Scholars On The Mount #1: What Does Canon Mean

hear me out:

transcanon

canonfluid

canonqueer

acanon

bicanon

ciscanon

miscanon

canon expression

canon identity

canon affirmation surgery

the canon binary

canon conforming

canon non-conforming

canon dysphoria :(

canon euphoria :)

canon abolitionism

canon norms

canon roles

we could keep going but you get the idea

define all of these. right now. go. go. go. go.

transcanon: transitioning from not canon to canon

canonfluid: sometimes canon, sometimes not, sometimes dubious

canonqueer: kinda funky with it ;)

acanon: not canon but in a different way I guess

bicanon: canon twice. applies to sollux?

ciscanon: has always been canon and is happy to be so

miscanon: when something is wrongly canonized

canon expression: how canonization is expressed by the thing

canon identity: how one sees their own canonization

canon affirmation surgery: vriska underwent this

the canon binary: the idea of canon being either canon or not

canon conforming: c. conforms with canon. idk.

canon non-conforming: like fanon stuff

canon dysphoria: dysphoria about being or not being canon :(

canon euphoria: euphoria from being made canon/not canon! :D

canon abolitionism: the idea that canon needs to be rid of altogether

canon norms: allllllll the bullshit that's gotta be deconstructed with how people see canon

canon roles: like fucking like the roles of if canon or not fuck dude i can't keep doing this i can't i oh i'm done okay

I think this goes even deeper than this actually. Are doomed timelines canon? Dreambubbles? What about the weird bastardized versions of dreams ghosts act out? Are you canon? Am I canon?

The trouble regarding the epilogues is that they are explicitly stated to be dubious canon, iirc this is where the term originates. I would propose that this and Hiveswap are equally canon and therefore both dubious, while one is post canon and one is pre canon. friendsI’m and pesterquest are an alternate timeline, aradia and dirk’s chapters show this. in another work these would be completely untrue, but homestuck supports other timelines and thus I believe it should also be considered dubiou. HSBC, on the other hand, is a further level removed from the original. so, homestuck is at the top, then the epilogues, friendsim, and Hiveswap branch off of it in fully separate and equal but not mutually exclusive realms of dubious canon, and the BC exists at the bottom, in a state similar to how you describe post canon.

This feels quite like the first session of an ecumenical council and honestly I am absolutely here for it.

i was going to describe myself as a visiting parish priest of homestuck until i realized that everyone here is actually standing inside of my congregation. so, yeah, close enough.

@squiddo: so, this is a really good question! based on the definition rose gives, all doomed timelines as featured on-screen are "canon," just in the sense that they're inherently true, but are much less relevant/essential. examples of relevant doomed timelines include the one davesprite comes from, and the [s] game over timeline that we spent, uh, literal years in. examples of irrelevant doomed timelines are: all the other ones. dreambubbles are truthful, but only relevant as they relate to our living characters, etc. are you canon to homestuck? only time will tell. am i canon to homestuck? i show up in the background of a patreon comic, so i'm at best dubiously post-canon.

@biznasty: actually, dubiously canon was a term originating from jakemorph (who is pretty active on this forum!). post-canon actually didn't have any "terminology" for it until after it was released. all of the discussion of it was in-universe, so if we're going based on Hussie Text(tm) in particular: meat is canon, candy isn't. but is it ever that simple...

this is a tough one because the way i feel is primarily that it describes a relationship of power over the text. like, it's kind of cringe to talk about "biblical canon" when "fandom canon" comes up but i think it's genuinely pretty useful sometimes.

