Talk: Personal canon

I am so disappointed that no Transformer has an 'anti-personnel cannon' we can disambig this with. Missiles, mines, shredders-- but no anti-personnel cannons.

So sad. -Derik 07:05, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

This article is soo not-condescending enough, it totally breaks the theme all our other fandom articles have, and whats worse is that personal cannon is more deserving of ridicule

Except that there is nothing inherently wrong or bad about personal canon as a concept. Just because some people have ridiculous personal canons doesn't mean EVERY personal canon is. Oscar Wilde is dead, but not all dead people are Oscar Wilde.

The problem becomes when people substitute personal canon for actual canon in arguments, discussions and informative articles. --M Sipher 01:40, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Also, *every fan* has a personal canon. It is impossible to avoid. One cannot consume any story without constructing an internal mental representation of what happened, what things mean, etc.. --Steve-o 14:14, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Is that you, X-Bob? --ItsWalky 15:30, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Beast Wars personal canon?

Hey guys. Hope the small edit in the article itself doesn't bug anyone too badly; it's actually mostly designed to attract attention to THIS discussion I'm hoping to have here, which I figured might not get noticed given there's been nothing posted here in about a year. Anyhoo, I just wanted to raise the question of whether the line "The American Beast Wars continuity, but without the accompanying series Beast Wars II and Beast Wars Neo" is actually a valid example of personal canon, as opposed to in fact being canon, within American continuity...?

Although I hasten to admit that I haven't really seen much of BWII or Neo (being a non-Japanese speaker + lack of availability), it's my firm understanding that, like the G1 split between The Rebirth and the three extra Japanese G1 series, the two Japanese-exclusive BW series were also a divergent continuity. Featuring things like presenting Optimus Primal as a "Legendary General Commander" with his own Matrix and events on Cybertron that I understand to be probably incompatible with Beast Machines... isn't it generally accepted that the U.S. BW continuity doesn't include this stuff, just like U.S. G1 continuity has no such character as Minerva?

(Obviously I'm not including IDW's inclusion of BWII and Neo, since that is clearly a retcon taking place in their own version of the original continuity.)

I realise that this is all a bit tricky given the continuity soup of TF, but it is nevertheless my understanding that Japanese fictions are separate continuities to American ones unless the American ones (original, i.e. not IDW) choose to acknowledge them. Um... right? Especially in light of the outrageous Japanese rectons that impossibly cram everything together.

If I'm wrong about this, I'd genuinely appreciate it if some folks would please explain to me why. Thanks, PacifistPrimePP 07:45, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

I've removed the offending example (and another one). It makes very little sense, since Beast Wars II and Beast Wars Neo are not included into American continuity to begin with. Not even IDW's. IDW uses an bastardization of the two series made to fit at the beginning of the Pax Cybertronia. —Interrobang 14:06, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

And really, the "original, not IDW" distinction is largely artificial. Yes, the IDW Beast Wars comics are a derivative work, but given that this wiki treats every official fiction as canon in some continuity, the IDW Beast Wars stuff is as much canon as the FunPub stuff, which is equally canon with the 3H stuff, and all three are divergent continuities whose core assumption is the canonicity of the Beast Wars and Beast Machines cartoons. Which really, is the same assumption made by the Beast Wars mangas, no matter how incompatible, as well as Beast Wars II and Neo.--Rosicrucian^Talk 17:08, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, perhaps I was unclear. I didn't mean to suggest that the IDW-BWverse is in any way less canonical (as I'm well aware of Hasbro's & our own policy that everything shown in a fiction is canon somewhere), I merely meant to emphasise the distinction that IDW-BW is a separate continuity from the original BWII and Neo, even though it incorporates elements of it. My sub-argument was therefore that anything IDW says about the canonicity of BWII & Neo is perfectly vaild for its own reality, but has no bearing on the canon issues surrounding the relationships between the U.S. and Japanese shows, since they're actually separate continuities from IDW (but equally canonical, from their own perspective). Which is a microcosm of my larger question/argument, that the U.S. Beast Wars/Machines shows are in a separate continuity from the Japanese BWII/Neo, even though Japan has it's own (slightly different) version of the first Beast Wars show. Anyway, I'm just glad that the general point seems to be argeed with, and the example removed. I think Interrobang is quite right that the Marvel U.S./U.K. is a similar example, which I hadn't thought through myself in relation to this article. All the best!PacifistPrimePP 00:55, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

There are unquestionably root differences that keep the two cartoons from being, strictly, in-continuity with one another-- though from a Japanese perspective this is a non-issue since their dub of BW accommodates those changes. BW, BW2, BW Neo, BW Metals, and BW Return are all in the same continuity.

