What is canon?

[SpoonyViking]

What is the point of material books and dictionaries if not to establish a corpus of canonical information in relation to the existing works?

If that information isn't present in the actual works, does it really exist?

[Leftovers]

That's like asking why DC Comics needs mega-crossover retcon events like The Crisis of Infinite Earths to sort out their continuity tangles. It's all a wild mess, and trying to line it up creates more headaches than it cures. Each author goes off and does his own thing with his own idea of how the rules work (or should work), and then some editor on high (or Nasu) has to try to tie it all back together again.

I don't care if Gotham by Gaslight is an Elseworlds title that sits outside of the main DC narrative or if Fate/Apocrypha exists in a split timeline where the Fourth and Fifth Grail Wars never happened. Do I find them entertaining or thematically resonant or simply worth my time?

I've certainly bugged moon runers like You for out-of-text explanations from those source books they so lovingly translate for us, but these revelations are decorative.

If Nasu swings in during an interview ten years from now to tell us that Shirou is distantly related to the Ryougi family, it won't change Fate/Stay Night in any way.

To be clear up front, more power to you if you can hold a text to scrutiny on its own merits, that's the kind of opinion the thread asks for and is in itself a way of approaching works that is fair both for the writers to be judged for what they write - and not in relation to what they write - and to you for taking the effort to read it. As far as canon as a personal perception of the TM corpus is concerned, I'm good with that. I have Some Thoughts about interconnectivity in TM and how it is an intrinsic factor in any attempt to write a Nasuverse anything, but deep into writing them out I realised that they relate to the topic at hand only in that it's the reason why fans think of a "shared setting" with "common rules" in the first place. Read if you want, I don't have the heart to delete them.

Spoiler:

No, seriously

Spoiler:

That said, if we talk about whether the connections, references, divergences, continuities, and overall place of each work in the latticework of the shared framework of setting and its logic and rules matter in the creative process of TM works insofar as we outsiders can tell, the very need for them to exist - to define their standing relative to the standard of the originally conceived "Fate world" - tells us that there is a need for this contextualisation; that it isn't enough for something to feature some aspects of F/SN but in very different circumstances, like toys from the shelf or a pick-and-mix in the sandbox of available setting information, but that these circumstances make sense - sense of continuity in relation to the "original", sense in the rationalisation of this divergence from it, sense for the logic of the setting to be upheld, for characters to be like their alternate selves or unlike them and for things to work in familiar or unfamiliar ways. If there was no need to explain anything, the lengths to which the writers go to foster intertextual connections, revise previous information to create or uphold threads of continuity, and maintain the conception that everything is ultimately beholden to the same fundamental logic would be a tremendous self-imposed limitation to creativity for no apparent gain.

But there is a gain, although it has shifted from the personal satisfaction of an author creating a greater unifying context for his stories to take place in and draw meaning from each other (intertextuality affording such efficient narrative 'crutches' that a single allusion to a character from another work connotes to the reader that character's entire story to connect to what they're reading - the inherent pleasure of reference - and a prompt as vague as "it's like this but if that didn't happen" sufficing to generate a narrative through the cumulative pileup of what-ifs - the novelty of deviation) to that of marketability and the need to promote every new thing as something familiar to the thing you like, yet different enough to be interesting. Whether intentionally or as a natural consequence of the company's creative decisions, interconnectivity is an indispensable condition in maintaining the pretense of a "Nasuverse" as a congruous, tangible idea.

This isn't restricted to spinoff writers, although their tendency to lean on their source material either in referencing/featuring events and characters from it or copying story structures wholesale is indicative of an anxiety to comport, to not contradict, to stay in line and follow the rules. Nasu served up a cynical reduction of FSN down to its pared-down premise and populated it with sockpuppets of familiar names and faces, all with a coat of paint for novelty, and if a game as bad as Extra could get a pass based on just that anyone writing in the setting would be dumb not to lean into the marketability of reference and deviation. The means to rationalise these efforts - to avoid being held creatively accountable for writing the same but different ad nauseam, although this isn't inherently a negative; the exact same would go for someone aiming to develop an obscure aspect of TM lore - is to frame it in relation to what's already there, paint it into the bigger picture, and validate its existence as a what-if, spinoff, or what-have-you. The necessity of this reasoning is apparent if one imagines an unfortunate wannabe fanfic writer pitching their totally rad idea about a TM fanfic and getting ripped a new one for failing their lore checks; the logic is the same. Because it makes sense, it can exist as part of the whole.

