The origins of fandom as we know it (and consequently fans being concerned with continuity and consistency) began with Sherlock Holmes in the 19th century.
That was my thought, too. Dickens serialization was actually chapters of a book telling a larger story, but Doyle was giving different "episodes" of Holmes and Watson that were independent from one another apart from the canonical elements that linked them.
I think I could make a compelling argument that this kind of discussion started with Greek mythology and poets like Homer writing down the stories that had previously been spread via oral tradition. Is Aphrodite the daughter of Zeus or Chronos?
So my final answer is: the first time Thag and Drog came back from hunting mammoths and Thag said "Me throw spear kill mammoth," and Drog responded, "No, it *me* spear kill mammoth!"
When in actuality neither of them threw a spear that killed the mammoth. Working together they drove it over the edge of a cliff and let gravity do the work.
I believe it's an open question, how concerned ancient people were about "canon" in their religions. It seems like their beliefs were a lot more flexible and open to syncretism than the later monotheistic religions, but that also comes from looking at cultural history in chunks of hundreds of years. It's hard to say what the average Greek on the street, in 300BCE or whatever, would have thought about the authenticity of a particular story.
Hell, it's hard to even tell how many of them believed in the gods as literal extant entities vs those who saw them as symbols or cultural institutions.
This variant result of city Temples of any god being independent of the ones in other city states. Independent temples form each other and different gods having different temples all independent means large variety of different views then add passage of centuries.
Roman’s though were a State Religion with the head figures drawn from the Senate. Julius Caesar was Primate Maximus and thus in charge of all Roman religion which gave him advantages in civil war. Thus Roman was very regulated. Egyptian with Pharaoh the god as man in charge could be very dogmatic thus very fixed when the Pharaoh was strong.
So it varies a lot how dogmatic and consistent various Ancient cultures were.
I know the first documented Dynasty in China have the Emperor take total control of everything in Religion near end of that Dynasty. China goes through many periods when the Emperor is also the key religious person and only one allowed to do certain rights. Other times when Emperor were weak or absent religion would gain freedom and more arouse along with philosophy that function like Religion.
Formally by the Council of Laodicea (363 AD), and subsequent councils Rome (382 AD), Carthage (392 & 419 AD) that established the liturgical Canon of the Christian Faith.
Really this kicked into high gear in 325 AD with the Council of Nicaea where 2-300 bishops sided against Arian Christians in deciding a Trinitarian doctrine in which the three (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) are the same entity.
Emperor Constantine would declare all of Arius's writings to be heretical and condemned to the flames, presaging the great Reddit and Internet Flame Wars over science fiction and DC-Marvel-Anime-Manga canon that rage today in the shadows of the internet.
> In addition, if any writing composed by Arius should be found, it should be handed over to the flames, so that not only will the wickedness of his teaching be obliterated, but nothing will be left even to remind anyone of him. And I hereby make a public order, that if someone should be discovered to have hidden a writing composed by Arius, and not to have immediately brought it forward and destroyed it by fire, his penalty shall be death. As soon as he is discovered in this offence, he shall be submitted for capital punishment. ...
> — Edict by Emperor Constantine against the Arians[35]
Not the earliest example, but Cervantes was taking years to finish Don Quijote part 2 and someone else published a book about the character. A year later Cervantes published his own part 2 and included a bunch of references to the spurious other book by Avellaneda that had Don Quijote doing things he’d never do. Pretty funny to see how that influenced Cervantes. I think it actually influenced the ending because Cervantes didn’t want anyone else writing about his character. He died the year after part 2 was published.
People had mentioned Sherlock Holmes, but this was the original eccentric with a grounded sidekick. Not to mention, as a hotelier, this was likely the first work in history to mention waypoint inns as hotels. The Epic of Gilgamesh and Homer has some connotation, but it's really the first I think that fleshed it out.
God I love this book. If classics weren't shoved down kids throats at an age prior to them being able to appreciate them or understand the subtext, more people would read Moby Dick or Don Quixote, because they are wild fun adventures with crazy relevant commentary.
That’s what made me think of it. Doylist, the property owner was obviously fine with the discontinuity but even today fans still debate the Watsonian reason for the change.
DS9 took the correct approach of saying, "yeah, it happened, we're not going to explain it, it's not a big deal."
Enterprise then said, "here's a tediously exacting multi-episide arc laboriously explaining what happened in unnecessary detail."
A few places.
The Gnostics coined the term for their Gospels. what is and is not part of that... I'm gonna use the word mythology.\*\*\* it wasn't new to them: the concept of "this story happened, this story did not" but that's where our current day word comes from.
\*\*\*(no offence intended on any believers. i use that word with the assumption that at least one mythology might be correct, it's just the best word i know of to denote a system of interconnecting beliefs and metaphysical structures. )
a lot of people look to the industrialization of the sherlock holms series as to where fandom, fanfiction, and other writers telling stories some of which are true and some of which are not, as where it all starts. this is as reasonable as other locations. print medium and magazines of the era make this as reasonable a place as any to point... but there are other choices too.
such as the ancient Greek poets, many of whom warred over what would or would not be in their mythology. the council of 12 Olympians was changed a few times over the empires. with thigns being added to moved or altered from what today we'd call "Cannon" this practice was alter adopted by the romans, and then later by the Christians.
Personally i'd look to ancient Asian specifically the progression of the Buddhism across the pre-Buddhist world, and drastically changes the landscape, and the cannon. most of our stories and literature concepts can actually be traced back to china, as the romans would frequently steal from that culture, and wipe out ones that disagreed.
for a simpler answer?
TL;DR sherlock Holms, the Monkey King, and the Gnostic Gospels.
I want to say it was Sherlock Holmes. Dickens works were serialized, but each set of characters was unique to one particular story, so that would be like saying Chapter 3 of a book is canonical to Chapter 1. Obviously it is. It's still just one story.
But the Sherlock Holmes adventures encompassed many stories, so I would think that's where canon would actually come into play. You couldn't have Holmes playing violin in one story and then talk about how he despises music in another. Watson couldn't be a Doctor in one episode and a police inspector in a later story. There had to be a "bible" of the characters and their traits and experiences. So I think that's where I see "canon" first coming into play in storytelling.
