and motivations, as well as the world in which it is set.
Film - Live-Action
- Star Wars: The Legends canon had a tiered rank of canonicity, with the films at the top, The Clone Wars below that, their novelizations below that, and then most of the books and other works subordinate to that, with each tier being named (G-Canon for films and film novels, T-Canon for The Clone Wars, and C-canon for the rest), and there was also a grouping for non-canonical materials. Towards the later end of the franchise's run, material written for The Clone Wars began to contradict, and consequently override, earlier "lower-canon" material. After the Disney purchase, all material was deemed non-canonical except for the six theatrical films and The Clone Wars, which Lucas had worked on directly, with all the newly produced materials being functionally equivalent to the old T-Canon (although the term hasn't been used in connection with the new canon).
Literature
- Cthulhu Mythos: The canon is sometimes only the work of H. P. Lovecraft, but sometimes also the work of August Derleth. Fans argue, especially with the changes in character Derleth created. In fairness, the mythos is all about horrors beyond our comprehension, so its natural that different writers would have different interpretations of the material.
- Dragonlance fans regard the stories written by Margaret Weis and/or Tracy Hickman as being the official canon, but attitudes towards the books written by other authors range widely.
- Sherlock Holmes: In the fandom, the original works penned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle are the primary canon, with different spinoff 'verses having their own subsidiary canons. However, what facts are and are not canonical is made less clear by Direct Line to the Author, where Doyle is merely John Watson's literary agent and the stories are all first-person accounts penned by Watson (and in a few aberrant cases by Holmes himself). Watson refers repeatedly to Doyle editing parts of his stories—and in turn Holmes regularly accuses Watson of "re-imagining" cases to be more exciting and trope-tastic—but Watson also edits himself, alluding to cases still too dangerous or controversial to publish. There even seems to be some Retcon involved around Moriarty, with stories published after "The Final Problem" and "The Adventure of the Empty House" suggesting that Watson WAS involved in the long cat-and-mouse game leading up to the destruction of Moriarty's crime network but suppressed that fact in order to protect the ongoing investigation.
- Tolkien's Legendarium:
- There's some argument over what is and what isn't canonical in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien as they relate to Middle-earth; he made many, MANY changes to his works over the course of his lifetime. The works on Middle-earth he published during his lifetime, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Adventures of Tom Bambadil, and The Road Goes Ever On are generally agreed to be canonical. Even then the specific text of The Hobbit is sometimes considered non-canonical because it was not originally created as part of Middle-earth and for having a fair bit of Early-Installment Weirdness, though they acknowledge the events referenced by The Lord of the Rings in Broad Strokes.
- The Appendices to Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, which Christopher Tolkien edited for consistency with The Lord of the Rings and published after his father's death are accepted as the most canonical accounts of the pre-Hobbit history of Middle-earth but for events not covered in them one has to delve into writings unpublished during Tolkien's lifetime, which are much less organized, unfinished, and sometimes flat out contradictory to what is stated in LOTR. The History of Middle Earth series published by his son is 12 volumes devoted to documenting the evolution of Tolkien's ideas and manuscripts and STILL didn't exhaust the known body of manuscripts left behind at his death. This is further complicated by the fact that Tolkien was himself a philologist and wrote a complex Direct Line to the Author aspect into canonicity explaining how he obtained a manuscript of the Red Book of Westmarch, Frodo and Bilbo's first-hand account of their journeys. Tolkien's preferred way of dealing with apparent inconsistencies in canonicity was to attribute them to a story having been handed down in more than one form before reaching his ears or to the personal biases of those involved in the transmission of the story.
- In the Harry Potter fandom, it is, of course, widely accepted that the books take precedence over the movies. The Harry Potter Lexicon and the Harry Potter Wiki have two different approaches to this. The Lexicon believes that the canon consists only of the things J. K. Rowling has said or written, ergo the films are non-canonical unless it can be proved that a particular detail was provided by Rowling herself. The Harry Potter Wiki, on the other hand, has a "canon tier" system which regards the films as canonical in the places where they don't conflict with the books. The practical effect of this is shifting the burden of proof, i.e. the Lexicon says movie details have to prove canonicity while the Wiki says they have to be proven not canonical. Also, the Wiki places the Harry Potter video games on a third tier, below the films.note Except for the original 101 Wizard Card descriptions: as they were written by Rowling herself, they are considered first tier canonicity And then there are the fans who disregard statements from Rowling and/or whole books, mostly because they don't like that a certain character died or a certain ship became official.
- How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom: According to a note in the afterword of volume 6, author Dojyomaru considers the published Light Novel volumes the canon version of the property, rather than the original Web Serial Novel or the anime and manga adaptations.
