What Really is Canon?

[Phaze]

I have read all of the Robotech books, haven't really gotten into the RPG, watched Macross and original Robotech cartoons...

In this world of 'Robotech' it seems the only thing constant is Veritechs, Regults, Protoculture, and MinMei. Everything else seems to have alternate versions somewhere in some form...

So what really is canon? This universe (actually could be explained by several Universes) appears to be more 'Rifts' than 'Rifts'.

So when I play do I pick a particular 'Canon' and run with it or would running a game at a con with my own 'canon' made up of pieces of all of the variations end up angering those tied to a particular 'canon'?

Thoughts?

[Seto Kaiba]

So what really is canon? This universe (actually could be explained by several Universes) appears to be more 'Rifts' than 'Rifts'. [...]

Officially, there is only one Robotech universe and continuity made up of:

• The 1985 Robotech television series
• The Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles movie/OVA
• The post-2001 comics published under DC/Wildstorm
  • From the Stars
  • Love and War
  • Invasion/Mars Base One
  • Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles
• Robotech: Love Live Alive (possibly)

Harmony Gold's official position on the Invasion and Battlecry video games is that they are not canon, but elements that appear in them are.

Y'see... the Robotech franchise did not come into being with any coherent creative intent, it was made quickly and cheaply as a toy commercial for Revell's ROBOTECH toy line, a failed attempt to carve for itself a piece of the Transformers profits. After Harmony Gold's attempts to capitalize on the show failed when Robotech: the Movie crashed and burned and Robotech II: the Sentinels fell apart shortly after its production process began, they basically just farmed the license out to anybody who was willing to pay. As the natural consequence of that decision, Robotech in the late 80's and 90's became a melange of poor quality, internally and mutually contradictory versions of itself with no orchestrating intent to speak of. The licenses changed hands a fair few times, sales weren't that great on average, and it was just a real mess.

Once Harmony Gold and Carl Macek bet everything on Robotech 3000 and lost HARD, Harmony Gold put the new creative director (Tommy Yune) in charge and tasked him with rebooting Robotech's continuity and straightening this mess out into something resembling a credible SF/mecha anime franchise. Naturally, a step in that process was the imposition of an official canon... which I described above.

There's a lot of resentment and ill will directed at Tommy for the decision to impose a canon, since Harmony Gold's quick-fix approach to straightening out the mess of the 80's and 90's was to simply can everything its licensees had made during that period. The official reason they gave for exiling the pre-2001 comics, novels, and so on not just from the continuity, but from the franchise itself was their poor quality, inconsistencies in content, and a lack of creative oversight from Harmony Gold.* Pretty much everything except the series and the post-reboot material was summarily declared to be "not real Robotech" and ignored thereafter. The official timeline, mecha stats, and so on proved to be equally contentious, since Harmony Gold borrowed the bulk of them from the original Japanese source material instead of coming up with their own.

Basically, there's a LOT of sour grapes over the whole thing, with some old-timers flat-out refusing to accept the imposition of an "official line" for various reasons.

* I'd imagine the rampant copyright violations in the old comics probably had something to do with that as well... but Harmony Gold didn't want to draw attention to it.

So when I play do I pick a particular 'Canon' and run with it or would running a game at a con with my own 'canon' made up of pieces of all of the variations end up angering those tied to a particular 'canon'? [...]

Honestly, since the RPG is not canon anyway it's not really an issue... the goal, after all, is simply to be a big toy box for those wishing to make their own Robotech stories. Whether you play it straight to official canon, or go with one or more of the disowned variations, depends on the preferences of your players. My group likes to stick close to canon, and some groups like to be out in left field. Whatever your players have fun with, that's the only thing that really matters for your game.

[mech798]

Probably one of the better decisions of HG-- for every decent comic, there were, well...

"Meltraedi Moon princesses" With samurai swords. That chopped up giant protoculture cyborg veritechs.

I'm not kidding.

Sometimes you gotta just nuke the site from orbit.

[Colonel Wolfe]

For most discussions on the Forums, I try to stick closely to the RPG printed as Canon, at times that is hard simply because it readily disagrees with the way things were represented in the show its self.
For Me Canon follows Tiers.
1st Tier is anything Animated, the 85 episodes, TSC, LLA (and sentinels to a point)
2nd Tier Printed information in Art books, Comics (post 2001), 2nd edition RPG books in that order.
3rd Tier is the Rest, Video Games, old Novels, Comics and RPG. Generally these sources are so far away from the show that little is useful from them.
Because of the Sacrifices for story-telling or game design, the Comics and RPG's are always secondary canon when they disagree with the primary canon.

