Gundam: What's Official?

[Kratos]

Well, naturally you wouldn't make a new section for every single non-contradictory piece of media. (although now that I think about, Wookieepedia does that). That'd be a pain. No, you'd want to have a main writeup, citing the various non-contradictory sources in footnotes. For ones that conflict, write a media-specific section. If that media's version of the character or mech is distinct enough (like THE ORIGIN's RX-78), give it its own article.

The only real issue with this is that it shatters any in-universe perspective, but when there are multiple perspectives anyways, doing it that way doesn't really make a whole lot of sense.

[SonicSP]

I think I can see the merit in that method. A main write-up followed by special sections for those that are really different. Its just that we hasn't really explore or written much of the "alternate sections" and focus on the so called "main anime related" stuff in specific character/mechs pages usually because editors don't have enough info to in alternate media more often than not.

As it is, I'm just trying to make sure we get as much correct citations and info as possible for the stuff we already have (and I only have the some expertise for AD and AG universes personally) so something for the future then.

[monster]

You can talk all you want about how the Western concept of canon would help a discussion...but for the purposes of Gundam discussions, it does not exist. The concept of "black and white" is as close as we're going to get.

Of course, it is what it is.

Besides, you speak as if Westerners automatically accept the canon of a fictional universe as is with no debate. In response to that, I have just three words: "Han shot first".

People don't have to like certain parts of a story (or even the whole), canon or otherwise, but if they ignore canon when making an analysis of another part of the story that is affected by the part that they ignore, then that's their mistake. (Of course, if the continuity isn't well preserved, then that's the author's mistake, but hey, no one is saying it's perfect.)

[AmuroNT1]

There are plenty of flaws in the concept of canon/"Word of God", too. Let's take a look...

-Let's start off with comics, just for the sake of argument. Who qualifies as "Word of God" for Spider-Man? Is it Stan Lee, his co-creator (can't include Steve Ditko because he's not with us anymore)? Axel Alonso, the current editor-in-chief for Marvel? Is it the writers for the various Spidey books? The classic school of thought would say Lee, as the original creator, would take precedence, but he hasn't been involved with the comic for years (not counting the daily newspaper strip).

-How about the evolution of canon? When he first created Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry intended the Federation to be a utopian society, one which had total racial and sexual equality but had also abolished money and had everyone choose to work jobs for the common good. It got to the point where his stories were insanely preachy and tended to revolve around the human characters meeting "savage" aliens and enlightening them (or say the episode of Next Gen where 20th century people are brought out of cryo-stasis and basically get lectured about how they were total monkeys back then). It wasn't until after Roddenberry's death that writers explored the dark underbelly of this utopia and presenting the Federation as something other than the most flawless white-hat ever; this lead to things like the better parts of Deep Space 9 and the recent film Into Darkness. But since Roddenberry was the creator and that wasn't his intent, does that mean the writers of those stories are defiling canon?

-In the same vein, we can go back to comics. One of the examples touted on TV Tropes' "Running the Asylum" page references Geoff Johns, who as a youth wrote to DC Comics suggesting that Superboy Connor Kent was a clone made from Superman and Lex Luthor's DNA, only to get gently shot down. Fast forward several years, and Johns is a writer at DC...and guess what we learn about Connor?

-And of course, there's Star Wars. Before, people treated George Lucas as if he were a god descended to Earth to bring us awesome stories. All that changed in 1997 with the Special Editions, at which point fans decided he was a senile, greedy kook who needed to be marginalized and ignored. And not just over things like "Han shot first", but over really dumb things, like cutting out the blood when Obi-Wan hacks off that alien's arm (never mind that Empire and Jedi showed lightsabers cauterizing wounds 20 years earlier). Technically speaking, he's Word of God, and yet you'll find many who prefer the Expanded Universe novels to the Prequel Trilogy (never mind that saying you don't hate the PT gets people to look at you as if you have brain damage).

-And yes, it's happened with Gundam too. When the Zeta Gundam movie trilogy was released in 2005, it rather famously gave the show a happier ending, including the forces of Axis just packing up and leaving. Since the films were directed by Tomino, people insisted that this was his way of removing Gundam ZZ from canon; eventually the man himself had to step in and say that wasn't the case. That hasn't stopped people who hate ZZ from clinging to the idea that Judau and his buddies don't exist anymore, and citing the Zeta movies as proof.

The ultimate problem with the Western concept of canon is the notion that a single person can be considered the "God" of a work, and therefore has final say over everything. While it might work with things on a smaller scale, when you get to the big franchises and companies it just falls apart because these things have been going on for decades and have had dozens of writers, directors, and other creative minds contributing.

