Canon Vs. Fanon: A Discussion

this is fair, and also truth
even so i still maintain that the elected helryx and whatever else ttv will have added to bs01 is not canon, and i would still have maintained that stance if any other helryx had won (including noodles)
in the end, aren’t we all our own ultimate authorities?

I think Huki’s point here is that a poorly handled contest for a toyline that ended 4? years ago shouldn’t be considered canon in one of the most profitable franchises of one of the world’s biggest toy companies. Group fancanon is great but I doubt anyone is anxious to build the Helryx that we got. Also Greg’s made more than one contradiction in the past with his writing of BIONICLE and is just one guy. We shouldn’t obsess over everything he says or treat it like gospel. Other people made BIONICLE, afterall.

I’d also rather a lot more thought be put in to what Helryx’s “canon” design be rather than a moc made in under half an hour

EDIT:
On that note, if Swert demands an art contest after a winning moc is chosen- what’s the point of even making a moc? I think it makes the moc contest a bit redundant.

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I wouldn’t say redundant. It’s a way to engage multiple sides of the community (Moccists and artists). From my understanding, BS01 was adamant that art was the only canon depiction, so it would have completely excluded an entire set of the community from even participating at all.

As for what anyone personally considers canon, that’s up to them. But in the grand scheme of things, Greg is pretty much the only person from the original BIONICLE team who even interacts with the community at all, and is willing to go back and ratify images for old characters that we aren’t going to get. Just cause someone disliked the winning entrant doesn’t invalidate the entire contest results canonicity. Heck, I kinda wanna build the Helryx that won, but it was far from my favorite. As for someone ‘disturbingly frail’, and a Toa, the MoC wasnt necessarily gonna need to be very ornate. The Artakha contest has already shown that with a diff character, you get alot of different interpretations.

-Solaris Magnus

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Greg is literally the only one left at LEGO who even worked on bionicle. I think it’s evidence enough that we should all move on as well.

There are other LEGO themes, afterall

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I’ve been a proponent of not wanting to bring back BIONICLE in a new form, especially after G2’s massive failure- and still share that sentiment. But I think it’s nice to give some little bits of closure to the original line, especially in it’s 20th anniversary year. Moving on is fine, but still nice to commemorate the past of what BIONICLE was and what it meant to many people!

-Solaris Magnus

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This is not the way to commemorate anything in my opinion. G1 also ended 11 years ago, we really need to find other things to do with our time

And that’s your opinion. I respectfully disagree but I can understand where you’re coming from. End of the day, canon for the line is what it is, but any one person can simply chose to ignore or not consider it themselves. I personally despise the SW sequel trilogy. It’s canon, but to me the series ended with episode 3. To each there own!

-Solaris Magnus

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Because the MOC gives the artist something to work from-an inspiration, if you will. Many an artist has based their work off of something they can see.

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One thing I would like to say is how canon is treated tends to vary from franchise to franchise. The Transformers franchise doesn’t have a singular canon. Everything is considered canon, though not everything is canon to each other. Then there are long-running franchises like Doctor Who where there are so many inconsistencies and different writers that any sense of canon is practically meaningless. Then there are works that are only written by one author or one main creator who hold total authority over the canon, like JK Rowling, J R R Tolkien, or George Lucas before he sold Star Wars to Disney.

Then there’s BIONICLE, which is a weird beast.

It’s true that Greg wasn’t the sole contributor of BIONICLE, but he’s the only one left that involves themselves in the community and G1’s story. While he didn’t create BIONICLE, he wrote for it for years, was part of the story team, and is pretty much the only guy left with any sense of authority over canon. I don’t see Bob Thomson or Christian Faber involving themselves with G1.

Personally, I agree that people take Greg’s word and canon too seriously. People should create what they want to create. But canon contests date back to the early days of G1. BIONICLE’s appeal was creativity and its story, and what better way to encourage that than to allow fans to contribute to it.

To me, I don’t really care about whether or not something is canon. I just want to see cool MOCs, artwork, and overall creativity from the community. Even Hoseryx would have been worth it for that alone.

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To me I feel that matoran don’t ‘love’ each other, even though they have sentience. Although once on Spherus Magna they might(?) because, depending if the Agori and Glatorian ‘love’ each other, the matoran would see that and go “oh yeah I never thought of that”. Most of the people in the canon contest I never really had to much of a strong idea of what they looked like, and thus the reason why I haven’t entered, but for some reason I still can’t imagine Helryx being how she is now depicted, same with Artakha. But the whole ‘gender’ thing I am really confused with, when did they, the matoran species, get genders, was it when they were made by the great beings or when they gained sentience, because why would the GBs given them genders if they were just robots?

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Matoran would see that and say: “those guys are reallly weird. let’s start an all-out war Matoran vs Agori”. That’s the thing Greg planned for 2011, by the way - war between the speces.
#loveisnotcanon
Genders were created by GB’s because some elements needed a more “gentle” users - that’s why Orde is the only male Toa of Psionics. Read his page on BS01 for more info. Also GB’s just made MU very similar to Spherus Magna (Matoran/Agori, Toa/Glatorian, Many elements), so they might made genders just because they had them themselves.