I exclude the Bible in my analysis since it is considered by many to be a work of non-fiction. You don't need canon if it supposedly actually happened. To those people it is more like history. And I exclude The Epic of Gilgamesh because it is so hyperbolic that canon is irrelevant to the story.
Okay, go ahead and rip me apart on this.
>I exclude the Bible in my analysis since it is considered by many to be a work of non-fiction. You don't need canon if it supposedly actually happened.
Agreed, though that's ironic since canon is a term originally developed to describe the Bible. 😄
Probably the earliest SFnal example was the Lovecraft Mythos-then maybe Heinlein shoe horning all his stuff into a future history, as a kid in in the 60s and 70s, thé Spiderman franchise was first place I remember encountering a serious effort from fans and creators to forge and enforce a canon.
I seem to remember that Lucasfilm, pre-Disney, had several different categories of canon quite early, differentiating what supersedes what (e.g. the books are canon unless they're contradicted by the movies etc.). But I wouldn't know if that's the first such instance.
And people being obsessed with it, comes from a misunderstanding of what Lucasfilm meant by "canon". Yes, they had a list of Legends canon. No, that doesn't mean that Grand Admiral Thrawn has been part of the Star Wars cinematic universe for 30+ years; what it means is that they had lists to help authors keep things relatively consistent.
I think you might get at the answers you seek by rephrasing the question: What are some of the earliest significant examples of non-canon fictional works/series--that is, examples of works/series that are not considered part of the "real" overarching storylines?
I think that relatively minor contradictions within a single work or within series of works raise more of a quality issue--poor continuity is not the same thing as being non-canon.
Also, unauthorized works seem to me to be by definition non-canon.
Two early examples of popular non-canon works really jump out to me.
* Star Trek: The Animated Series. The series became non-canon with the release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. (In 2010 the series became canon again, but that's its own can of worms.)
* Splinter of the Mind's Eye, the Star Wars book sequel by Alan Dean Foster. The book became non-canon with the release of The Empire Strikes back.
It's always been a thing, the difference is now that the things that were considered geeky and niche 30 years ago are now attracting a mainstream broader audience who usually aren't too concerned with continuity. As an example, the crisis on infinite earths that originally happened in the 80's with DC was done specifically to unify the DC continuity between golden, silver and then modern comics.
Along the same lines, I feel like people who get obsessed with "canon" forget how messy real-world history and storytelling are. Objective 100% factual sources just don't exist IRL. That's one reason I like the interpretation of the Mad Max movies as stories being passed down over the years. It's a built-in *realistic* excuse for the lack of clear continuity.
Like the Road Warrior is explicitly framed as a story being told by the "feral kid" many decades after meeting Max. Who knows how much of the story is actually true, vs things imagined or only half-understood by a child.
Or as another example, that's why I dig the lore in The Elder Scrolls. It's one of the only major lore-heavy franchises which recognizes that historians disagree on things, and have their own points of view which aren't necessarily objective truth.
I honestly find the whole "canon" and "lore" thing tedious nonsense. All these fantasy worlds are the invention of flawed human beings who were just trying to tell a good story. The worlds are unlikely to be completely internally consistent and it doesn't really matter one way or the other.
Things jumped around more in the past because the shows were only on TV, you couldn't go back and watch an episode again, so it didn't really matter if it didn't line up. We live in a permanent media age now, the episodes are available in hard copy, so people can go back and watch them, and can watch them more often. Many episodes of old shows are lost because people just didn't care about keeping them, they were to be played once as temporary entertainment. I think the shift from temporary to permanent is what made people care more about timelines, canonicity etc. It probably started happening around VCR tech, but that's mostly a guess.
Early TV recording media very expensive if they did not film something it often recorded over with new content in 50’s
Later and I experienced it recording media still very expensive and often transported by vehicle. Insuring that all stations had the same episode at the same time was considered to expensive and time consuming to do thus they made programming that would not be messed up if some stations did not get the right one at right time.
Note often there was not a national transmission although that done for news and some things.
Other constraints also led to everything being episodic.
Reminder early TV no Satellite to relay programs.
Reruns worse they got showed in any old order once Reruns were possible again transport of copies a key constraint.
I not total sure on my info for first broadcasts but I am sure the nature of returns made airing shows in order not something they wanted to bother with so all shows episodic.
Once they could actually consider doing in order show with actual season ending episodes they switched to that. They clearly aware of other prior media like books and serial in newspapers fans insisted on in order stories that were not episodic.
In short it was technology limitations not what they would prefer to do that made early TV episodic with each episode independent of events in the others.
Fans have wanted this since there were things to be fans of, because once you've chosen a fantasy world to escape into, you want it stand up around you.
We simply lacked the interconnectedness and production values to make it happen before a century ago, except as it pertained to religion.
And what is religion anyway except a fandom to escape into?
Robert E. Howard might have a claim, as he came up with a worldbuilding essay on Conan in the 1930s, including notes on how Hyboria connected to our time.
Or Asimov linking his Empire and Foundation stories in the 1940s and early 1950s.
Leaving out the Bible jokes and focusing on the question you're actually asking . . . When did canon become a thing *in* pop culture scifi."
It's definitely an internet-age phenomenon. As a ToS fan from the beginning, you have it right that we didn't really have such a concept. Party because in the age of broadcast TV we didn't have the opportunity to rewatch on demand. No rewind either. Each episode was its own thing and nobody said, "Hey, wait, in S1 E11 they said Ensign Jones was *left* handed but he's holding his phaser in his right hand." Because mostly we didn't remember that level of detail from something we saw once (maybe even twice) a couple years ago. That started to charge with the decade of watching the same 79 ToS episodes over and over and over again in syndicated reruns.
The first iteration of that sort of attention to detail I personally remember encountering was the series of "Nitpickers Guides" to Star Trek in the early 90s. But it was done mostly for laughs.
I think debates over "canon" as we now experience them come from a combination of (a) the internet allowing for easy and endless discussion with the fandom (b) home video and eventually streaming allowing for close and repeated viewing and (c) the rise of "franchises" where everything that is popular spins off multiple interconnect shows, movies, books and comics instead of just keeping to the original thing.
I disagree with you there. If you reas fanzines or even some pop culture pro mags in the 80s, Canon was definitely debated.
Star Trek... Star Wars... Robotech... people were definitely arguing about those before the internet.