- Discworld: The novels are the primary canon. The TV shows and video games are non canonical (the first two video games in particular are a mash-up of things that happened in different books). The RPG tries to be consistent with canon but, as it was published when Terry Pratchett was alive, specifically states that he was free to contradict it at any point. The literary spin-offs (the Mapps, Nanny Ogg's Cookbook, The Discworld Almanack etc), are generally considered to be "sort of canon" with their canonicity on a sliding scale based on how involved it appears Sir Terry was.
Live-Action TV
Mythology and Religion
- Religion, which is in fact the origin of this concept, also has its share of both canonicity and Fanon. In addition to The Bible, for instance, Jews have The Talmud and many old Jewish legends besides, and Christians have works from various Jewish and Roman historians such as Josephus, Gnostic cults, and certain popular contemporary legends as well. Note that true believers do not necessarily automatically disregard all of these apocryphal works as wholly false; in fact, Jews and Christians will often borrow from these works to interpolate from the canonical works when adapting various parts of the Bible to television and movies. They just don't require anyone to believe in these "supplementary" writings in order to be a believer.
- Note that the Christian Bible has been officially and permanently fixed since the 300's. Before this many smaller groups of religious sects argued over which Gospels were in fact true to the canon of Jesus. For example, you might be surprised to hear that there was a Gospel of Peter. It's not in your local Bible, though. If the early compilers had the information we do now, what became canonical would probably have been very different. Just one example: early Christians believed that the John mentioned as Jesus' disciple, the author of the Gospel of John, the author of the 3 Letters of John and the author of Revelation were all the same person. They're now widely considered to have been at least three different people (most historians would still say that the Gospel and the Letters probably had the same author, but the other two are undeniably different), which casts doubts on whether it was right to include those books.
- In Islam, there's The Qur'an, the Word of God, and the Hadith, things said by Muhammad that aren't part of the Koran. The Hadith have their own hierarchy of canon, based on how reliably the chain of transmission can be traced back to Muhammad, how well they cohere with other Hadith, and so on. The main categories are: Sahih (authentic, authoritative), Hasan (good, acceptable) and Da'if (weak, almost never quoted in isolation but only in conjunction with superior Hadith). Unfortunately due to the various sub-categories, things get a bit more complicated than that.
- The Koran assumed readers are already familiar with the events described in the Bible, especially the Old Testament. However, the Koran also makes it clear that the Bible is a distorted, not always reliable version of these events, and in many places gives a slightly different narrative than the Biblical one.
Newspaper Comics
- Per Word of God, only the Peanuts comic strip is canonical, not the animated TV specials, TV series and movies.
Tabletop Games
- Ordinarily Wizards of the Coast takes the position that any video game adaptations aren't canonical. But then the Forgotten Realms novel and sourcebook writers chose to make canonical several plot points from the BioWare games. For example, the whole Bhaalspawn plot from the Baldur's Gate series was referenced in the 3.5E sourcebook Lost Empires of Faerûn, and other material mentions the Wailing Death in Neverwinter Nights. By the ordinary standards the Baldur's Gate novelizations would have been more canonical than the games, but references in various materials in the run-up to 5E, plus a new comic book series, made clear that while the canonical protagonist was the one from the novels (or at least had the same name, race and gender), the events he was involved in and his companions during them were closer to those of the games.
- Catalyst Game Labs has a tiered view of canon for BattleTech. The main source of canon consists of the sourcebooks and novels note though there is a gradiation of canon here due to the Unreliable Narrator tendencies of the sourcebooks, which are almost always presented as in-universe documents from ComStar or other powers and so reflect the biases or incomplete information of the in-universe author — and in some Jihad-era books, out-and-out in-universe lies known as "canon rumors". This has proved very convenient to the various developers when changes had to be made to canon or when two sources conflict. Conversely, Catalyst has said that information related in a novel is unimpeachable canon unless explicitly retconned. With one exception: due to a variety of reasons mostly revolving around licensing snags that have made reprinting the novel impossible as well as some Early Installment Wierdness, the events of the early novel The Sword and the Dragon are considered Broad Strokes in terms of canonicity — Hanse Davion was replaced by a body double, and this still is one of his casus belli for launching the Fourth Succession War, but otherwise the novel's events are not often referenced and the novel itself is not counted in the official list of BattleTech Expanded Universe novels., and materials supporting the click-base miniature spinoff MechWarrior: Dark Age and MechWarrior: Age of Destruction games. A secondary tier exists with the computer games. Both due to their more open nature and due to the licensing issues surrounding the split intellectual propertynote Topps owns the tabletop game rights which they license to Catalyst, Microsoft owns the computer and video-game rights, the canonicity is Broad Strokes, in that events of the games generally happened, but it may not be in the exact way that any player experienced it in their own playthrough of the game and the characters created for the games may or may not exist in canonnote notable Canon Immigrants from the video games include the Crescent Hawks mercenary company from The Crescent Hawks' Inception and The Crescent Hawks' Revenge, and the entirety of the Aurigan Coalition from BattleTech (2018). The BattleTech (1994) cartoon, the various comic books, and official magazines with the possible exception of the currently-running Shrapnel magazine, also fall into this tiernote for instance, the cartoon is not canon, but Adam Steiner, Nicolai Malthus and many of the other characters are. It's just that the events in the cartoon (officially a Propaganda Piece Wartime Cartoon created by the Lyran Alliance in-universe) do not always match up with what actually occurred in canon.