[MilkManX]

Right. The original 85 Episodes + the newer Shadow Chronicles and RT:Love LIve Alive are the HG canon. Your own game canon can be whatever you want. My personal campaign in currently on New Generation Era Earth but I pull from some of the not canon material such as the Sentinels and the in between novels to flesh out the story.

[Alrik Vas]

Right. The original 85 Episodes + the newer Shadow Chronicles and RT:Love LIve Alive are the HG canon. Your own game canon can be whatever you want. My personal campaign in currently on New Generation Era Earth but I pull from some of the not canon material such as the Sentinels and the in between novels to flesh out the story.

Basically this.

Mostly so there are still Zentradi left.

[Colonel Wolfe]

Right. The original 85 Episodes + the newer Shadow Chronicles and RT:Love LIve Alive are the HG canon. Your own game canon can be whatever you want. My personal campaign in currently on New Generation Era Earth but I pull from some of the not canon material such as the Sentinels and the in between novels to flesh out the story.

Basically this.

Mostly so there are still Zentradi left.

That's one of the Few things I've kept from eariler versions, the presence of Zents later on in the series. Both full-sized and miclone sized Zents exist in all 3 eras.

[Seto Kaiba]

Probably one of the better decisions of HG-- for every decent comic, there were, well...
[...]
Sometimes you gotta just nuke the site from orbit.

Quite... though, again, I suspect that the frequent occurrence of copyright infringement in the old comics, by small companies that I hope simply didn't know any better, probably played a role. The old comics had a very bad habit of trying to copy whatever title was big at the time, everything from Independence Day to Macross Plus seems to have been fair game.

[ShadowLogan]

I have read all of the Robotech books, haven't really gotten into the RPG, watched Macross and original Robotech cartoons...

In this world of 'Robotech' it seems the only thing constant is Veritechs, Regults, Protoculture, and MinMei. Everything else seems to have alternate versions somewhere in some form...

So what really is canon? This universe (actually could be explained by several Universes) appears to be more 'Rifts' than 'Rifts'.

So when I play do I pick a particular 'Canon' and run with it or would running a game at a con with my own 'canon' made up of pieces of all of the variations end up angering those tied to a particular 'canon'?

Thoughts?

There is no true single canon IMHO. What we have really is a bunch of alternate universes working under misguided attempt to make everything work together (though here some aspects have higher value).

Really RT has several universes that are separate and best kept that way:
-Revell's Defender Comic/Model Line
-TV Series (original before the Remaster/Editing done in the 2000s)
-Yune Verse (Editing TV Series from 2000s, TSC, Yune's comics, etc)
-Novel-verse/Mckinney-verse (novels are basically internally consistent, and can be shown to be slightly different than the original show)
-1E RPG
-2E RPG
-Old Comic Adaption of 85 Ep, which can have sub-branches with the non-adaption stuff (not familiar with the derivative stuff)
-Original Forms for each arc before merging

As for what to do for the RPG, you really have the option to do what you want. You can change the timeline used, either based on one of the above or done on your own.

[mech798]

Probably one of the better decisions of HG-- for every decent comic, there were, well...
[...]
Sometimes you gotta just nuke the site from orbit.

Quite... though, again, I suspect that the frequent occurrence of copyright infringement in the old comics, by small companies that I hope simply didn't know any better, probably played a role. The old comics had a very bad habit of trying to copy whatever title was big at the time, everything from Independence Day to Macross Plus seems to have been fair game.

I worked with a lot of smaller independent companies doing lettering and production, and while I never worked with anyone doing robotech, I can tell you that in the 1980s and early 1990s, a "Lawyer" never mind an "IP lawyer" was a strange and mythical creature that cost more to talk to for one hour than most companies made in a month. In general, if anyone thought of it at all, they probably figured nobody was going to care, or even notice that they were ripping off a new manga from Japan.

And, for the most part, they were right. I mean, AP wasn't utterly destroyed for "Star Trekker" and that was about the biggest definition you could find of copyright violation and while paramout stopped their distribution, they didn't burn AP to ash in teh fires of a thousand suns. (it was 1992, and that thing-- not only did it use on model ship designs, but the exact likenesses of the main characters, even the fonts were identical to the movie font)

[Seto Kaiba]

I worked with a lot of smaller independent companies doing lettering and production, and while I never worked with anyone doing robotech, I can tell you that in the 1980s and early 1990s, a "Lawyer" never mind an "IP lawyer" was a strange and mythical creature that cost more to talk to for one hour than most companies made in a month. In general, if anyone thought of it at all, they probably figured nobody was going to care, or even notice that they were ripping off a new manga from Japan.