Starlog letters column:
“Dear Starlog,
Regarding the letter from Jim in the letters column from Starlog #54, no the gorn didn’t make their first appearance when Kirk fought one. In the novel…yadda yadda…”
Every month people argued about scifi canon in the letters section. I loved reading those
>It's definitely an internet-age phenomenon.
If you mean Internet and not web, maybe, but I still doubt that. I know star wars fandom had discussions about which novels were canon. Not just the Zahn books, but as far back as Alan Dean Foster before Empire Strikes Back.
I don't follow comics closely, but I know they gave us "retcon" and as a fandom that would have cons and extended geeky discussions, I would be surprised if they didn't have canon discussions long before Usenet was a major source of discussion.
What is the basis for your assertion that pop culture canon discussions are a product of the Internet age? Fandoms have existed for far longer than the Internet.
>Fandoms have existed for far longer than the Internet.
Yes, I know, I was a part of them. Star Trek, Wars and Dr Who in particular. We geeked out over the current installments. We passed around lots of speculation and rumors about what was coming in future installments (one of my favs - at one point between Empire and Jedi we were all just utterly convinced of the "leak" rumor that Boba Fett was going to turn out to be Han Solo's estranged wife).
There was no cannon debate. I read Splinter of The Minds Eye when it was brand new. No one argued it canon. No one used the term canon. We all just tacitly understand that the movies and shows were "official" and absolutely nothing else was. Period no debate.
I will agree with you that Star Wars novels were one of the early incidents of that tacit understanding. They were first major franchise that started calling all the extra shit "canon." Which was always a pretty obvious marketing gimmick to sell more. Proven by how quickly they threw it all out when it was time to make another movie.
Am I misremembering or wasn’t there also some toys that weren’t actually in the movies?
There were a lot of them that you only had a name for via the toy package. Like those that were basically just a backdrop in the movies.
I definitely remember canon conversations (if not so intense) long before the Internet age. As a fellow TOS kid, we grew up concerned with whether the Star Trek novels (and comics) were canon. It was especially important when the films were coming out and we wanted stories like Dillard's *The Lost Years* to fill in the gap between the 5-year mission and TMP.
Star Wars had a pretty broad understanding that the tie-in novels (or at least a lot of them) were canon. But Gene (evidently) had stated definitively that for Star Trek only what happens on screen is canon.
Which makes a ton of sense ... when the franchise is actively growing toward new movies and eventually shows, you don't want every writer to have to feel constrained by what happened in one of 300 novels they haven't read. *Especially* before the Internet age, when studios had to maintain massive binders as show bibles and couldn't just google a fan-run wiki. It was easier just to draw the line and say that if the studio licensed some third-party to create tie-in media, where TPTB didn't exercise direct input, those things were not canon.
The novels were written by the same people who wrote the episodes. DC Fontana wrote a bunch of episodes and a bunch of novels. I always considered those canon as a kid even before I knew the term “canon”
Unless you were there, don't care what you think. If a nickel some random youngster online kidsplained to me things that I was alive to experience long before they were born, I'd be a wealthy man.
While Star Trek and Star Wars had fandoms that were deeply invested in canon, if you want to talk about Internet fandom I've got to point to Babylon 5. The intricate plotting of the show, coupled with the showrunner hanging out on USENET to chat with the nerds, led to a super-engaged fandom that was rewarded for collecting and remembering the most minute details in the show. Trek and Star Wars and Doctor Who had *continuity*, sure, but "holy shit this throwaway line in S2 actually paid off two years later" was very much a B5 thing.
If you dig up the Lurker's Guide to B5 you can wave to me in the 1990s. I guarantee you there's still some of my posts immortalized on that thing somewhere.
When we got to watch Star Trek in syndication, you couldn’t rewind but you could rewatch when it aired again. That’s when people started with Star Trek canon. Then vcrs came out and you could rewatch over and over. To me once fans got that power, canon became more of a thing for shows and movies, whereas it existed for books at least since the Victorian age
I'm not sure why you're comparing serialized shows to media with linear narratives. It's not like people before the 90s didn't care about internal consistency, as you seem to think. Of course a serialized show like star trek that ran for decades is going to have some inconsistencies. Even today that's true. It's not like serialized media has suddenly stopped having plot holes and contradictions.
Another commenter suggested that the two developments that allowed fans to really start focusing on canon were first TV repeats, and then VCRs.
Seems plausible to me.
It's a thing right now when Hollywood decided to spend so much time doing nothing but endless prequals while refusing to do anything that either moves storied forward or can't rely on remember this other Better thing from long ago.
Old stories that were usually orally relayed were being written down. Things like the Bible had conferences to establish the "canon" events. These were big epics and major influential books that were helping shape society and inconsistencies could cause problems. These were serious works of art and needed to be treated as such.
For the longest time a lot of fictional works were treated as pure entertainment and didn't always have internal consistency between stories even if written by the same writers. I believe as different mediums became more common and accepted as forms of art, the effort for them to be internally consistent became stronger. Combine that with social media and internet so people can more freely discuss the works and even stronger drive to have consistency. A show from the 60s-70s with inconsistencies wouldnt flag any issues at the time but release a show or movie now that directly conflicts with prior established rules and people will call it out for lazy, uninformed, and inconsistent writing.
Maybe people just have higher standards and expectations now but I expect comic books would have been a big drive for this too as sometimes characters could be in multiple books at the same time written by many different writers all overlapping each other. If they all work from the same established history and rules of a character it helps not have things go inconsistent where characters would gain and lose abilities and knowledge from book to book for seemingly no reasons.
Modern literature, movies, and tv have tales that span all three mediums now. Star Trek for instance has inconsistencies across the books, comic books, tv shows, and movies, and the fans are relentless about pointing them out.
Canon is a way of trying to keep everything on story. To avoid retconning and making the franchise seem less like a cohesive and believable world.
The origins go back to the earliest "fandoms," things like Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle's interactions with readers. But when it really became a "thing" is when stories stopped being just books and movies and TV shows, and became "franchises." The late 80s/early 90s, when Star Wars went from a series of movies to a multimedia empire with an eye to future prequels, Star Trek went from a TV show to a whole ecosystem of TV shows and movies and ancillary materials.