Toys
Video Games
- In the games Wing Commander III and Wing Commander IV, which also had novelizations contracted out by Origin, you are given several choices as to an action path to take, as part of the "interactive movie" feature of those games. Origin (later bought by Electronic Arts) has declared that the choices taken in the novels are the official history of the in-character universe. Sorry, Locanda IV.
- Metal Gear Solid has two endings, one in which Snake's love interest Meryl dies and another in which she survives. Initially, the creators decided to handle the issue by simply ignoring it; Metal Gear Solid 2's story neither contradicts nor confirms either ending, making them both possible. It wasn't until the fourth game that we found out that Meryl lived.
- Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer assumes (not unreasonably) that the Knight-Captain defeated the King of Shadows instead of pulling a Face–Heel Turn.
- The Elder Scrolls:
- For the series in general, the canon (known to the fandom as "lore") is generally not clear-cut. Reasons for this range from nearly every source being implicitly biased due to all information being given by a character In-Universe, to sources lacking critical information or working from false information, to the implication that All Myths Are True - or that at least Metaphorically True. Out-of-game developer supplemental texts (referred to as "Obscure Texts" by the lore community) are seen as more trustworthy, but even those can be later contradicted, since frequent events in-universe alter the timeline. Because of this, it is entirely possible for two contradictory statements in-universe to both be true.
- Most prolific of the Obscure Text writers is former developer Michael Kirkbride, who still does some freelance work for the series. Most of what he writes about are the more obscure aspects of universe's cosmology which don't get expanded on in the games, as well as lore figures the games never touch upon or that Bethesda is simply finished with (like Vivec). As of Skyrim, some of the concepts in his works have been officially referenced in game (the idea of "kalpas," Ysgramor and his 500 companions, and some of the motivations of the Thalmor), moving them to full Canon Immigrant status.
- Daggerfall has seven mutually exclusive endings. However, later works starting with Morrowind, reveal that all of the endings happened due a Cosmic Retcon/Time Crash known as the "Warp in the West". However, none occurred to the same extent they would have individually. For example, instead of one political power dominating the region, the dozens of city states merged into four with all still under the banner of the Empire. Mannimarco successfully ascended to godhood, but in a rather minor station,note Some texts even claim that he was later restored to mortality while also leaving a "mortal" version behind who leads the cult that worships the god version. Numidium doesn't go on a Tamriel-destroying rampage, but is rendered forever non-functional through unexplained means.
- The series has two novels set between Oblivion and Skyrim (Lord of Souls and The Infernal City by Greg Keyes), both of which are established as canonical.
- Skyrim implies, via Sheogorath's Daedric quest, that the canonical version of the Champion of Cyrodiil (the Oblivion Player Character) joined the Thieves' Guild and Dark Brotherhood in that game. The series otherwise avoids getting into the specifics of previous player characters, so as not to invalidate anyone's play-throughs.
- Castlevania has been subject to multiple canonicity revisions, first with series lead IGA cutting out certain stories from the canon, then later adding most of them back, then we get Lords of Shadow which ditched previous continuity altogether.
- Fighting Games have their own problems when they introduce an actual narrative into the mix; usually they involve some kind of tournament or Big Bad that every single character (often more than a dozen!) is trying to triumph over, each with his or her own ending for doing so. When a sequel rolls around, it can be a Herculean task to figure out who won the previous game, which other characters had endings that could play out even if they didn't win, and which have been relegated to what-if scenarios.
- This is especially a problem in games such as Tales of Symphonia, where the game varies slightly by which character you choose as Soul Mate for the main character. And thus begin the Shipping Wars.
- In The Legend of Zelda, all 21 flagship games are canonical (and not the games by Phillips, Spin-Off games like Link's Crossbow Training or Hyrule Warriors, or the games released on Satellaview), albeit in three Alternate Timelines that diverge at Ocarina of Time, according to the 25th anniversary encyclopedia Hyrule Historia. These games include multiple people named Link and Zelda (about ten each).
- Pikmin. In the bad ending of Pikmin (2001), Olimar fails in collecting all the ship parts and doesn't make it home. This obviously isn't canonical because in Pikmin 2 he lands on Hocotate and it is requested that he go back.