All this to say that if you write in what you conceive of as the Nasuverse you are already interacting with the context of the setting you are engaging and the works that are set in it. No Nasuverse work exists in a void, however much its merits as a literary work can be appraised independently - and even that is impossible to do without factoring in the influence of the metatext and the setting information embedded in the text corpus. It's the core concern of writing in a pre-established setting.

Also, it goes without saying that if a setting like that is conceived of as a foundation, changes to it ripple up to everything built on it. Maybe you think Shirou being a Ryougi doesn't effect a change to FSN (although it does by din of what the Ryougi are in the setting), but if Nasu told you Shirou didn't actually destroy the Grail after all in HF True because of X reason and you should look forward to the True conclusion in Heaven's Feel II: Steel and Cherry Blossoms, you'd have a harder time reconciling the emotional payoff of the story that hasn't changed in the slightest with what you know about the text from beyond the text. Yet equally, if this came with a label of it being an AU, it might've been palatable. Or maybe not, because rationalisations can only stretch one's belief in their necessity/validity so far.

This has gotten pretty rambling so I might as well put a full stop to it here.

Personal take on canon:

The common sense of the fandom used to align with that of Nasu for the time when the number of works was small and the connections easy to draw and maintain; encouraged by Nasu's worldbuilding efforts the fans were happy to conceive of a setting where everything they'd seen existed and happened in more or less the same shape and form. When Nasu's writing began to depart from this 'base' setting he chose, for one reason or the other, to contextualise this departure and foster a sense of setting consistency and clearly defined threads of continuity. As the works and the deviations piled up, the threads multiplied and the rationalisations that keep them anchored to the 'base' setting got more convoluted. The fandom's 'common sense' on what is canon is challenged to evaluate these rationalisations, contextualise the departures, and trace the connections between threads through their shared setting elements - themselves also subject to revision and convolution - and generally to decide if the mental construct of a Nasuverse stands on its own as a narrative framework or if it's an ever-expanding mess of a structure held upright by constantly propping up explanations, reattaching connections, constructing exceptions to the rules of architecture in order for the overall construct to stand (up to scrutiny), however dysfunctional and ugly it might look. Whether someone wants to engage in mental gymnastics to accommodate this model, or prefers to just look at the individual rooms and floors, or is holed up in the basement and pretends everything above doesn't exist hinges on how they engage with TM works primarily and then how important the idea of the setting and worldbuilding, lore and consistency is to them.

I can't say I've given up on the illusion of a consistent setting even after years of getting kicked in the balls by TM so I can only put myself down in all honesty as Whatever Fits with a dash of Core Works (Tsuki, FSN, KnK) because, while I'd love to be able to say that God is dead and nothing matters, Nasushit requires synthetic thinking if you want to engage it as an immersive setting rather than some cool anime fantasy stories or something. Can definitely say the thunderdome approach of calling everything that contradicts your idea of how things are-or-should-be retarded is much more fun than playing the GD Knight of Holy Canon ever was. Having opinions is fun!

- - - Updated - - -

If that information isn't present in the actual works, does it really exist?

I know very few who say it doesn't, and they happen to not particularly care about the idea of lore in general. For the moderately immersed fan I'd posit that it not only exists and interfaces with it but at a certain point even supplants the text itself. The more that stories are supplemented by dictionaries and fans experience them through summaries and primarily engage with contextualising information in a framework of lore underpinning the story, the more apparent it becomes.