like, whenever i talk about canon i think about its inverse, apocrypha. if you go back to the history of biblical apocrypha, it kind of lays bare the motivations behind maintaining a "canon". protestants didn't believe the apocrypha were divinely inspired, and that was their motivation for making it apocryphal, and not canonical, to begin with. of course, that opens a whole well of biblical inspiration and the tension between the belief in the bible as a text solely authored by god and the reality of its creation as a multi-authored, patchwork, often deeply political text

this gets into a whole mess of biblical authorship and brushes up against a lot of stuff i simply don't want to dissect right after waking up, but i'm sure we can all get where i'm going with this: the reason the apocrypha were taken out of "canon" is that it's not "divinely inspired" and this intent echoes out into the whole discussion. the epilogues, beyond canon, pesterquest, they're just not divinely inspired. they're not smiled upon by god. (and quite often the "god" invoked here is an imagined version of andrew hussie that no longer exists)

i think at the end of the day "what's canon" is a deeply politicized argument that, whether we like it or not, rarely relies on the quality or even relevance of a text, and instead comes down to "i don't like the person that wrote it", and this is about 80% of why i've struggled to keep my attention on capeshit, despite my heart being open to it in theory.

as a writer, what's "canon" is what's useful to me. homestuck - especially the back half of homestuck - is a story that requires a lot of legwork to put together into a sensible thing, and people just don't do that leg work. and because of this, i try to give every part of homestuck its due process, because that's all text that was written with intent, right? skaianet wasn't canon to my work until i realized it was useful, and now it is.

as a reader, i do think rose laid it out best - there is a lot of homestuck to work with. so sorting it by its relevance, essentiality, and truthfulness does just work. the snapchats that weren't part of the credits were largely irrelevant and inessential, so their truthfulness didn't matter, right up until they did and jane fired cake lasers at everyone.

so with that in mind, here's how i feel:
canon - a text or part of a text that is presented as diegetic within a text (eg, Homestuck is canon to Homestuck: Beyond Canon and Burning Down the House, but the Snapchats are only canon to Homestuck: Beyond Canon, they didn't happen in BDTH)
noncanon - a text or part of a text that is not relevant to interpretation (eg, Secret of Mana is not canon to Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose, but it is to Homestuck)
dubiously canon - an interpretation relies on inference and implication but can't be written off as "noncanonical" because if we throw out inference and implication as a meaningful way to understand a story we may as well all kill ourselves now (eg, Undertale is Dubiously Canon to Deltarune, Homestuck: Beyond Canon is dubiously canon to Burning Down the House)
post-canon - an approach to storytelling that rejects a single canonical truth, opening up contradictory ideas, to convey its story (think post-rock, post-structuralism)

the issue, then, is when people pretend "post-canon" is "noncanon". the ideas presented are contradicting existing canon, but like. maintaining a proper, non-contradictory canon is an elusive and ethereal goal that will be fucked up just because like, human thought tends towards contradiction. despite what my beloved son detective conan says, one truth does not always prevail. and acknowledging the complexities and contradictions in a story as a natural, intentional part of them, and not a failure to create "the perfect story" is important.

it's like a big tube that throws rocks

as per usual, victoria said something way smarter than what i did. in exchange, leaf hit me in the head with a rock traveling at high velocity, so i'm feeling pretty good.

i think the definition of post-canon in particular hits, especially now. no further comment on that. it just works. that said, i do like the idea of dubiously canon being turned into, in a very literal sense "i don't know...?" it kinda means basically everything that isn't stated to be true or false is in a superposition of "this could maybe become true at any point and we just wouldn't know," with the most obvious of these examples (re: the deltarune/undertale) ones being the only ones we consider.

is undertale canon to deltarune? is deltarune canon to homestuck? is homestuck canon to roachquest? we may never know the truth.

I read this thread with dawning horror as I realize dubcanon is not in fact a wider fandom thing and Ive been calling things "dubiously canon" from outside of the homestuck sphere to describe the idea of 'word of god canonized things', or things that aren't explicitly stated in the main texts but are stated in other mediums (like how star wars treats its novellas as a non homestuck example).

anyone in this thread smoke weed?

in the words of the great scholar, Marvus Xoloto,

"MARVUS: depending on how u look at it evry branch in the timeline b fundamental 2 da metatextual structure of da essence of existence itself

MARVUS: even an incident dat fallz outside a the strict confines of canonical continuity contributez 2 a metaconsciousness dat b built by & could even b said 2 b at its most essential level defined primarily by the extratextual xxxchange of interpretation by those who observe it

...

MARVUS: even if watz goin down here cant b said 2 b “true” dat doesnt mean we r meaningless

MARVUS: turn up !!"

