Confused about what is canon and what isn't. Help?

[LawgSkrak]

Okay for the longest time, I was under the assumption that the novels and animated series were canon to the games, but the movie was it's own thing.

Now I'm reading that the movie and it's tie-in novels are also canon to the games.

Trying to figure out how. Can anyone help me out here?

 

[Pedro]

ChatGPT, our new AI overlord told me it’s not canon but I’m pretty sure that is just another ai blunder.

Initially there was debate over this but Wing Commander Arena had an online game manual (Star Soldier) which references the movie - so it’s pretty well established as part of the canon.
I think the reasoning was not wanting to lose all the cool stuff like the confederation handbook.
And in the reverse there’s definitely attempts to tie the movie universe to the games in the novels.
Personally I’d have preferred not to have to try and reconcile the two and had it like the resident evil franchise with cross references but definitely alternate timelines, but my sensibilities definitely aren’t canon. I do my best to treat it like the Dr Who movie; he’s half human for these 90mins, I will not ask why and it will never be mentioned again

 

[AD]

Okay for the longest time, I was under the assumption that the novels and animated series were canon to the games, but the movie was it's own thing.

Now I'm reading that the movie and it's tie-in novels are also canon to the games.

Trying to figure out how. Can anyone help me out here?

The events of the movie and tie in books are canon in so far as things like the Arena manual mentions them in broad strokes. You don't really have to worry about fitting everything together, and the only people that need to care would anyone tasked with writing a future story that happens to not be a reboot. So there was an invasion attempt in 2654. Future official WC stories (provided we ever get official ones) only ever need mention it as a footnote.

All that said, the WC movie has some interesting concepts buried in an unfortunate post-production mess. The overall ideas don't really mess with any of the main game themes and events and provide a little bit of flavor to previously unexplored aspects of the WC universe. It could have used a little more time in the oven though.

 

[LawgSkrak]

Cool. Guess I'll check out the tie in movie novels too then. I was initially going to skip them.

 

[AD]

Cool. Guess I'll check out the tie in movie novels too then. I was initially going to skip them.

The movie novel is interesting since it was based off the shooting script so has all the cut subplots included that help the movie make a bit more sense... plus for those that care about the look of ships it was also written without having seen any footage from it so most descriptions end up based off of things gleaned from the games. You can imagine everything looks however you would like them to.

The follow-up books are interesting but I'm not sure they're particularly good. Telep does a decent straight forward adaptation with the movie novelization but when he had to come up with everything himself it gets odd. They do wrap up the Pilgrim storyline but ultimately it's not really essential reading

 

[Bandit LOAF]

Hello!

On the creative side, the policy was that anything published could/should be referenced by anything else. We were still following this on Wing Commander Arena in 2006 (mostly at my insistence!) but if they decided to do a big budget Wing Commander reboot today then the team involved would come up with their own rules and none of this would necessarily matter. But for everything developed so far, the entire body of work was fair game (which is why we got to put a bunch of movie references in the XBox game).

… but at the same time, canon it wasn't something that particularly came up much because while the end users consider the story and setting to be very important, the big force in development was advancing technology. Chris Roberts didn't sit down to tell the epic story of the Kilrathi War so much as he sat down to move technology and design ideas forward and then they built a story and setting on top of that. Continuity was something that happened in between gameplay with most of it coming just after the fact when the creative services group developed those cool in-universe manuals. For example, absolutely nothing in Wing Commander III cares what year it is relative to any other Wing Commander story and that's because no one involved in the film shoot or the game production ever thought about it. The idea that it's the year after Fleet Action and the universe is this, that and the other way now is all from Victory Streak, which was put together by Origin's publishing group late in the development process. Luckily, they were dorks like us who had a series bible and a complicated timeline to try and fit everything together and the end result is pretty neat!

(That said, the popular idea of a canon on the internet has absolutely nothing to do with the realities of IP work. We nerds loooove to organize things so precisely but I've never ever worked a room for a legacy property where anyone used previous work as anything but inspiration. No matter what Star Wars or Star Trek's public facing folks tell you about how they have a specific 'canon', no one working on them is actually carefully reviewing forty years of past stories to avoid every contradiction. It's always story first and then at best 'canon' is a cleanup pass, with the reference material being used only as an additive thing. So enjoy everything you want to instead of thinking there's a particular group of media that's the right one and one that's the wrong one… like the comic book folks say, it's all imaginary stories!)

 

[LawgSkrak]

Unfortunately that's not how my brain operates. Lol Continuity discrepancies bug the crap out of me.

 

[Pedro]

Unfortunately that's not how my brain operates. Lol Continuity discrepancies bug the crap out of me.

Yeah I'm not fond of them. Each one distracts just a little bit more.

I get why it shouldn't, but it does. Especially things like the powers Telep granted Blair with.