- Fire Emblem:
- Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn: The game assumes that you got the most perfect ending possible in the predecessor, Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance. This means that you would have had all possible characters recruited and alive, as well as having defeated The Black Knight, a boss battle you could escape. This makes less sense as Radiant Dawn offers you to transfer your game save from Path of Radiance to draw from it and alter things in the game. On the other hand, the story of Radiant Dawn would be somewhat boring if all characters had died in Path of Radiance.
- Fire Emblem: Awakening not only makes every game canonical to the same verse, but potentially every save file ever made as well, due to the various worlds accessible through the Outrealm Gate. That said, there may be a world where everyone did die in Path of Radiance, but that's not the world that Radiant Dawn takes place in.
- The X-Universe series has about half a dozen novels set in it, and has an encyclopedia designed to be the official explanations for everything. Unfortunately, an apparent chronological error in said encyclopedia leaves a bit of confusion surrounding the Second Terraformer War.
- Officially, the Halo canonicity policy is that if there's a conflict between new material and old material, the new material wins unless directly stated otherwise. Some players got very angry that various details of Halo: Reach didn't match up with the earlier-published novel Halo: The Fall of Reach.
- The Dragon Age Extended Universe has what is referred to as the "BioWare canon". Rather than creating stories that avoid Cutting Off the Branches of players' choices as with the Mass Effect EU, the Dragon Age EU establishes a canon of the games for its stories. Word of God has said that, should a player have made different choices in their own playthroughs, the events in the EU would have transpired differently or never happened at all.
- One of the most noticeable traits of Nintendo's most succesful franchise, Super Mario Bros., is its very loose canon. Any game endorsed by Nintendo (which means over 200 of them) is part of this overarching canon, and it's all about players having fun with them without worrying about whatever order in which the events of said games occur. There are some Continuity Nods between certain games, but they're largely unimportant.
Webcomics
- For Sluggy Freelance, there's been some discussion about what is canonical and what is not, though not everything has been covered. Obviously the regular stuff by the author Pete Abrams is assumed to be canonical, though some bits feature an Unreliable Narrator and brief moments of Breaking the Fourth Wall never have any implications of the characters knowing they're fictional. Stick-figure filler is equally obviously not canonical. Pete has also declared Ian McDonal's "Meanwhile in the Dimension of Pain [or elsewhere]" Saturday fillers strips to be "mostly" canonical, meaning not necessarily in exact detail, whereas its successor "The Bikini Suicide Frisbee Days" by Clay Yount, set in the strip's past, was declared non-canonical from the start to avoid problems. The status of other guest strips has usually not been commented on — some of them seem like they would fit in the canon, others not — though Phil Foglio's was explained as a weird dream.
- For El Goonish Shive, almost everything in the main comic is canonical except the first introductory storyline, the Q&A sessions, any other appearances of the cast of the Fourth-Wall Mail Slot, April Fools' Day comics, and Guest Strips. There are also some special cases.
Western Animation
- The Ultimate Alien episode "Ben 10,000 Returns" establishes that only the three shows Ben 10, Ben 10: Alien Force, Ben 10: Ultimate Alien (excluding What If? episodes), and Ben 10: Secret of the Omnitrix build up the canon of the Ben 10 franchise up to that point. Everything else takes place in separate Alternate Timelines.
- The movie Ben 10: Alien Swarm was later made canonical however, with the episodes "Revenge of the Swarm" and "The Perfect Girlfriend", which acted as sequels to the movie and explained many unanswered questions.
- The Fairly OddParents! Live-Action movie A Fairly Odd Movie: Grow Up, Timmy Turner! takes place in the future and shows that the Tootie/Timmy shippers won out in the end, as Timmy gives up his fairies for Tootie, but a loophole in the rules allows him to keep his fairies, so long as he uses them for unselfish purposes. Tootie also is allowed to learn of the fairies. Although the movie is not the finale of the series itself, it seems to set the events of the future in stone.
- The Ghost and Molly McGee jokes about this in one of the videos done as part of Disney Channel's "Theme Song Takeover" series. Halfway through Libby's video, Molly compliments her friend's amazing singing voice, before recalling that the show proper has an entire episode dedicated Libby being an absolutely horrid singer. Libby eases a confused Molly's concerns by pointing out that these videos are out-of-continuity gag shorts.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: The show is the main canon. Everything else is a bit less clear. Formally, material from spinoff works is considered to canonical insofar as not contradicted by the show. In practice, while it was actively airing, the show intentionally refused to reference things that originated in the comics, chapter books, etc. to prevent Continuity Lock-Out and often contradicted or overrode earlier EU material stories, setting elements, or characterizations. The fandom generally holds material created by the show's writers (such as the Equestria Girls Spin-Off) as closer to canonicity than other works, but for the most part everything is considered unofficial unless it's shown in the show itself.
- The Steven Universe Crossover with Uncle Grandpa states out loud that it's non-canonical.
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