[I Can't Believe It's Not A NoblePhantasm]

Usually, cannon describes works that have the original author's approval. On other occasions, it just counts as the official standing of stories according to the publisher. I believe there's no official stance from Type-moon, and Nasu has set up things where the stories have relatively the same validity by having similar lore, but being separated from one another via parallel worlds. Even far-unrelated spin-offs like Kaleid or GudaGuda seem to be implemented in other stories Nasu has direct involvement with (Grand Order). It could be inferred that Nasu approves of all the works of the current series.

Now, I selected everything that Type-Moon publishes, but there's an *. There will be instances of contradictions, and when that happens, like an anime adaptation that displays a character's abilities fundamentally different from the source material, then that instance is non-cannon. If an adaptation has a different series of events, but it's within reason of the rules, then it's cannon. Nasu can also say things in interviews that are automatically in cannon with one exception. If he says something that contradicts his own, official, written work, then his interview is non-cannon. The best example of this being where Nasu stated that Nameless needs the moon-cell to replicate Excalibur even at a degraded state. EMIYA has indirectly been shown through Fate/Stay Night to be able to replicate Excalibur, so that's just an example of an error on Nasu's part. Things like that. Official releases overrule interviews and sourcebooks since the latter are meaningless without the former, but the former is independent of the latter.

[You]

編集 これまでも資料集や用語辞典などの形で月姫の背景設定、人物紹介など積極的に行われていますが。今後もう少 し踏み込んだ形で背景世界、世界設定といったものを公開される予定はありますか
武内 「月姫」っていうのは奈須の中の完成された世界観の切り売りという部分があるんですよ。月姫の中で切れる部 分はもう全部公開してるような感じで。ここから先はまた別の作品でメインに語られるべき部分なので、これ以 上語ることはできないですね。他の作品を出した後にその作品に最もウェイトがある部分をまた公開していくこ とはあると思うんですけど
奈須 世界にルールが欲しいんですよ。世界には縛りがないと面白くないと思う。何事もやっぱり規則。限定された出 来事があるから、限定された中での出来事とあえて限定を破った時の凄さっていうのがいきてくる。自分は設定 好きとよく言われるんですが、できることとできないことをきっかり決めておかないと物語はつまらないと思う んですよ。現実が面白いのは人間が飛べないからであって､そういうその、どうしても口出せない部分をきっか り決めておいて、物語を書いた方が絶対に面白い。
そう思うので何年も前から少しずつルールを作っていって、それが広がっていって箱庭になっているのが自分の 中の「現代伝奇物」としての世界設定。その一部が「月姫」なんです。次回作があるとしたら、自分が好き勝手 書けて、かつ今一番面白いのは現代伝奇物なので。月姫をやってくれた方が「あれ、これって？」とニヤリとす るような世界の広げ方はしたいなあ、というところですかね。

Editor Up until now we've talked about the background and characters of 「Tsukihime」 like a glossary or analysis would. Now we'd like to go deeper into the background and structure of the story, if possible.
Takeuchi 「Tsukihime」 was created completely from the world inside Nasu's head. So 「Tsukihime」 is only a part of that world, and all the elements have already been shown to everyone. If we were to talk more about that world, we'd have to start talking about new works. When they're released, we'll talk about which elements of that world each new work focuses on.
Nasu I wanted rules for my world. I don't think worlds are interesting unless they have limitations. Everything's born from regulations. It's because you have something limited that you can impress people by later breaking those limitations. People often tell me I love "setting information," but I feel like stories aren't interesting unless it's clear what can and can't be done. Real life is interesting because humans CAN'T fly. So I want to make sure that I make the rules loud and clear when I write.
I made up these rules a few years back, and gradually the world expanded to become my world setting for all my "modern romantic" fiction. 「Tsukihime」 is a part of that. For my next work, modern romantic fiction is still what I'm most interested now, so I just have to make sure I can still enjoy writing in this world. But I really want to make it so that people who've played 「Tsukihime」 can play this next one and get a few "A-ha!" moments.

.

[pinetree]

If that information isn't present in the actual works, does it really exist?