And, for the most part, they were right. I mean, AP wasn't utterly destroyed for "Star Trekker" and that was about the biggest definition you could find of copyright violation and while paramout stopped their distribution, they didn't burn AP to ash in teh fires of a thousand suns. (it was 1992, and that thing-- not only did it use on model ship designs, but the exact likenesses of the main characters, even the fonts were identical to the movie font)

Neat! Thank you for offering us the benefit of your experience from that time.

[Phaze]

Wow...Great Infomation. Thanks for the feedback.

[bar1scorpio]

Okay, Mech798, kinda wondering who you are, as I'm familiar with Antarctic Press as well I've even been published a couple of times in their old Ninja High School annuals. Back when that book was still worth reading - that female artist/writer whatever she was killed the book for me. Still dig Fred
Perry's works, though.

As for Robotech Comics, some of later ones were truly godawful. They went from Comico, to Eternity, to AP to... some group called "Academy" that looked like they were, for the most part, drawn by high schoolers.

[mech798]

Okay, Mech798, kinda wondering who you are, as I'm familiar with Antarctic Press as well I've even been published a couple of times in their old Ninja High School annuals. Back when that book was still worth reading - that female artist/writer whatever she was killed the book for me. Still dig Fred
Perry's works, though.

As for Robotech Comics, some of later ones were truly godawful. They went from Comico, to Eternity, to AP to... some group called "Academy" that looked like they were, for the most part, drawn by high schoolers.

I think the NAdir, other than the one that had meltradi sailor scouts. Was a story that centered on ANOTHER sdf-1, this one was a replica of the macross, only built better, (Oh, and this all was done secretly, because only dummies have to build a city around a supertech alien starship to figure out how it works. )becuse the scientist on it was totally smarter than Lang, oh, and it used antimatter rather than protoculture so they didn't have any problems with running out and it-

And I think that was teh moment I put the book down and said: no more, because I don't remember any more of it.

In all seriouness, there are two ways to handle this-- 1. have someone in charge, have writer's bibles and enforce them. That requires a lot of work and honestly sometime's it plays out poorly if your editor in chief has odd ideas, or isn't good with communication.

2. The Star Trek method. I've lost track of the offspring of kirk, but it doesn't matter because in star trek, no book is canon, or rather, exists in its own universe. (which honestly coul be the case given how much Star Trek breaks the time line). That's great, in teh sens that it lets people, like say, Diane Duane, give us another look at the Romulans. It's not so great in that you get some real drek, so even there, you need some degree of oversight.

[Seto Kaiba]

In all seriouness, there are two ways to handle this-- 1. have someone in charge, have writer's bibles and enforce them. That requires a lot of work and honestly sometime's it plays out poorly if your editor in chief has odd ideas, or isn't good with communication.

This is more or less the approach that Harmony Gold is taking with its new licensed material... everything goes through the franchise creative director for a consistency check, and only those things which have crossed his desk are considered part of the story.

2. The Star Trek method. I've lost track of the offspring of kirk, but it doesn't matter because in star trek, no book is canon, or rather, exists in its own universe.

Officially, Paramount considers all books, comics, etc. to be non-canon... like Robotech does with all the pre-reboot material. Though, like Trek, there are some licensed works that could be organized into some kind of coherent, self-contained timeline if someone in charge really cared to.

[mech798]

As for canon, myself, I stick to the original Japanese incarnation since there is more to work with, especially for Cho Jikuu Yosi Macross. Making stats for the VF-25's were fun and I had access to all published materials through "Macross Cronicle."

This is true-- for all that Macross seems to have very few Alien races beyond zentraedi/supervision fleet and things like the Varjara, you actually have a wider universe in it. Robotech, especially now that the'yve pretty much decided to ignore sentinels. Suffers from a major lack of scope-- you have a few people fighting, Earth, maybe the Hadronite world...and not much more.

To be honest, If I was doing robotech, I'd go and get the guys who did clone wars, not just for the look, but the scope-- one thing the CGI cartoon did very well was give a sense that this was an immense galaxy wide conflict, where more than a few major adventures never even had the main characters showing up because they were somewhere else doing something equally important.

[Rabid Southern Cross Fan]

This is true-- for all that Macross seems to have very few Alien races beyond zentraedi/supervision fleet and things like the Varjara, you actually have a wider universe in it. Robotech, especially now that the'yve pretty much decided to ignore sentinels. Suffers from a major lack of scope-- you have a few people fighting, Earth, maybe the Hadronite world...and not much more.

Actually, the traditional Sentinels races DID show up in Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles which is supposed to be canon.

[Alrik Vas]

Let's hope they do something with it. And develope all new mecha so they can actually make real new material without having their heads half on the chopping block.

[Devjannz]

I have never really cared one way or the other about what is canon and what isn't when it comes to retroactive changes. I use whatever works for me and what I like.