I'd definitely have leaned towards a cleaner continuity than all encompassing. Not just the movie, but trying to incorporate Secret Missions 1.5 which has so much overlap with 2.

I do love the way Doctor Who has handled it over the years, had 3 lifetime fans running it and Big Finish plugging up classic continuity issues; but the show has only ever explicitly referenced the 8th Doctors adventures, and absolutely zero idea if the novels or comics are "canon". Leaving it up to the fans to decide how much they want to bring into their personal image of the universe and how much they don't works well for me. You don't need to know if those are canon or not to enjoy them, but if you explicitly state it is then that can become a distraction. And when a continuity issue does come up (like the Doctor being half human) they just leave it be and don't mention it so it doesn't intrude on future episodes. Something I wish Star Trek could have done that with the Klingons; leave that stuff for the expanded universe to clean-up.

Still with no new games coming out I think you're free to enjoy it whatever way suits you best. After my last run through of the franchise and getting the crap bugged out of me I will definitely do a seperate pass for the movie franchise and not merge it into one giant playthrough next time.

 

[EmuMusicFan]

Unfortunately that's not how my brain operates. Lol Continuity discrepancies bug the crap out of me.

I understand. Continuity is really an issue. You can see that the appearance, personality, and even identity of quite a few characters in the series vary quite a bit from work to work - and not because of literary and art style.

My suggestion is to treat the different series of works separately, thinking that there are only vague connections among them.

My own view is roughly as follows:

1. WC1, especially SM2 and the novel Freedom Flight, WC2.
2. End Run, Fleet Action, Action Stations. I call them Jukaga Trilogy.
3. WCA Animation.
4. As for WC Movie, WC3 and WC4 and corresponding novels, read them separately.

 

[Jdawg]

to me all the games run together nice enough, not saying there are not some jagged edges bc there are, especially with how wc3 handled hobbes, I still hate that and the corny clichéd reason why he betrayed confed. even adding in the books fleet action and false colors; Less so with flase colors, but you can see how a writer could get towlyn to his character arc in WC4.

 

[Bandit LOAF]

The big thing that makes this kind of discussion hard is that so many people treat 'canon' to mean 'whatever I like' instead of its actual purpose... so it mostly serves endless bickering (WING COMMANDER PROPHECY RUINED MY CHILDHOOD!) instead of understanding how it was used to make a work come into existence. It's super interesting to me to know how previous stories were used in forming later things... but beyond that, what's the point? "Fleet Action isn't canon!" isn't saying Fleet Action didn't happen... and it's certainly not saying it did, either!

 

[Jdawg]

The big thing that makes this kind of discussion hard is that so many people treat 'canon' to mean 'whatever I like' instead of its actual purpose... so it mostly serves endless bickering (WING COMMANDER PROPHECY RUINED MY CHILDHOOD!) instead of understanding how it was used to make a work come into existence. It's super interesting to me to know how previous stories were used in forming later things... but beyond that, what's the point? "Fleet Action isn't canon!" isn't saying Fleet Action didn't happen... and it's certainly not saying it did, either!

Disagree, millions of folks hate the prequels and sequels of star wars, the originals are fine on their own. So is the matrix, the first works great as a standalone. The shark roaring like a lion in jaws 4 has nothing to do with the greatness of jaws 1. So not all cannon matters. Heck the halloween series has reset their cannon like five times. Superman Returns with brandon routh ignored Superman 3 and 4 and only followed after superman 2. Everybody Plays fast and loose with Canon let's be real.

I do agree with you on the dramatic it ruined my childhood statement though. I like what i like and ignore what i dont within reason. No movie has ever ruined my joy for another film.

 

[Bandit LOAF]

Disagree, millions of folks hate the prequels and sequels of star wars, the originals are fine on their own. So is the matrix, the first works great as a standalone. The shark roaring like a lion in jaws 4 has nothing to do with the greatness of jaws 1. So not all cannon matters. Heck the halloween series has reset their cannon like five times. Superman Returns with brandon routh ignored Superman 3 and 4 and only followed after superman 2. Everybody Plays fast and loose with Canon let's be real.

I think you're saying the same thing I'm trying to! It's totally meaningless to the audience, the same way we don't need to care what a grip does or how films are financed. Especially in the cases you mentioned, on the creative side it's a cumulative thing... the Phantom Menace has a canon we can refer to when we're talking about why it works the way it does (the original Star Wars movies)... but it doesn't work in reverse, nobody working on The Empire Strikes Back had to think about or otherwise limit themselve because of stories that didn't exist yet.