I'd argue that, in regards to Fate and most other franchises, it very much does. At least in the sense that the writers expect you to be aware of that information. Even putting aside relevant FGO Materials, or all that discussion around Last Encore's website, it does feel like TM expects you to be engaged with the lore on a deeper, multi-work level, even in the case of series that aren't directly connected.

Just remember scenes like the reveal of Fou's true identity, for example. That scene is clearly set up to surprise you not only due to Fou being Beast IV, but also being Primate Murder. That can only happen if you've been engaging with supplementary content (I've yet to read anything Tsukihime, but IIRC, Primate Murder only exists in supplementary material, not in any actual work). What about the constant mention of Overcount 1999 in Fate/Extra works? Clearly meant to get a reaction from the reader/player/watcher (at least in Last Encore), despite being a meaningless term to anyone who attempts to only watch that show.

[Dullahan]

'canon' is an illusion - these days, more of a marketing tool than anything else. it is like the toy inside a kinder surprise: completely inedible, but it incites desire. to be sure, I have a "personal idea of what the Nasuverse is and how it works, fanon included" - but I cannot be bothered to inflict the name 'canon' on this, hence my vote. abstractly designating your vision as 'canon' is worthless. the best you can do is write it, and in writing concretely try to get others to see things your way - from the inside so to speak.

that said - I would like to clarify this - lore autism, or autism about canonicity, in the sense of trying to systematise nasu's haphazard scribblings into a semblance of overall logical coherence, is a necessary stage of comprehension even if it is not the final one. you can't skip it, as many try to do. you need to pass through deeply understanding the 'canonical' 'lore' in order to arrive at the point where you can validly grasp that 'canonical' 'lore' is, in general, an illusion.

[SteelBeowulf]

Hangups over "canon" seem like a weirdly Western obsession.

I've seen this ball bounced back and forth in other fandoms, too, such as Gundam. There's a lot of raging debate about whichever manga or spin-off counts toward canon, whether or not the Zeta Gundam movies make ZZ non-canon, if Tomino-written manga have as much weight as non-Tomino animated entries, etc.

None it mattered over there, either.

Mark Simmons, a prolific translator and super-fan, has pointed out that the Japanese Gundam fans don't really care. Stories are stories. Enjoy them or hate them. Take it or leave it.

So it doesn't matter if a new spin-off introduces ideas of Grand Servants or a reserve system or if Touko shows up in Case Files. They're all just stories. You're not obligated to read them all or try to cram them all together. It's not a tapestry that was meant to be woven together. It's an ongoing jam session.

You made it sounds like Turn A was not a big meta narrative about canons, but oh well

Nasuverse canon can be seen as each micro-canon like Fate/Stay Night has its own canon, Fate/Hollow Ataraxia has its own canon, Tsukihime Has its own canon etc etc.

But if we are trying to find canon in a common unified Nasuverse then its either Nasu make a grand compendium or it's "What the fans think make sense".

[Kamera]

this modern fiction fandom obsession with canonicity isn't so different from medieval theologian discorse about biblical canonicity tbh

[Kamera]

By an act of faith the Nasuverse reader today may identify Type Moon works, as it has been received, with the entire ‘Nasuverse lore’. But confidence in such an act of faith will be strengthened if the same faith proves to have been exercised by the fandom in other places and at other times—if it is in line with the traditional ‘criteria of canonicity’. And there is no reason to exclude the bearing of other lines of evidence on any position that is accepted by faith

it's all about faith

[Nanashi(kari)]

this modern fiction fandom obsession with canonicity isn't so different from medieval theologian discorse about biblical canonicity tbh

Sometimes I wonder if the obsession western fandoms have with canon derives from the cultural background of Christianity.

[Ratman]

Canon of TM is the void described by Karen. Rather than a complete structure, it is the notion of incompleteness and potential contained within that we argue about the most. The desired canon doesn't exist, which is why everything flows in to take its place, creating more pockets of things that want to be canon as the work stretches itself out. In being filled in, it becomes possible to dispute the former pocket's canonicity, because this new work is not our messiah either.