And that's exactly the way it is with Gundam, too. The whole "white/black" thing is pretty much the best way of handling such a large franchise; things like Blue Destiny aren't rendered "non-canon", the official opinion is simply that since it isn't animated it's much lower on the priorities list than things like 08th MS Team. That certainly hasn't stopped Blue Destiny (or any "black" work for that matter) from appearing in countless video games and getting official merchandise like action figures and model kits.

TL;DR: Gundam is Gundam, trying to bring canon into things just makes it needlessly complex.

[HalfDemonInuyasha]

-And yes, it's happened with Gundam too. When the Zeta Gundam movie trilogy was released in 2005, it rather famously gave the show a happier ending, including the forces of Axis just packing up and leaving. Since the films were directed by Tomino, people insisted that this was his way of removing Gundam ZZ from canon; eventually the man himself had to step in and say that wasn't the case. That hasn't stopped people who hate ZZ from clinging to the idea that Judau and his buddies don't exist anymore, and citing the Zeta movies as proof.

Oh yeah, I still see this quite a bit, and even when it's brought up that Unicorn obviously shows that ZZ did in fact exist (aside from Tomino himself saying so), and even CCA making references to Haman's Neo Zeon by Char in his speech, those people have nothing to fall back on except to say that "the intention" was that the Nahel Argama was a "brand new ship" in Unicorn rather than ZZ or some other very weak excuse.

So yeah, with Gundam anyway, from what I've seen, trying to say something is "canon/non-canon" is like lighting a fuse that'll quickly cause arguments to explode into flames.

[Deacon Blues]

The Gundam Wiki, try as it may, will never be a reliable source of information. They're either too busy lifting material from my own database or crafting up bullshit entries for mobile suits and what not. Citations won't matter. Unless you cite a specific book with page numbers, there's no point. The canon controversy just serves yet another purposes to confuse the fans on things.

[Kratos]

Or Google Translating articles from the Japanese Gundam Wiki. I've seen a couple of those, here and there.

Deacon, have you ever thought of contributing? Has Mark? I know keeping a wiki is an intense task, but it would be really cool to have a reliable source of Gundam info in English, and the involvement of the two of you could go a long way to making that a reality. You have access to a number of books directly, and can work within the language that all this ancillary information exists in - why not help bring the much-maligned Gundam Wiki up to snuff?

[Kuruni]

Deacon, have you ever thought of contributing?

Unless there's an imposter, he's already.

[Deacon Blues]

Or Google Translating articles from the Japanese Gundam Wiki. I've seen a couple of those, here and there.

Deacon, have you ever thought of contributing? Has Mark? I know keeping a wiki is an intense task, but it would be really cool to have a reliable source of Gundam info in English, and the involvement of the two of you could go a long way to making that a reality. You have access to a number of books directly, and can work within the language that all this ancillary information exists in - why not help bring the much-maligned Gundam Wiki up to snuff?

*snorts* It would need a full scale deletion. I contribute, but it's mainly editing things that people slip in from fan pandering and what not, but that is why I have my own site workings. Mark and I have our own information presentation. Granted, he's tackled a lot of the stuff I had on my list but there's a bunch of stuff I do that he doesn't delve into. Hah. But, it doesn't matter if we contributed, it would still be edited and contested by people lol...

[monster]

The ultimate problem with the Western concept of canon is the notion that a single person can be considered the "God" of a work, and therefore has final say over everything.

Well, if that's the Western concept of canon, then I must admit I have a very different concept of canon. To me, the authority to decide what is or isn't canon rightfully belongs to the individual or group who currently owns the IP, regardless of the original creator/author or any individual writer/director.

Or put it this way: If Gene Roddenberry is a "god" of Star Trek, having final say over everything, then that would include having a say in selling his idea to the studios/stations, thus letting other people take charge of his creation.

But anyway, I'm not saying that Gundam needs or should have it, but I do see its appeal.

[padre]

To me, the authority to decide what is or isn't canon rightfully belongs to the individual or group who currently owns the IP, regardless of the original creator/author or any individual writer/director.

So there's no canon for things that no one owns (e.g. Sherlock Holmes)? Because I would have thought a paradigm case of how canon was supposed to work was that Conan Doyle's Holmes stories are the canonical ones and e.g. Sherlock and Elementary are not. But I admit I don't really understand how canon is supposed to work.

[Dendrobium Stamen]

So there's no canon for things that no one owns (e.g. Sherlock Holmes)? Because I would have thought a paradigm case of how canon was supposed to work was that Conan Doyle's Holmes stories are the canonical ones and e.g. Sherlock and Elementary are not. But I admit I don't really understand how canon is supposed to work.