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But they would need proper sentience to make there own choices that make they more volatile

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Toa were sentient before the awakening. Though I don’t remember where I’ve red it. And Matoran had according genders because it would be weird to chage one when a Matoran becomes a Toa. If that all makes sense.

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Wait, what?! I never knew that!

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I’ve red somewhere that Greg once said that one of his ideas was civil war on Spherus Magna, because Agori and Matoran are very different. I am sure that there more information about that on TTV, you can try to find something with search.

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I thought the civil war was going to be between the great beings.

When considering the validity of fanon over canon, we must entertain two seemingly unintuitive ideas:

  1. The author of a work is not all-knowing or infallible, and can be wrong about his own narrative.
  2. A piece of media is not the narrative itself, but a depiction of that narrative, and can imperfectly reflect the narrative’s canon or contain its own, sovereign canon.

In other words, we must accept that either Greg’s word is not law and he is wrong about details which official media directly contradicts him on, or the official media which conveys the Bionicle story outright lies to us or delivers a different story.

These two ideas can be reconciled when we consider the possibility that media is always an adaptation and never the narrative itself. Bionicle media is not the Bionicle story, and the “official” story is something else, while the story told by the media is its own thing. Officially, Matoran cannot feel love; but, in the media, Matoran openly express and pursue romance. Officially, the word “Tohunga” has no known meaning; but Matoro refers to himself as one in the first comic. And so on with various other semi-canon or retconned details in MNOG and whatnot.

Of course, you can just say “death of the author” and say Sidorak was legitimately simping and Greg must not be trusted with anything, but doing so entirely discounts the value of the author’s word, which throws potentially useful insight on a narrative out the window and conflicts with the very nature of art as a mode of communication between author and audience. However, we can still accept that authors are human and, therefore, fallible. They can be entirely wrong or even lie about what the have said through their work–doing so, of course, with legitimate purpose.

Another, similar example comes from Kill la Kill. I’ll spoiler this in case anyone hasn’t seen it, and you really should: The creator of the show (or whoever it was) has officially gone on record saying that there are no romantic relationships in KLK. However, this is demonstrably false, as Mako clearly expresses, er…interest…in Ryuko. In episode 7, she asks Ryuko out while making lip contact; in the tournament arc, she gets, uh…excited…by a revealing close-up of Ryuko; and, in the last episode, she asks Ryuko out once again (Ryuko accepts, and we see that date in the credits), followed by a montage in which the two briefly hold hands. There’s also the scene where she helps free Ryuko from Junketsu, which has some cheeky symbolism, and Mako’s relationship with Ryuko has an important place in the show’s politics and coming-of-age component, but that’s a wall of text for another day. My point is this: either the anime outright lies to us and Ryuko and Mako never hook up despite doing so right before our eyes, the author is outright wrong, or the author is technically right (dating isn’t romance until you actually fall in love, right? And 2 crazy teens just seeing if they work together may not be in love from the get-go) and just used cheeky wording to avoid sending the shippers into an actual civil war.

TL;DR The question is this: what is “canon,” really? Does canonicity equal truth? And, if so, what truth does it entail?

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For me, it doesn’t matter whatsoever, at least in this case. In the majority of franchises, canon is the basis of fanon, which seems obvious, but once you arrive at that conclusion, actual canon no longer matters.

If I say love is canon in my fanon, it no longer matters to me whether or not it’s actually canon.

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I agree with SirKeksalot here, and also want to add that a factor to be considered is that Bionicle story and world were made by real people on real Earth, and thus are not perfect at all. Here is an exmple: the tohunga. Word “Matoran” would not exist, if not problems with Maori language, that have nothing to do with Bionicle at all! In Bionicle especially there are really much rpoblems: the whole story of 2001-2003 is not clear, Toa’s hight, cancelled books, sets that do not fit descriptions… So I think that Bioncle canon is really like 1000 years old scrolls from different authors, written on an unknown language, that contradict with each other, and you don’t know if those are all scrolls, or only part of the whole story :+1:.

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I’m just gonna also drop my 2 cents here in the example of the bionicle universe. I run an RPG campaign set in the matoran universe for a bunch of friends who have never even played with bionicle as kids.

So what I’ve done is essentially taken the extremely open bionicle canon and written in both A. new bits of information like people and places & B. things that I believe need changing to ground the players a bit more. Keep in mind we’re all college students, so playing kid-friendly is pretty unattractive for them.

As a result, I’ve decided that love IS fanon for my purposes, that toa and matoran can be of ANY gender, and I’ve fleshed out/written in 2 very large landmasses. But I try to stick to the possibilities of canon as much as possible: while love is my fanon, I don’t think realistically it would be in the way we have it. Toa or Matoran love would be an asexual relationship but not aromantic: contact, kissing, etc. would probably be a thing but the actual act of reproduction makes no sense in the canon. So theoretically it’d be a connection based off of feeling more secure around a person, or more comfortable, or whatever rather than our more primal urges.

Well that was a wall of text, lol. My point is essentially that as long as your fanon is relevant and fun for you, and serves your purposes, it can and should be whatever you want. I’d advise sticking to the canon as much as possible and working around the canon, so to speak.

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