 

[Pedro]

I think you're saying the same thing I'm trying to! It's totally meaningless to the audience, the same way we don't need to care what a grip does or how films are financed. Especially in the cases you mentioned, on the creative side it's a cumulative thing... the Phantom Menace has a canon we can refer to when we're talking about why it works the way it does (the original Star Wars movies)... but it doesn't work in reverse, nobody working on The Empire Strikes Back had to think about or otherwise limit themselve because of stories that didn't exist yet.

I feel like most people approach it from the opposite direction. They aren’t thinking about what was going through the heads of the creators at the time, infact they’re doing their best to forget there was someone outside the box; they’re doing their best to suspend disbelief and enter into that world without thinking about when it was made or by who. The universe may have been created chaotically but they want to mentally map out something that makes sense to them.

Clearly that’s not how you approach it but i think it’s unkind to equate those saying they’d have preferred some separation to those saying “it ruined my childhood” about movies such as the phantom Menace which were clearly written with the intent of being in the same continuity. I think when we talked about how the wing commander movie bugged us neither of us were talking about quality, i certainly was specifically referring to integrating it into the games.

They’re both cheesy as hell so I shouldn’t care about continuity, but I’m glad that the resident evil games and movies are just their own parallel worlds as I’m never thinking about contradictions.
They’re both parts of the franchise but two separate continuities.

I enjoy the movie and games more when I put a mental wall around them and enjoy them on their own terms, even more so for the movie novels.

 

[Jdawg]

I think you're saying the same thing I'm trying to! It's totally meaningless to the audience, the same way we don't need to care what a grip does or how films are financed. Especially in the cases you mentioned, on the creative side it's a cumulative thing... the Phantom Menace has a canon we can refer to when we're talking about why it works the way it does (the original Star Wars movies)... but it doesn't work in reverse, nobody working on The Empire Strikes Back had to think about or otherwise limit themselve because of stories that didn't exist yet.

Heck george lucas didnt even limit himself between movies. Stuff wasnt there one movie, then there the next, like some light incest between luke and leia lol. I truly get why a lot of fans hate the last jedi, but luke being angry 25 yrs later didnt bother me bc people change. I appreciated the risk taking. Rise of skywalker bored me to tears however, it was 2 hrs of people running and screaming lines from scene to scene. I heard finn yelling REY!!! In my sleep.

Dont get me wrong, i love when cannon sings together in a beautiful harmony, but it is not the end of the world when it doesnt.

For example the choice to make hobbes the spy is not a cannon issue at all but just a poor creative choice to me, with a lame payoff. There could have been a way more interesting story between him and cobra and even radio rollins and all his conspiracy theories. Instead we got Manchurian Candidate, and it landed with a thud to me. I think that is why wc3 is my least favorite. Still a very solid game, i just think a lot of character threads go nowhere after being introduced in a good way. For instance radio rollins conspiracy theories kind of fade off. Cobra's trust issues are never fully explored, she was right all along. After blair beats flash he kind of fades away into the background. Maniac having zero character growth at all. I really like what they did with him in wc4 and then he went right back to Wing Commander 3 maniac, in prophecy.

 

[Jdawg]

I feel like most people approach it from the opposite direction. They aren’t thinking about what was going through the heads of the creators at the time, infact they’re doing their best to forget there was someone outside the box; they’re doing their best to suspend disbelief and enter into that world without thinking about when it was made or by who. The universe may have been created chaotically but they want to mentally map out something that makes sense to them.

Clearly that’s not how you approach it but i think it’s unkind to equate those saying they’d have preferred some separation to those saying “it ruined my childhood” about movies such as the phantom Menace which were clearly written with the intent of being in the same continuity. I think when we talked about how the wing commander movie bugged us neither of us were talking about quality, i certainly was specifically referring to integrating it into the games.

They’re both cheesy as hell so I shouldn’t care about continuity, but I’m glad that the resident evil games and movies are just their own parallel worlds as I’m never thinking about contradictions.
They’re both parts of the franchise but two separate continuities.

I enjoy the movie and games more when I put a mental wall around them and enjoy them on their own terms, even more so for the movie novels.

See i loathe the wing commander movie, from acting, to story, creature design, ship design etc... none of it works for me, not even in a it is so bad it's kind of fun, like the room. But saying that, it doesnt affect the way i feel about the wing commander games, 1 iota. This game franchise was and is my favorite franchise of all time

 

[Pedro]

See i loathe the wing commander movie, from acting, to story, creature design, ship design etc... none of it works for me, not even in a it is so bad it's kind of fun, like the room. But saying that, it doesnt affect the way i feel about the wing commander games, 1 iota. This game franchise was and is my favorite franchise of all time

Some of those things bugged me back in the day, but now I'm just fond of it. I won't defend it or recommend it to anyone, but I frequently watch it. It's only really trying to reconcile the timeline, Blair's past and abilties, who died when etc. The visuals changed so often that I always just take them as a per entry choice of someone recounting the story. I actually like the Kilrathi, just not their movement. If I got the chance to remaster all the WC titles (I won't, WC4 alone is killing me ) I would keep all the visual variations as that's one of the things endearing about the franchise.