Ahh, the wonderful gray areas of public domain works...

In that case, were someone to try and apply any kind of "canon" to the Sherlock stories, I suppose you'd consider each interpretation of the source material as its own separate universe, much as we Gundam fans take the in-universe elements of each timeline in isolation. So, the BBC's rather excellent Sherlock is its own "canon" within the scope of that production, just as Arthur Conan Doyle's original novels form their own "canon".

Still, I find the whole notion of "canon" fairly pointless, when it comes to fictional metaverses as vast in scope and scale as Gundam, or Star Trek; there's just so much to them, that applying a Catholic term of which Biblical tomes should be treated as the "true Bible" seems really... daft.

Much easier to use the black/gray/white system Gundam's copyright holders seem to approach the topic with: if it's animated, it's official; if it's not animated, it isn't - unless it appears in a subsequent animated work. Anything else is just personal preference on what you as a content consumer choose to incorporate into your perspective, and what you choose to discard as not fitting in with your views - much like life in general, really.

[Amion]

Sounds to me like the root issue is that some people were around for the beginning of said metaseries and find it slightly offensive to find the original creator's ideas snubbed/discarded/or just plain set aside as a separate "canon". While those who didn't start out with said series from the beginning tend to be more open-minded. And then in all of this the copyrights come up, although one must also remember that whichever studio/publisher/company technically owns the work now, it was created by someone else, sometimes a single entity who for at least some time owned the work, not disregarding that even if said person died and then rose from the dead to reclaim their creation, the copyrights probably would prevent them from doing so!

Ah, its a-pardon me-canondrum.

[monster]

Still, I find the whole notion of "canon" fairly pointless, when it comes to fictional metaverses as vast in scope and scale as Gundam, or Star Trek; there's just so much to them, that applying a Catholic term of which Biblical tomes should be treated as the "true Bible" seems really... daft.

Actually, fictional "metaverses" that are vast in scope and scale are good candidates for which the owners can define a set of canonical works. That's because the more body of works that exist, the bigger the possibility of introducing discrepancies between the different works.

The process of canonizing merely emphasizes those definitive works that, when taken together, would (hopefully) provide a more manageable (or at least a definitive) continuity (or even more than one if need be).

Of course, if the owners of these works do not care to define a set of canons, then yes, it would be daft for the fans themselves to force the concept on these works.

[HellCat]

Yeah, a big use of canon in wide ranging fiction is to sweep away a story that is unpopular for the sake of the brand's success. Comics do this all the time, often for petty reasons. If the audience or even the writer in question didn't like an earlier part of an ongoing story it can be loudly labelled as non-canon within a future instalment. That of course goes back into the debate over who has the ultimate right to declare canon as it isn't unheard of for someone in said position to wipe out long standing canon they don't personally care for (the poster child being the long infamous Spider-Man: One More/Brand New Day), even if the audience have approved of and encouraged it for ages.

In that respect, canon will come down as a factor of what each individual wants to see acknowledged. I for instance would love to see the mangas 00F and 00I wiped away, even though officially sanctioned Gundam games, models and comics continue to use characters from them to seemingly great success.

[Baund Doc]

The Gundam Wiki, try as it may, will never be a reliable source of information. They're either too busy lifting material from my own database or crafting up ZOINKS entries for mobile suits and what not. Citations won't matter. Unless you cite a specific book with page numbers, there's no point. The canon controversy just serves yet another purposes to confuse the fans on things.

Sorry to change the conversation, but where can I find your database?

[Kuruni]

In that respect, canon will come down as a factor of what each individual wants to see acknowledged. I for instance would love to see the mangas 00F and 00I wiped away, even though officially sanctioned Gundam games, models and comics continue to use characters from them to seemingly great success.

Seriously, I think that fan who desperately looking for canon indeed want something, anything, to remove...G-Savior. Because the WGB status mean that it will be there, no matter how fan/Sunrise/BanNam ignore it.

[Amion]

True, sadly. But then, what's the rule again? I thought if it was in animation, G Savior is live-action. Are they considered the same?

[Kratos]

The point is, though, you CAN ignore it. It's always official, even if it's ignored, but because Gundam doesn't have canon, there's absolutely nothing that says you need to acknowledge it. This is made even easier by the fact that absolutely no other materials in the franchise reference G-Saviour.

[Amion]

Great, because I do ignore it. Works pretty well right?.......*sob, Gundam X, why??*

But that doesn't answer my real question though. Exactly where does live action fall into place on the scale of white/black?