Engaging with media is inherently interpretive. Authors can't telepathically zap a story into your head (nor would they necessarily prefer to). Instead, they go through the following process:


Because (among other reasons) the decoder is itself something that must be sent using symbols, the reader's decoder will inevitably be an imperfect match to authors encoder, so perfect communication is impossible. In ordinary life, this may be an annoyance, but artists will often embrace miscommunication as an important part of a work.

Stories ultimately only exist in people's minds, and you are the owner of your mind, so you can think whatever story you want. All art is inescapably open for interpretation; regardless of how reasonable or obvious any particular reading may seem, the meaning is always fundamentally able to vary according to the context in which it is engaged with (as any lolicon will tell you). What of "canon", then?

Here are a few formulations of what "canon" might refer to.

1: The intentional formulation. Given my above explanation, the obvious move is to assign canonicity to the intentions of the author, the story that exists initially in their mind. This can be muddled when, for example, a work has multiple authors, but we can simply acknowledge that the concept of canonicity might only exist under certain conditions. To allow for the concept of retcons, the canon should probably update to represent the authors current intentions at any given time... though something about that feels wrong to me.

2: The self-evident formulation. One can interpret a work however they like, but it should be acknowledged that there is very often (though not always) one interpretation that "sticks out", somehow. In the cases where such an interpretation exists, it makes some sense to call it "canon". This isn't particularly rigorous, and maybe it ultimately relies too much on consensus, but I do think we should keep in mind the fact that works very often have "obvious" interpretations (as any anti-lolicon will tell you).

(It's also sometimes true that these obvious interpretations are subverted, for example during a twist reveal. You might then be forced to say, under this definition, that canon has changed; what we would call a "retcon". However, intuitively, the change may have been planned or set up subtly from the start, so you might not want to consider it as such... which makes me suspicious of this definition of canon. Though you could argue that, if a twist was properly set up, the false interpretation would have been "not obvious enough" to be considered canon in the first place; ergo, no retcon.)

3: The scientific formulation. When I think of canon in the context of narrative works, I am often thinking of it in a sort of pseudo-scientific sense. That is, the relationship between canon, presentation, and interpretation resembles the relationship between the universe, conscious observation/experimental data, and theory. I imagine the story as a representation of its own little concrete fictional universe. This universe is the "canon" of the story, the set of things that "really happened". It "exists" conceptually, not in the sense that chairs exist, but in the sense that numbers exist. I postulate its existence, and then I try to guess at its contents via observation and analysis of the work itself, which is taken as a representation of it. In the case of ongoing works (eg TV shows), theories of canon grant some prediction power with regards to what will happen next. This formulation is my most natural mode of thinking, personally.

These three formulations tend to heavily overlap.

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Here is a concrete problem where we can put these definitions to use.

Stories rarely depict characters, for example, going to the restroom. Thus, it might seem that "canonically", characters do not ever have to do so. Is it "canon" that characters use the restroom?

My intuition is to lean on the scientific formulation, and my answer would be "we don't know". If it isn't depicted in the story, it isn't "confirmed", but that doesn't mean it can't be canon. We just don't know for sure. It could be revealed next episode/chapter/etc that the characters all use catheters, or something. However, it is often the case that characters using the restroom is a very good theory.

(Of course, I would also apply Bayesian reasoning and claim that nothing is ever "confirmed" in the sense of reaching a probability of 1. This definition of confirmation is impractical, though, so I will use the word to refer to probabilities which are approximately 1. I don't know where the threshhold is exactly. Let's agree not to worry about it.)

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Here is an example of a work where the concept of canon may be readily applicable: puzzles. The player's lack of knowledge regarding how the pieces fit together is an intentional, important part of the work. Players are allowed to "interpret" the work however they like, putting the pieces together "incorrectly". But puzzles clearly have an "intended" solution, the canon solution. When you engage with a puzzle on its own terms, you're playing a game of guess-and-check to discover the canon solution.

It would seem that the first 2 formulations can apply here. The 3rd struggles, because puzzles are not narratives, and there is not (necessarily) some fictional universe being represented. Is the sense in which a puzzle solution is canonical the same sense in which a narrative event is? I'm not sure, but it does seem that there is overlap. Mystery stories, for example, are often presented as puzzles, where the canon series of events is the solution.

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When you have a guess regarding the canon of a story, this is called a "fan theory". When you derive a story of your own, unconcerned with canon, this is called a "fanfiction", or on smaller scales, a "headcanon". I think the distinction is just in whether the idea is trying to reach canon. Though there sometimes exists silly theories which are called "theories" despite not seriously attempting to reach canon. (Really, I think there's something of a continuum between these concepts, but this at least gets the general idea across.)

It is worth noting that fan works are works in themselves; despite not being canon to their source material, they do have a canon of their own.

I've seen people in the Rain World community upset about the canonicity of the Downpour DLC. The DLC has, allegedly, been deemed noncanon to the original game. But I don't understand why this should upset anyone, because it just means that the DLC has a canon of its own which branches off from the original game's. Now there are two stories with two canons, and you're free to invest feelings in the one you care most about (or both). I fail to see the problem!

This is something which I suppose should be given emphasis. Fanfictions have a canon of their own. The first episode of a show has a canon of its own, separately from the overall canon of the show as a whole. Don't like episode 13? Good thing episodes 1-12 still exist, as well as their stand-alone story (albeit an incomplete one, most likely).

This is beginning to feel less like the strict, solid sense of canon and more like the free-flowing feeling of interpretation, but all I'm doing is redefining what counts as "the work" which we are interested in the canon of. Yes, Portal 2 is the sequel to Portal 1. But it is obvious that Portal 1 can still be taken as a singular work in its own right, independent of Portal 2's context. This is self-evident in the fact that 2's context didn't even exist until 3.5 years after 1's release.

It seems that some view the concept of canon as limiting at best, meaningless at worst (see: Beyond The Keyhole, from The Demiurge Diaries by Ouroborista). I just think of it as practical. If worry about canonicity is preventing you from enjoying art, you're doing it wrong. I think that canon is a useful construct for understanding relations between narrative works. If you don't like it, ignore it, or construct your own.

(Ouro seems to define canon as "the things which a work states explicitely".)

To be clear, this is my current line of thinking, but I'm not married to it. Maybe I should stop thinking of stories in terms of canonicity. Maybe I should stop trying to make the concept of canon make sense, and simply accept that it doesn't need to, and abandon it, whatever that might look like. I haven't done that, so I'm not sure.

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That "relations between narrative works" aspect deserves more attention, I think. That is what canon is primarily used for in practice, after all. It's just a way to clarify that one work is a continuation of another, that the stories are connected in-universe. The main canon is the master branch, fanfictions are forks. Yes, all art is a product of all its context, but there's a big difference between works influencing each other and literally sharing a narrative universe.

Am I too MatPat-brained? Am I missing the point? Should I be focusing more on the thoughts and feelings that narrative art inspires, rather than the structures of the fictional universes it creates? I don't know, probably. I am autistic and alexithymic. Maybe I will work on this.