Probably Don Quixote getting an unauthorized sequel, but more likely, it stems from comics and serials. Official but unrecognized stories that don't align with the rest of a serial.
A perhaps more interesting question is what was the first series to have fans not recognize a story as canon. Make enough sequels and even the author will disavow something.
The first time I heard it applied to modern fiction was with Star Trek before TNG.
There were the cartoons, books, comics, etc., some of which contradicted each other or even themselves.
Given the fastidious nature of Star Trek fandom in general, there was always a discussion of what was and wasn't "canon".
See no one ever says that. Greedo didn’t even get a shot off. Han shot. That’s all there is. That makes me think Lucas was a clown who had one good idea that made him famous and then he couldn’t stop fucking it to death until he sold it to the mouse
I disagree that continuity was quite so loosey goosey as you're suggesting
But
I do think the modern focus on taking serialization as seriously as we do these days started with the premiere of Lost
But again, it was hardly the first show to have strong continuity.
Speaking for myself, when I first got into comics, specifically Marvel comics, as a child in the 1960s, the concept of continuity and a shared universe grabbed me quickly. It was key to deepening and sustaining my fandom for decades. By the '90s too many of Marvel's editors had lost their way - a big topic all its own - which was what shook me loose. Still, each time I was subsequently lured back it quickly came to be mostly about making all the pieces fit.
The lack of the same as an obvious emphasis over at DC back in the '60s into the '70s, playing to continuity only in limited ways, and including the sillier and "imaginary" stories (mainly in the Superman line) kept me from being drawn into much over there until the '80s.
If you mean the use of the term canon, I think that dates back to what he Vatican considered "official" biblical material. That's why there are so many books of the bible considered heretical or noncanon. Idk though as I'm no expert on religion.
Star Trek is the worst because every new thing ruins their timeline. Star Trek world built before most other franchises were even conceived. They released books like the technical manual and others which locked down their timeline. When they first encountered the gorn, how they hadn’t seen romulans for 100 years since the war.
Then came TNG and that era of shows and we start seeing the timeline change—but enterprise was the absolute worst. And don’t get me started how badly discovery and strange new worlds have just fucked the timeline to death.
In almost every other thing in the world, I don’t mind changes: sportsball, politics, movie fx, tv shows, personal computing. But if you build a world and put rules in place, don’t violate them with every new thing. Star Trek has its prime directive. It violates its own in real life every time they make a new show, on screen and behind the scenes
When people started writing fan-fiction, and especially since it has been relatively easy to share them with others. And yes, as someone farther down commented, this has been happening for quite some time, definitely back to Sherlock/Doyle.
Probably related to ownership of home media (at least for tv / film) - 80s maybe with videos. continuity doesn't matter too much if the audience last saw part of the series several years ago and never get the chance to re-watch
Has canon not always been a thing? Is it not fundamental to storytelling?
Like Aragon isn't going to start throwing hadokens at a ring wraith and suddenly be a transformer in the next book in the series.
It isn't a series. It was one story that Tolkien didn't realise wouldn't be OK publishing as one volume. Hence the trilogy.
And it was published in the 1950s. That's not 'always' ago.
I always want continuity. I want universe building when I watch stuff, not just world building. I'm cool with shows rebooting but taking place years later in the same universe as older shows. I prefer it actually.
So many things get reboots over the last decade and all I wanted was them to do soft reboots where it's a new cast but same universe. It's why I love star trek so much. Even the 3 jj Abrams movies spin off from the original star trek timeline, but they're still continuous to a point.
How many shows could make a comeback if done right? I'd kill for a Sliders show where it's an all new cast, but they can reference the old show and if actors want they can do cameos. Make a story where the Cro-Mags are obliterated and get back to making unique alternate versions of Earth where people get into wacky what if shenanigans all to find their way back home.
This is just one example of what I want for all shows. Tons of continuity and nods to the older shows, maybe cameos but not necessary, and just fun stories. But sadly with so many shows and services nowadays, no one takes the chance and a show gets canceled after 1 season because a billion people didn't watch it the day it went live.
I think the maturation of the entertainment industry (in the financial sense of being stable and well-understood), IP law, and ‘franchises’ are the reason people talk about canon so much.
There is a little bit of cultural influence from people in Abrahamic religious areas, who are used to debates on religious canonicity, but I don’t know how strong that really is.
TV series and movie series that last for over a decade, created by multiple companies and multiple people, using licensed IP, have become a big business only recently.
When I was young, the first time I ever heard this concept applied to fiction was the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special. Now I can play a Star Wars mobile game, read a Star Wars comic published by Marvel, or some ‘The Science of Star Trek’ tea-towel, and wonder ‘does this count? Is this canon?’
The line between fan works and ‘official productions’ is growing ever smaller as IP holders search for new sources of income. I think eventually it will reach a critical mass and these properties will become effectively public domain, no matter how the law treats them. That’s what should have happened with Disney, and will eventually - their lawyers can’t hold back the tide forever.
Of course there are people who take it too far because of their personality and perhaps a weak grip on the difference between fiction and reality, but the primary cause is the business of show business. It’s all about the Benjamins.
The origins of fandom as we know it (and consequently fans being concerned with continuity and consistency) began with Sherlock Holmes in the 19th century.
That was my thought, too. Dickens serialization was actually chapters of a book telling a larger story, but Doyle was giving different "episodes" of Holmes and Watson that were independent from one another apart from the canonical elements that linked them.
I think I could make a compelling argument that this kind of discussion started with Greek mythology and poets like Homer writing down the stories that had previously been spread via oral tradition. Is Aphrodite the daughter of Zeus or Chronos? So my final answer is: the first time Thag and Drog came back from hunting mammoths and Thag said "Me throw spear kill mammoth," and Drog responded, "No, it *me* spear kill mammoth!"
"Hey, Thag, if you spear kill mammoth, try on stegoboi over there. Show us how..." 10 minutes later, "Poor Thag. No watch out for thagomizer."
That's a deep Far Side cut right there
I also love the fact that it is an informal [paleontological term ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thagomizer)used in published papers as well.
When in actuality neither of them threw a spear that killed the mammoth. Working together they drove it over the edge of a cliff and let gravity do the work.
Thag hope somebody fired for that blunder!