 

[EmuMusicFan]

For example the choice to make hobbes the spy is not a cannon issue at all but just a poor creative choice to me, with a lame payoff. There could have been a way more interesting story between him and cobra and even radio rollins and all his conspiracy theories. Instead we got Manchurian Candidate, and it landed with a thud to me. I think that is why wc3 is my least favorite.

I always thought this design was poor, as were the many continuity issues in WC3.

I guess I should read the script carefully to come to a real conclusion, but my impression so far is that WC3 has some "this seems cool, so let's write it this way" storylines.

About Thrakhath: After I read the Freedom Flight and WC2 script more carefully I felt that the character of Thrakhath actually had more depth than that was in WC3. Yes, this character is a villain one, but not a mad one. He had his own troubles, hurt feelings, and selfish interests independent of the empire.

As for Ralgha, the situation is even more complicated. His leaving the Empire to join the Resistance was a complex political outcome. For example, as close relatives of the emperor's clan, all of Ralgha's family (and most of his close vassals) was destroyed in an "accident", except for Ralgha himself and the young vassal Kirha. Considering how the emperor and Thrakhath described Gilkarg's "accident", isn't there room for thought here? And from Ralgha and Kirha's mere words related to the emperor's family, Ralgha and Kirha showed no kindness to either the emperor or Thrakhath.

All of the above illustrate the complexity of the internal contradictions of a feudal empire, a state of politics that is actually common knowledge to us. And all of these was not much reflected in the WC3 game script. BTW, Melek's depiction in WC3 novel is more interesting.

That said, it is at least debatable whether the series has really paid attention to the issue of continuity since WC3. There are so many discontinuities from WC3 to WC Movie that seemed to be caused by random ideas.

 

[Jdawg]

Some of those things bugged me back in the day, but now I'm just fond of it. I won't defend it or recommend it to anyone, but I frequently watch it. It's only really trying to reconcile the timeline, Blair's past and abilties, who died when etc. The visuals changed so often that I always just take them as a per entry choice of someone recounting the story. I actually like the Kilrathi, just not their movement. If I got the chance to remaster all the WC titles (I won't, WC4 alone is killing me ) I would keep all the visual variations as that's one of the things endearing about the franchise.

In all honestly I appreciate the fact that you love the movie for what it is, it just doesn't work for me especially Matthew Lillard. all I see is his character from Scream and it just is not a good to me. Plus freddie is about as interesting as a cardboard cutout to me.

I always thought this design was poor, as were the many continuity issues in WC3.

I guess I should read the script carefully to come to a real conclusion, but my impression so far is that WC3 has some "this seems cool, so let's write it this way" storylines.

About Thrakhath: After I read the Freedom Flight and WC2 script more carefully I felt that the character of Thrakhath actually had more depth than that was in WC3. Yes, this character is a villain one, but not a mad one. He had his own troubles, hurt feelings, and selfish interests independent of the empire.

As for Ralgha, the situation is even more complicated. His leaving the Empire to join the Resistance was a complex political outcome. For example, as close relatives of the emperor's clan, all of Ralgha's family (and most of his close vassals) was destroyed in an "accident", except for Ralgha himself and the young vassal Kirha. Considering how the emperor and Thrakhath described Gilkarg's "accident", isn't there room for thought here? And from Ralgha and Kirha's mere words related to the emperor's family, Ralgha and Kirha showed no kindness to either the emperor or Thrakhath.

All of the above illustrate the complexity of the internal contradictions of a feudal empire, a state of politics that is actually common knowledge to us. And all of these was not much reflected in the WC3 game script. BTW, Melek's depiction in WC3 novel is more interesting.

That said, it is at least debatable whether the series has really paid attention to the issue of continuity since WC3. There are so many discontinuities from WC3 to WC Movie that seemed to be caused by random ideas.

Yeah see I didn't read the scripts. I do agree with you about the prince I felt like he was a slightly more nuanced in Wing Commander 2. While Wing Commander 4 has my favorite story and acting and I still think holds up pretty well by modern standards; you can almost slide in the cutscenes into a Sci-Fi Network show right now and it looks better than what's half on that Network nowadays. Wing Commander 2 is my favorite overall game from story, combat, and especially ship design. While the kilrathi are not explored greatly in depth, I do think it's better than what we got in wing Commander 1 and actually Wing Commander 3.

 

[ChrisReid]

Dont get me wrong, i love when cannon sings together in a beautiful harmony, but it is not the end of the world when it doesnt.

For example the choice to make hobbes the spy is not a cannon issue at all

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volleyed and thundered;
etc