Using Truth, Essentiality, and Relevance as the three pillars of canonicity seems to be the “in-house” definition, per Lalonde (2019). But then one wades into a thicket of weeds like the corollary questions “what is truth?”, “essential to what?”, and “relevant to whom?”.

RE: Squiddo

I tried it once but I didnt really fuck with it enough to continue.

yeah, we're waist-deep in the thicket of Subjectivity now, which is honestly what brought the whole "canon debate" to its current form anyway. "is this relevant to me?" "is this essential to me?" even if an author claims something to be true, full stop, no grayness, it doesn't stop an audience from simply ignoring it.

homestuck in particular has always mediated a kinda unique relationship between its fans and the work. i've never really seen a fanbase so quick to disregard something that happens, textually, just because they don't Want it to be true. maybe homestuck was always post-canon. maybe we're just figuring it out now.

Oh, so... hammering out terminology? Sounds fun scary!

We're missing out on another term: "dubious authenticity", which is used on the page that links to the epilogue. (Though maybe that's just part of the definition of apocrypha? at least on wikipedia it is.)

Fun fact: "post canon" is used in Homestuck itself sort-of. In the adventure map, the section for credits uses that.

I think in this case, we could sorta consider daisy-chaining things:
* Homestuck is canon to the Credits.
* The Credits (and Homestuck) are canon to the Snapchats.
* The Credits (and Homestuck - give or take a couple of errors) are canon to the Epilogues (I would split meat and candy but they interdepend on each other so I can't really do that but trust me if I had a diagram I would okay it'd have arrows and it'd be so great)
* The Epilogues (and the Credits and Homestuck) are canon to Homestuck^2.
* Homestuck^2 (and the Epilogues, and the Credits, and Homestuck) plus the Snapchats, are canon to Beyond Canon.

I might have missed something, but this is sorta a rough idea of what I was thinking. If I drew a diagram it might start looking like inheritance in Object Oriented Programming which is its own kettle of worms.

my personal examples of dubiously canon are things i've put together from implications in Homestuck for my own comic, but things i would have to actively make a case for when arguing, rather than it being an agreed-upon read. agreed-upon reads tend towards the shallow and obvious and tend to be pretty cyclical depending on their popularity. nepeta cannot not be the badass apex predator who tears down giant animals with her bare hands, and fujoshi queen who keeps an updated ship chart of all of her friends simultaneously, nepeta instead oscillates between the two because just one trait is simpler, easier to keep track of. (see again: inability to handle complexity and contradiction.)

so here's several facts in a leading order to make a case.

- in homestuck, black holes are non-literal thresholds between worlds.

- beforus does not have the orbiting green moon, only the pink one, which has natural landscaping (and meenah's hive)

- the green moon of alternia is given this mid-century architectural style that coats the entire planet.

- the 8-ball planet in caliborn's session is given the same mid-century architecture

- black and green are linked colors in homestuck's grand color scheme. space as an aspect is black, while space players speak in green. ("space isn't green" was a big twist at the time!)

- caliborn, at one point, says he would paint with calliope's blood

with all these points, would it be reasonable to say "the green moon of alternia is the 8-ball planet from caliborn's session?"

when it's all laid out like this, it's a compelling idea. and my personal feeling is that this is just true. but that's a lot of implication and inference to pull on, more than the average person is willing to do. and so it's in this kind of dubious place of canonicity. there are a lot of little things like this in homestuck. for example, the music boxes gamzee and vriska use to time travel around the alpha session are probably damara's and not aradia's.

there's no page there saying "these are actually damara's music boxes", though. so you have to argue for it.

@victoria - I want to take some more time to think about what you said and actually come up with a satisfying response but two things that ump to mind immediately are:
1. "cannot not" is that a tyop or am I misreading?
2. Honestly I can think of Nepeta doing both at once and that has given me ideas on what to do if I ever write her.
3. "in homestuck, black holes are non-literal thresholds between worlds." - it's funny the similarities and differences between how Problem Sleuth and Homestuck handle black holes lol.