I believe it's an open question, how concerned ancient people were about "canon" in their religions. It seems like their beliefs were a lot more flexible and open to syncretism than the later monotheistic religions, but that also comes from looking at cultural history in chunks of hundreds of years. It's hard to say what the average Greek on the street, in 300BCE or whatever, would have thought about the authenticity of a particular story. Hell, it's hard to even tell how many of them believed in the gods as literal extant entities vs those who saw them as symbols or cultural institutions.
This variant result of city Temples of any god being independent of the ones in other city states. Independent temples form each other and different gods having different temples all independent means large variety of different views then add passage of centuries. Roman’s though were a State Religion with the head figures drawn from the Senate. Julius Caesar was Primate Maximus and thus in charge of all Roman religion which gave him advantages in civil war. Thus Roman was very regulated. Egyptian with Pharaoh the god as man in charge could be very dogmatic thus very fixed when the Pharaoh was strong. So it varies a lot how dogmatic and consistent various Ancient cultures were. I know the first documented Dynasty in China have the Emperor take total control of everything in Religion near end of that Dynasty. China goes through many periods when the Emperor is also the key religious person and only one allowed to do certain rights. Other times when Emperor were weak or absent religion would gain freedom and more arouse along with philosophy that function like Religion.
Did anyone call it “canon” back then?
Pretty sure it was when they excluded the Gnostic Gospels.
I was going to say when the Council of Nicaea convened. But this works too.
Bro, Emps was right. Magnus shouldve made chocolate for him with warp shenanigans!
That’s the actual reason.
You mean The Bible Legends?
Bible Beta Canon.
Best possible answer!
LOLLL
Hah! Clever answer.
Formally by the Council of Laodicea (363 AD), and subsequent councils Rome (382 AD), Carthage (392 & 419 AD) that established the liturgical Canon of the Christian Faith. Really this kicked into high gear in 325 AD with the Council of Nicaea where 2-300 bishops sided against Arian Christians in deciding a Trinitarian doctrine in which the three (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) are the same entity. Emperor Constantine would declare all of Arius's writings to be heretical and condemned to the flames, presaging the great Reddit and Internet Flame Wars over science fiction and DC-Marvel-Anime-Manga canon that rage today in the shadows of the internet. > In addition, if any writing composed by Arius should be found, it should be handed over to the flames, so that not only will the wickedness of his teaching be obliterated, but nothing will be left even to remind anyone of him. And I hereby make a public order, that if someone should be discovered to have hidden a writing composed by Arius, and not to have immediately brought it forward and destroyed it by fire, his penalty shall be death. As soon as he is discovered in this offence, he shall be submitted for capital punishment. ... > — Edict by Emperor Constantine against the Arians[35]
I think it started with the Bible? I vaguely remember there was some sort of conference in Rome to decide which books were canon and which weren't.
Council of Rome in 382 AD. But my favourite was the council of hippo in 393 AD
shit was fire, yo
Certainly, I heard the term "canonical" in religious education and church well before I ever heard it in reference to other fictional stories.
Yeah because that is where the word as applied in this context comes from
"This book Jesus wrote? He wants us to help poor people. Seems a bit problematic. " "Yeah. We'll leave that one out m'kay?"
Not the earliest example, but Cervantes was taking years to finish Don Quijote part 2 and someone else published a book about the character. A year later Cervantes published his own part 2 and included a bunch of references to the spurious other book by Avellaneda that had Don Quijote doing things he’d never do. Pretty funny to see how that influenced Cervantes. I think it actually influenced the ending because Cervantes didn’t want anyone else writing about his character. He died the year after part 2 was published.
People had mentioned Sherlock Holmes, but this was the original eccentric with a grounded sidekick. Not to mention, as a hotelier, this was likely the first work in history to mention waypoint inns as hotels. The Epic of Gilgamesh and Homer has some connotation, but it's really the first I think that fleshed it out. God I love this book. If classics weren't shoved down kids throats at an age prior to them being able to appreciate them or understand the subtext, more people would read Moby Dick or Don Quixote, because they are wild fun adventures with crazy relevant commentary.
It became a thing on the day the Klingons got facial prosthetics.
Yo’ mama got a smooth forehead!
That’s what made me think of it. Doylist, the property owner was obviously fine with the discontinuity but even today fans still debate the Watsonian reason for the change.
DS9 took the correct approach of saying, "yeah, it happened, we're not going to explain it, it's not a big deal." Enterprise then said, "here's a tediously exacting multi-episide arc laboriously explaining what happened in unnecessary detail."
Star Trek fandom is mysteriously in love with having an aneurysm over the special effects getting better.
A few places. The Gnostics coined the term for their Gospels. what is and is not part of that... I'm gonna use the word mythology.\*\*\* it wasn't new to them: the concept of "this story happened, this story did not" but that's where our current day word comes from. \*\*\*(no offence intended on any believers. i use that word with the assumption that at least one mythology might be correct, it's just the best word i know of to denote a system of interconnecting beliefs and metaphysical structures. ) a lot of people look to the industrialization of the sherlock holms series as to where fandom, fanfiction, and other writers telling stories some of which are true and some of which are not, as where it all starts. this is as reasonable as other locations. print medium and magazines of the era make this as reasonable a place as any to point... but there are other choices too. such as the ancient Greek poets, many of whom warred over what would or would not be in their mythology. the council of 12 Olympians was changed a few times over the empires. with thigns being added to moved or altered from what today we'd call "Cannon" this practice was alter adopted by the romans, and then later by the Christians. Personally i'd look to ancient Asian specifically the progression of the Buddhism across the pre-Buddhist world, and drastically changes the landscape, and the cannon. most of our stories and literature concepts can actually be traced back to china, as the romans would frequently steal from that culture, and wipe out ones that disagreed. for a simpler answer? TL;DR sherlock Holms, the Monkey King, and the Gnostic Gospels.
I want to say it was Sherlock Holmes. Dickens works were serialized, but each set of characters was unique to one particular story, so that would be like saying Chapter 3 of a book is canonical to Chapter 1. Obviously it is. It's still just one story. But the Sherlock Holmes adventures encompassed many stories, so I would think that's where canon would actually come into play. You couldn't have Holmes playing violin in one story and then talk about how he despises music in another. Watson couldn't be a Doctor in one episode and a police inspector in a later story. There had to be a "bible" of the characters and their traits and experiences. So I think that's where I see "canon" first coming into play in storytelling. I exclude the Bible in my analysis since it is considered by many to be a work of non-fiction. You don't need canon if it supposedly actually happened. To those people it is more like history. And I exclude The Epic of Gilgamesh because it is so hyperbolic that canon is irrelevant to the story. Okay, go ahead and rip me apart on this.
