Canon

This article is about the story material which is considered to affect the overall continuity. For various big guns, see Cannon (disambiguation).

This is canon. (It also shows a cannon.)

Canon originally referred to (among other things) the recognized books of the Bible. In the 20th century, however, the term has also been adopted in the discussion of most long-running media franchises to mean any event, character, or location within the fiction that is considered to have been "real" with respect to that fictional continuity. Only canonical material should be used as evidence in debates on the nature of the fictional universe and the characters that inhabit them. The reason we name this after Biblical law is because a Sherlock Holmes fan named Ronald Knox satirically compared Holmes to the Bible, to have at both Biblical criticism of the time and fans' total obsession with the Holmes books; we can only wonder what Knox would think of us and this page.

In the Transformers brand, as a result of editorial choice and the multiversal nature of the Transformers brand, canon is both extremely complicated and extremely simple, depending on how you look at it. The only reliable metric for determining the canonical status of Transformers fiction is whether it was officially licensed/approved or not. If so, it is canon... for some continuity. If not, it is not canon at all.

Canon in other media franchises

So is this.

Before examining canonicity as it pertains to Transformers it might first be useful to understand how canon is dealt with in other media franchises. It is tempting to dismiss canonicity as a trivial matter, of interest only to the most obsessive fans, and while it is true that many casual fans of a franchise will give very little thought to the canon, some franchise owners have taken it seriously enough to create their own "canon policies". Others ignore the issue totally. To illustrate, we can look at three of the largest multimedia sci-fi franchises in existence today, Star Wars, Star Trek, and Doctor Who, all of whom have vastly different views on canon from each other and their own earlier selves:

• Prior to being acquired by The Walt Disney Company, Lucasfilm developed several tiers of canonicity into which a Star Wars text can fall, ranging from G-Canon (the films) down to T-Canon (the TV cartoons) and so on to N-Canon (ignored). The old policy decreed that most fiction was canonical unless it was contradicted by a higher level source (effectively, the movies and TV shows trump everything else), or was explicitly marked as non-canonical (such as material released under the Infinities banner). In April 2014, to prepare the way for new movies under Disney management, Lucasfilm declared all Star Wars text up to Star Wars: Legacy Volume 2 #18 (published on August 27, 2014) except for the movies, the Star Wars: The Clone Wars cartoon and non-TV adaptations of unproduced scripts of said cartoon officially non-canon and abolished the canonicity tiers, with all material starting with the aptly-named novel Star Wars: A New Dawn on September 2, 2014, falling into a single level of canon regardless of their medium unless explicitly marked as non-canonical (such as post-Disney updates to the pre-Disney MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic).

• CBS, the owners of Star Trek, had no real policy on canon until The Next Generation. Around then, there was a change from a laissez-faire approach to a hardcore stance that only the show and films counted, and not even all of them as Star Trek: The Animated Series was abruptly declared non-canon. It's believed that certain demands were made in the Generation bible to deliberately undermine popular guidebooks. These days, Star Trek canon is still restricted to TV and film but thanks to a changing of the guard, the animated series once again 'counts'. Thusly, a comic and a novel published in the same year can freely contradict each other so as long as they do not contradict the televised canon.

• The BBC, owners of Doctor Who, have no canon policy for the franchise, and fans are left to argue it out themselves. Partly this is due to statute (as a public broadcaster the BBC cannot have its programs refer to merchandise) and partly because nobody involved gave much of a toss until the 1980s, when fans started to get more organised and loud. So despite being a single continuous story, even the core show is riddled with countless irreconcilable continuity clashes! The 2005-9 (and now current) showrunner Russell T Davies said he'd prefer to let fans decide their own canons "completely free of the production team's hot and heavy hands", and made it clear in 2005 that time/continuity can be rewritten at any time, the ultimate get-out clause.

Canon in Transformers

And this.

Right from its conception in 1984 Transformers differed from many other franchises in that it was made up of more than a single continuity, the two main ones being the Sunbow cartoon series and the Marvel comic series. Although based on the same basic concept both series offered different interpretations of events and characters. For example, in the cartoon, Shockwave was shown to be slavishly loyal to Megatron, whereas the comic portrayed him as a usurper constantly plotting to take control of the Decepticons himself. Both interpretations are canonical within the confines of their specific continuity. The nearest we got to a statement on canon was in the letters page of the UK comics, where 'Soundwave' and 'Grimlock' stated that the cartoon was incorrect. However, Soundwave and Grimlock were not employees of Hasbro and so their judgement wasn't company policy.