It's probably worth discussing exactly what mechanics are behind this, though. Due to the way TM goes about things, Canon ends up being something we cannot confirm or metaphysically anchor, but must nevertheless believe in lest we fall to apathy. The great purpose we only assume we were unworthy to know.
Is it believed in, like the words of our elders must be believed in?
Is it believed in, like culture and customs must be believed in?
Is it believed in, like god must be believed in?

The way I understand it, TM canon is like the meaning of life. In this case, the meaning of reading. If it was there like in a normal book, we would read the moral and be able to move on, but because its not, we create this elaborate structure around its non-presence to compensate. Tsukihime 2 is canon, there I said it

[the god of world-0]

The real Canon is the friends we made along the way.

[Byegod]

I'd argue that, in regards to Fate and most other franchises, it very much does. At least in the sense that the writers expect you to be aware of that information. Even putting aside relevant FGO Materials, or all that discussion around Last Encore's website, it does feel like TM expects you to be engaged with the lore on a deeper, multi-work level, even in the case of series that aren't directly connected.

Just remember scenes like the reveal of Fou's true identity, for example. That scene is clearly set up to surprise you not only due to Fou being Beast IV, but also being Primate Murder. That can only happen if you've been engaging with supplementary content (I've yet to read anything Tsukihime, but IIRC, Primate Murder only exists in supplementary material, not in any actual work). What about the constant mention of Overcount 1999 in Fate/Extra works? Clearly meant to get a reaction from the reader/player/watcher (at least in Last Encore), despite being a meaningless term to anyone who attempts to only watch that show.

Whats this about the last encore website?

Also for my answer : A miserable little pile of secrets

[fumei]

With each episode of Last Encore, there was a collection of glossary entries on its website. Some people thought some of those were required to even understand parts of what was going on, some others thought that was not the case. Heated debates.

[Twelveseal]

Personally, I don't think there's much to canon in the Nasuverse anymore; it's a steadily growing multiverse with a "main continuity" to the original author. Except that he's since split the major works of that timeline into separate ones, and the base of many of the franchises incorporate branching timelines, alternate reality crossovers, etc... the base rules and metaphysics of it are guidelines, not absolutes, even as Nasu contorts to try to make it fit. As such, canon itself is largely something that we apply to it on the outside. It's a thing that lets us be Hipster about knowing, about being in on the joke, but it's not actually all that relevant.

[Imperial]

You made it sounds like Turn A was not a big meta narrative about canons, but oh well

Nasuverse canon can be seen as each micro-canon like Fate/Stay Night has its own canon, Fate/Hollow Ataraxia has its own canon, Tsukihime Has its own canon etc etc.

But if we are trying to find canon in a common unified Nasuverse then its either Nasu make a grand compendium or it's "What the fans think make sense".

That was largely window dressing.

The notion of an overarching narrative encompassing all things Gundam (up until 1999, at least) is a fun one, but it does not fundamentally change the nature of Turn A.

There were great and terrible wars that bombed us back to the Stone Age. All of the cute little winks are kitschy decorations. The “canon” of G Gundam doesn’t matter to Turn A and in fact flies in the face of it. The magical superpowers of G clash pretty severely with the world presented in Turn A, so much so that I can’t think of them as related.

The same goes for T-M. Doesn’t FGO try to say Servants were designed to battle the Beasts one day? What about a bunch of German homunculi trying to get their Magic back? Not to mention the division of Fate Worlds and Tsukihime Worlds. You can see the moment Nasu realized he goofed and decided to fix a minor scrape with a major surgery.

[Reign]

Just to be pedantic since this isn't the main topic, GO says the Grand Servants were for that and the three families made a bootleg version of the ritual that made weaker Servants.

[Twelveseal]

Which seems to conflict with the earlier lore that you would previously summon such Spirits as lumps of raw power. Or maybe it doesn't, idk. Not sure it actually matters, either, which is why I tend to think of canon as a lie.

[fumei]

It doesn't really, no.

[weeblord]

I believe in the True Canon aka the SOUL Canon: Fuyuki Fate + non-Fate