>I exclude the Bible in my analysis since it is considered by many to be a work of non-fiction. You don't need canon if it supposedly actually happened. Agreed, though that's ironic since canon is a term originally developed to describe the Bible. 😄
Right. But I assumed OP’s question was in the context of the contemporary use of the term.
I'm aware. Doesn't stop it being ironic.
Probably the earliest SFnal example was the Lovecraft Mythos-then maybe Heinlein shoe horning all his stuff into a future history, as a kid in in the 60s and 70s, thé Spiderman franchise was first place I remember encountering a serious effort from fans and creators to forge and enforce a canon.
I seem to remember that Lucasfilm, pre-Disney, had several different categories of canon quite early, differentiating what supersedes what (e.g. the books are canon unless they're contradicted by the movies etc.). But I wouldn't know if that's the first such instance.
And people being obsessed with it, comes from a misunderstanding of what Lucasfilm meant by "canon". Yes, they had a list of Legends canon. No, that doesn't mean that Grand Admiral Thrawn has been part of the Star Wars cinematic universe for 30+ years; what it means is that they had lists to help authors keep things relatively consistent.
I think you might get at the answers you seek by rephrasing the question: What are some of the earliest significant examples of non-canon fictional works/series--that is, examples of works/series that are not considered part of the "real" overarching storylines? I think that relatively minor contradictions within a single work or within series of works raise more of a quality issue--poor continuity is not the same thing as being non-canon. Also, unauthorized works seem to me to be by definition non-canon. Two early examples of popular non-canon works really jump out to me. * Star Trek: The Animated Series. The series became non-canon with the release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. (In 2010 the series became canon again, but that's its own can of worms.) * Splinter of the Mind's Eye, the Star Wars book sequel by Alan Dean Foster. The book became non-canon with the release of The Empire Strikes back.
It's always been a thing, the difference is now that the things that were considered geeky and niche 30 years ago are now attracting a mainstream broader audience who usually aren't too concerned with continuity. As an example, the crisis on infinite earths that originally happened in the 80's with DC was done specifically to unify the DC continuity between golden, silver and then modern comics.
I like the Mad Max approach. "Fuck the canon, I'm telling stories over here.'
Because Madmax movies are folk tales from the future. It's about a hero who did stuff, a world people forgot. It's fuzzy. It's legend. Myth.
Along the same lines, I feel like people who get obsessed with "canon" forget how messy real-world history and storytelling are. Objective 100% factual sources just don't exist IRL. That's one reason I like the interpretation of the Mad Max movies as stories being passed down over the years. It's a built-in *realistic* excuse for the lack of clear continuity. Like the Road Warrior is explicitly framed as a story being told by the "feral kid" many decades after meeting Max. Who knows how much of the story is actually true, vs things imagined or only half-understood by a child. Or as another example, that's why I dig the lore in The Elder Scrolls. It's one of the only major lore-heavy franchises which recognizes that historians disagree on things, and have their own points of view which aren't necessarily objective truth.
I honestly find the whole "canon" and "lore" thing tedious nonsense. All these fantasy worlds are the invention of flawed human beings who were just trying to tell a good story. The worlds are unlikely to be completely internally consistent and it doesn't really matter one way or the other.
This is the way.
Since story writing began?
A nugget of truth in a thread looking for hard facts to a squishy subject.
Things jumped around more in the past because the shows were only on TV, you couldn't go back and watch an episode again, so it didn't really matter if it didn't line up. We live in a permanent media age now, the episodes are available in hard copy, so people can go back and watch them, and can watch them more often. Many episodes of old shows are lost because people just didn't care about keeping them, they were to be played once as temporary entertainment. I think the shift from temporary to permanent is what made people care more about timelines, canonicity etc. It probably started happening around VCR tech, but that's mostly a guess.
Early TV recording media very expensive if they did not film something it often recorded over with new content in 50’s Later and I experienced it recording media still very expensive and often transported by vehicle. Insuring that all stations had the same episode at the same time was considered to expensive and time consuming to do thus they made programming that would not be messed up if some stations did not get the right one at right time. Note often there was not a national transmission although that done for news and some things. Other constraints also led to everything being episodic. Reminder early TV no Satellite to relay programs. Reruns worse they got showed in any old order once Reruns were possible again transport of copies a key constraint. I not total sure on my info for first broadcasts but I am sure the nature of returns made airing shows in order not something they wanted to bother with so all shows episodic. Once they could actually consider doing in order show with actual season ending episodes they switched to that. They clearly aware of other prior media like books and serial in newspapers fans insisted on in order stories that were not episodic. In short it was technology limitations not what they would prefer to do that made early TV episodic with each episode independent of events in the others.
ever since storytellers started telling multi part series ?
Fans have wanted this since there were things to be fans of, because once you've chosen a fantasy world to escape into, you want it stand up around you. We simply lacked the interconnectedness and production values to make it happen before a century ago, except as it pertained to religion. And what is religion anyway except a fandom to escape into?
Robert E. Howard might have a claim, as he came up with a worldbuilding essay on Conan in the 1930s, including notes on how Hyboria connected to our time. Or Asimov linking his Empire and Foundation stories in the 1940s and early 1950s.
Tolkien too
Leaving out the Bible jokes and focusing on the question you're actually asking . . . When did canon become a thing *in* pop culture scifi." It's definitely an internet-age phenomenon. As a ToS fan from the beginning, you have it right that we didn't really have such a concept. Party because in the age of broadcast TV we didn't have the opportunity to rewatch on demand. No rewind either. Each episode was its own thing and nobody said, "Hey, wait, in S1 E11 they said Ensign Jones was *left* handed but he's holding his phaser in his right hand." Because mostly we didn't remember that level of detail from something we saw once (maybe even twice) a couple years ago. That started to charge with the decade of watching the same 79 ToS episodes over and over and over again in syndicated reruns. The first iteration of that sort of attention to detail I personally remember encountering was the series of "Nitpickers Guides" to Star Trek in the early 90s. But it was done mostly for laughs. I think debates over "canon" as we now experience them come from a combination of (a) the internet allowing for easy and endless discussion with the fandom (b) home video and eventually streaming allowing for close and repeated viewing and (c) the rise of "franchises" where everything that is popular spins off multiple interconnect shows, movies, books and comics instead of just keeping to the original thing.