The American BW cartoon, OTOH, doesn't recognize things like- "Primal had a matrix he never mentioned because it can only be used in conjunction with other Matrixes," or even the idea that Primal was a legendary or renown commander. Clearly these two views of reality are incompatable-- but you also have to cnsider... if BW2 and Neo were ever dubbed... they'd almost certainly make the SAME sort of "dub corrections" to place them IN LINE with the American cartoon. So are they really any more incompatible than Scramble City, or season 3 taking place in 2006 AND 2010? (This is kinda a three-card-Monte of hypothetical situations, since you're debating how the JBW cartoons WOULD be treated IF they were dubbed... but it is in line with the way TF has been treated since... forever.)

Finally I point out- that though Japan seems to consider the cartoon the 'root' characterization from which all else springs... in America that's always been the tech-spec, to the point that our tech-sepcs often reflect weird never-never meta-continuities that didn't make it into any media (Beast Changer's for example) and TM2 Cybershark's spec at least obliquely acknowledges that the JWB CHARACTERS exist in the same "Universe" as the BW characters. ...but the US tech-specs don't line up with the cartoon either, so when you say "BW and JB are incompatible," you really need to DEFINE what you mean by that. American BW and BW2 and Neo as they exist in their Japanese state certainly are not the same continuity, but there is more than reasonable basis to think that "a version" of BW2 and Neo (we already have at least 3) may exist in the same continuity as the BW cartoon.

Of course- we've also gotten at least four, (and possibly more than 30) distinct 'iterations' of Beast Wars in the Multiverse-- often occurring in different, incompatible, eras. (BW was simultaneously 4 million years ago, 130,000 years ago and 70,000 years ago, just like Season 3 was 2006 and 2010.)

So, yeah... probably right to ditch that example as it was phrased... but I just think it's cool to discuss this sort of thing. ^_^; -Derik 01:28, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

Absolutely, it's fascinating, and you raise some very good points. TF's continuity soup must be one of the most uniquely inclusive and thus outrageously complex and semi-revisionist continuities in all of liscenced pop-fiction. Certainly the most far-out in that regard that I can think of. I mean, it makes DC Comics' pre-Crisis multiverse look like a piece of fuckin' pie, and they had fifty years more time to screw around with.

Particularly interesting to me is the fact that Hasbro (and thus, us here) have a policy that "it's all true... somewhere", a policy that basically ratifies/permits the perspective of the article I originated ages ago on Micro-continuities (which I keep meaning to go back and expand/update. Interested...?), unlike, say, what's probably the next-most inclusive multimedia property's approach to canon, i.e. Star Wars. The LucasFilm edict that everything's canon unless it contradicts a higher tier of canonicity means an enormous amount of weird, stylistically incongruous or seemingly contradictory stuff can still be regarded as canon, but does periodically require specific details to get retconned out as apocryphal. Transformers' super-inclusive policy, on the other hand, combined with the fact that Hasbro doesn't remotely attempt to guide or adjudicate the specifics (unlike LF, who actually employ someone to deal with continuity quibbles as their feaking job!), means that basically any kind of contradiction between sources pretty much automatically creates a divergent TF continuity, be it macro or micro. And has done since day one.

Which is one of the reasons why, ala the ongoing debate over on the Ironhide talk page, I think it's important to always be clear that most retcons in TF, unless they take place within an individual, ongoing fiction (like the appearance/function of the Matrix in the original Marvel U.S. comics or merely its sudden existence in the cartoon), need to be regarded as new, divergent continuities, however similar. So IDW-BW, even if it's following existing information in the U.S. BW show to the letter, is still not actually part of the same exact continuity - it has become it's own creature. Same for 3H's The Wreckers, same for Japanese BW.

Your point about what might be the canonical implications for a hypothetical English dub of BWII & Neo is very interesting... but as you say is essentially speculative. Here's a thought to consider, though: would a Western dub produced a decade after the fact that (as you posit) contained continuity-smoothing dialogue tweaks still not, by necessity, be considered a retcon producing a new, parallel but separate continuity, in the same way that IDW has? I'd say that it would, frankly. For example, I consider neo-G1 e-Hobby characters to exist in (a?) micro-continuity variation of G1 (take your pick of which G1) in which, well- in which they actually exist, since they obviously didn't at the time. They are "retcon characters". That's also how I reconcile continuity problems rising from bios that have incongruities with major fictions. Thoughts...?

PacifistPrimePP 05:52, 17 August 2008 (UTC)