In addition to these two main continuities, countless other licensed products offered their own take on the Transformers' fictional universe, resulting in yet more micro-continuities, such as those presented in the Ladybird Books, Big Looker Storybooks (also published by Marvel) and Kid Stuff’s Talk and Read series to name but three. Then it got stranger when the United Kingdom started to make its own UK-only stories set in and around the American Marvel Comics, and in 1987 Japan started to make its own cartoons following on from Sunbow's.

Yeah, this too.

Over the years as new Transformers franchises have been developed, multiple continuities have given way to multiple continuity families, each of which may contain dozens of continuities. The first time this happened was with the arrival of Transformers: Robots in Disguise in 2001, which was the first time any Transformers fiction had not been a continuation of the 1984 cartoon and/or comic.

Hasbro's only real input on what constitutes canon in Transformers comes from the Transformers Universe franchise, which grew out of the BotCon merchandise and fiction produced by 3H Productions, and was continued with Fun Publications' fan club and Timelines comics. These stories present the idea that each Transformers continuity exists in its own separate universe, with Primus and Unicron as entities which straddle (or easily travel between) these universes. This approach is essentially a tacit endorsement of the model that the Transformers fandom had already started working under:

Everything is canon.

In Transformers, "canon" is for all intents and purposes a synonym for "official". If it was released by a Transformers licensor with Hasbro approval, then it is canonical. However, simply being canonical doesn't say anything about what continuity or continuities it applies to.

Sorry, this as well.

3H and IDW have both released comics which take place "just offscreen" during the Beast Wars cartoon, but these comics contradict each other. Rather than the later IDW comics invalidating the 3H story or retconning it out of existence, the two are simply relegated to separate but closely parallel universes. The same is true for IDW's use of Japan's Beast Wars II and Beast Wars Neo characters, which puts the characters in a different time zone and alters some of their personalities; the anime and the comics are simply using versions of the same basic characters.

While this "multiverse" approach helps to ensure that essentially all Transformers fiction is given a certain amount of validity, there are occasions when a given fiction will contradict itself. The origin of the Constructicons in the original cartoon series is probably the most infamous example: they were built on 1980s Earth, are Autobots from Cybertron brainwashed into being Decepticons, and were Decepticons millions of years ago. Unless and until official fiction says "this origin is the right one" and retcons the other two somehow, which one of the origins is the "real one" or how they might fit together is the domain of personal canon: a fan's subjective collection of ideas about the official fiction, constantly being reevaluated and changed.

One example of contradictions being retconned is the fan-club comic Balancing Act, which said all the continuity contradictions in Cybertron was because the black hole was warping reality.

Our sole existence of a declaration of non-canon was in Marvel UK's Transformers #264. In response to a letter about the future-set story "Peace", 'Dreadwind' (not a Hasbro employee but, as a Marvel UK employee, allowed to make judgement here) stated this was not the actual future for the comic.

General canon rules

And this.

When dealing with Transformers fiction, these general rules apply:

• All officially-licensed fiction is canonical for some continuity.
• If conflicting events occur which are ostensibly within the same continuity, there is no single "correct" interpretation, unless an official retcon is later issued. Fans may reach a consensus on it, or not. The two events may be relegated to slightly different continuities, or an in-continuity fix may be applied.
• While canon from one continuity cannot, in general, be used as evidence to support canon in a different continuity, there are exceptions. For example, the Tech Specs and bios from toy packaging are used as the basis for character personalities across various continuities, and can therefore hold some cross-continuity weight.
• Fan fiction is not canon.
• Toy catalogs produced by companies other than Hasbro (such as J.C. Penney) are not canon.
• Some fans have their own ideas about what constitutes canon and nothing anyone else says will change their mind (see personal canon).
• Perhaps most important of all... it only has one N in the center, and one at the end. Megatron has a "personal cannon", but you likely never will.

See also

Oh god, why was this canon?

• Authorial intent
• Canonizing
• Fan fiction
• Fanon
• Personal canon
• Pseudocanon