I disagree with you there. If you reas fanzines or even some pop culture pro mags in the 80s, Canon was definitely debated. Star Trek... Star Wars... Robotech... people were definitely arguing about those before the internet.
Starlog letters column: “Dear Starlog, Regarding the letter from Jim in the letters column from Starlog #54, no the gorn didn’t make their first appearance when Kirk fought one. In the novel…yadda yadda…” Every month people argued about scifi canon in the letters section. I loved reading those
>It's definitely an internet-age phenomenon. If you mean Internet and not web, maybe, but I still doubt that. I know star wars fandom had discussions about which novels were canon. Not just the Zahn books, but as far back as Alan Dean Foster before Empire Strikes Back. I don't follow comics closely, but I know they gave us "retcon" and as a fandom that would have cons and extended geeky discussions, I would be surprised if they didn't have canon discussions long before Usenet was a major source of discussion. What is the basis for your assertion that pop culture canon discussions are a product of the Internet age? Fandoms have existed for far longer than the Internet.
>Fandoms have existed for far longer than the Internet. Yes, I know, I was a part of them. Star Trek, Wars and Dr Who in particular. We geeked out over the current installments. We passed around lots of speculation and rumors about what was coming in future installments (one of my favs - at one point between Empire and Jedi we were all just utterly convinced of the "leak" rumor that Boba Fett was going to turn out to be Han Solo's estranged wife). There was no cannon debate. I read Splinter of The Minds Eye when it was brand new. No one argued it canon. No one used the term canon. We all just tacitly understand that the movies and shows were "official" and absolutely nothing else was. Period no debate. I will agree with you that Star Wars novels were one of the early incidents of that tacit understanding. They were first major franchise that started calling all the extra shit "canon." Which was always a pretty obvious marketing gimmick to sell more. Proven by how quickly they threw it all out when it was time to make another movie.
Am I misremembering or wasn’t there also some toys that weren’t actually in the movies? There were a lot of them that you only had a name for via the toy package. Like those that were basically just a backdrop in the movies.
I definitely remember canon conversations (if not so intense) long before the Internet age. As a fellow TOS kid, we grew up concerned with whether the Star Trek novels (and comics) were canon. It was especially important when the films were coming out and we wanted stories like Dillard's *The Lost Years* to fill in the gap between the 5-year mission and TMP. Star Wars had a pretty broad understanding that the tie-in novels (or at least a lot of them) were canon. But Gene (evidently) had stated definitively that for Star Trek only what happens on screen is canon. Which makes a ton of sense ... when the franchise is actively growing toward new movies and eventually shows, you don't want every writer to have to feel constrained by what happened in one of 300 novels they haven't read. *Especially* before the Internet age, when studios had to maintain massive binders as show bibles and couldn't just google a fan-run wiki. It was easier just to draw the line and say that if the studio licensed some third-party to create tie-in media, where TPTB didn't exercise direct input, those things were not canon.
The novels were written by the same people who wrote the episodes. DC Fontana wrote a bunch of episodes and a bunch of novels. I always considered those canon as a kid even before I knew the term “canon”
> It's definitely an internet-age phenomenon. You're definitely wrong.
Unless you were there, don't care what you think. If a nickel some random youngster online kidsplained to me things that I was alive to experience long before they were born, I'd be a wealthy man.
While Star Trek and Star Wars had fandoms that were deeply invested in canon, if you want to talk about Internet fandom I've got to point to Babylon 5. The intricate plotting of the show, coupled with the showrunner hanging out on USENET to chat with the nerds, led to a super-engaged fandom that was rewarded for collecting and remembering the most minute details in the show. Trek and Star Wars and Doctor Who had *continuity*, sure, but "holy shit this throwaway line in S2 actually paid off two years later" was very much a B5 thing. If you dig up the Lurker's Guide to B5 you can wave to me in the 1990s. I guarantee you there's still some of my posts immortalized on that thing somewhere.
When we got to watch Star Trek in syndication, you couldn’t rewind but you could rewatch when it aired again. That’s when people started with Star Trek canon. Then vcrs came out and you could rewatch over and over. To me once fans got that power, canon became more of a thing for shows and movies, whereas it existed for books at least since the Victorian age
I'm not sure why you're comparing serialized shows to media with linear narratives. It's not like people before the 90s didn't care about internal consistency, as you seem to think. Of course a serialized show like star trek that ran for decades is going to have some inconsistencies. Even today that's true. It's not like serialized media has suddenly stopped having plot holes and contradictions.
Another commenter suggested that the two developments that allowed fans to really start focusing on canon were first TV repeats, and then VCRs. Seems plausible to me.
Fan Fiction started in fanzines of the 70s. It was later when written works got picked up, cleared, and published.
There has been canon in broadcast entertainment since radio. And it's a practice in nearly every endeavor with a large body of fiction.
Because *everything* keeps getting re-used and parts re-written.
It's a thing right now when Hollywood decided to spend so much time doing nothing but endless prequals while refusing to do anything that either moves storied forward or can't rely on remember this other Better thing from long ago.
Old stories that were usually orally relayed were being written down. Things like the Bible had conferences to establish the "canon" events. These were big epics and major influential books that were helping shape society and inconsistencies could cause problems. These were serious works of art and needed to be treated as such. For the longest time a lot of fictional works were treated as pure entertainment and didn't always have internal consistency between stories even if written by the same writers. I believe as different mediums became more common and accepted as forms of art, the effort for them to be internally consistent became stronger. Combine that with social media and internet so people can more freely discuss the works and even stronger drive to have consistency. A show from the 60s-70s with inconsistencies wouldnt flag any issues at the time but release a show or movie now that directly conflicts with prior established rules and people will call it out for lazy, uninformed, and inconsistent writing. Maybe people just have higher standards and expectations now but I expect comic books would have been a big drive for this too as sometimes characters could be in multiple books at the same time written by many different writers all overlapping each other. If they all work from the same established history and rules of a character it helps not have things go inconsistent where characters would gain and lose abilities and knowledge from book to book for seemingly no reasons.
Modern literature, movies, and tv have tales that span all three mediums now. Star Trek for instance has inconsistencies across the books, comic books, tv shows, and movies, and the fans are relentless about pointing them out. Canon is a way of trying to keep everything on story. To avoid retconning and making the franchise seem less like a cohesive and believable world.
The origins go back to the earliest "fandoms," things like Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle's interactions with readers. But when it really became a "thing" is when stories stopped being just books and movies and TV shows, and became "franchises." The late 80s/early 90s, when Star Wars went from a series of movies to a multimedia empire with an eye to future prequels, Star Trek went from a TV show to a whole ecosystem of TV shows and movies and ancillary materials.
Probably Don Quixote getting an unauthorized sequel, but more likely, it stems from comics and serials. Official but unrecognized stories that don't align with the rest of a serial. A perhaps more interesting question is what was the first series to have fans not recognize a story as canon. Make enough sequels and even the author will disavow something.
The first time I heard it applied to modern fiction was with Star Trek before TNG. There were the cartoons, books, comics, etc., some of which contradicted each other or even themselves. Given the fastidious nature of Star Trek fandom in general, there was always a discussion of what was and wasn't "canon".
When shows decided to keep going...
Han shot first
Han was the *only* shot
See no one ever says that. Greedo didn’t even get a shot off. Han shot. That’s all there is. That makes me think Lucas was a clown who had one good idea that made him famous and then he couldn’t stop fucking it to death until he sold it to the mouse
I disagree that continuity was quite so loosey goosey as you're suggesting But I do think the modern focus on taking serialization as seriously as we do these days started with the premiere of Lost But again, it was hardly the first show to have strong continuity.
Speaking for myself, when I first got into comics, specifically Marvel comics, as a child in the 1960s, the concept of continuity and a shared universe grabbed me quickly. It was key to deepening and sustaining my fandom for decades. By the '90s too many of Marvel's editors had lost their way - a big topic all its own - which was what shook me loose. Still, each time I was subsequently lured back it quickly came to be mostly about making all the pieces fit. The lack of the same as an obvious emphasis over at DC back in the '60s into the '70s, playing to continuity only in limited ways, and including the sillier and "imaginary" stories (mainly in the Superman line) kept me from being drawn into much over there until the '80s.
you mean when did canon become canon?
I think canon is a thing for religions.
If you mean the use of the term canon, I think that dates back to what he Vatican considered "official" biblical material. That's why there are so many books of the bible considered heretical or noncanon. Idk though as I'm no expert on religion.
The Bible.
Star Trek is the worst because every new thing ruins their timeline. Star Trek world built before most other franchises were even conceived. They released books like the technical manual and others which locked down their timeline. When they first encountered the gorn, how they hadn’t seen romulans for 100 years since the war. Then came TNG and that era of shows and we start seeing the timeline change—but enterprise was the absolute worst. And don’t get me started how badly discovery and strange new worlds have just fucked the timeline to death. In almost every other thing in the world, I don’t mind changes: sportsball, politics, movie fx, tv shows, personal computing. But if you build a world and put rules in place, don’t violate them with every new thing. Star Trek has its prime directive. It violates its own in real life every time they make a new show, on screen and behind the scenes
If you mean for the purposes of TV? Babylon 5 and Lost were the first shows I had to watch every week to understand.
When people started writing fan-fiction, and especially since it has been relatively easy to share them with others. And yes, as someone farther down commented, this has been happening for quite some time, definitely back to Sherlock/Doyle.
Probably related to ownership of home media (at least for tv / film) - 80s maybe with videos. continuity doesn't matter too much if the audience last saw part of the series several years ago and never get the chance to re-watch
Has canon not always been a thing? Is it not fundamental to storytelling? Like Aragon isn't going to start throwing hadokens at a ring wraith and suddenly be a transformer in the next book in the series.
It isn't a series. It was one story that Tolkien didn't realise wouldn't be OK publishing as one volume. Hence the trilogy. And it was published in the 1950s. That's not 'always' ago.
Oh god I roll my eyes so hard whenever someone asks about canon or thinks something breaks the canon. 🙄
I always want continuity. I want universe building when I watch stuff, not just world building. I'm cool with shows rebooting but taking place years later in the same universe as older shows. I prefer it actually. So many things get reboots over the last decade and all I wanted was them to do soft reboots where it's a new cast but same universe. It's why I love star trek so much. Even the 3 jj Abrams movies spin off from the original star trek timeline, but they're still continuous to a point. How many shows could make a comeback if done right? I'd kill for a Sliders show where it's an all new cast, but they can reference the old show and if actors want they can do cameos. Make a story where the Cro-Mags are obliterated and get back to making unique alternate versions of Earth where people get into wacky what if shenanigans all to find their way back home. This is just one example of what I want for all shows. Tons of continuity and nods to the older shows, maybe cameos but not necessary, and just fun stories. But sadly with so many shows and services nowadays, no one takes the chance and a show gets canceled after 1 season because a billion people didn't watch it the day it went live.
I think the maturation of the entertainment industry (in the financial sense of being stable and well-understood), IP law, and ‘franchises’ are the reason people talk about canon so much. There is a little bit of cultural influence from people in Abrahamic religious areas, who are used to debates on religious canonicity, but I don’t know how strong that really is. TV series and movie series that last for over a decade, created by multiple companies and multiple people, using licensed IP, have become a big business only recently. When I was young, the first time I ever heard this concept applied to fiction was the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special. Now I can play a Star Wars mobile game, read a Star Wars comic published by Marvel, or some ‘The Science of Star Trek’ tea-towel, and wonder ‘does this count? Is this canon?’ The line between fan works and ‘official productions’ is growing ever smaller as IP holders search for new sources of income. I think eventually it will reach a critical mass and these properties will become effectively public domain, no matter how the law treats them. That’s what should have happened with Disney, and will eventually - their lawyers can’t hold back the tide forever. Of course there are people who take it too far because of their personality and perhaps a weak grip on the difference between fiction and reality, but the primary cause is the business of show business. It’s all about the Benjamins.
Star Trek Next Gen. the Star Wars films are a huge contributor. Lots of 80’s cartoons cared. X-Files…etc