Sunrise's stance on canon

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doghunter1
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Sunrise's stance on canon

While Mark Simmons/toysdream has told us time and time again that "only filmed works are official," what does anyone think of this:

http://pastebin.com/GUy5j6h9
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HellCat
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Re: Sunrise's stance on canon

I think next time someone starts this discussion yet again, they should be shot with a canNon.
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doghunter1
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Re: Sunrise's stance on canon

HellCat wrote:I think next time someone starts this discussion yet again, they should be shot with a canNon.

I wasn't asking about canon and officiality, I was asking about the pastebin link?
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Re: Sunrise's stance on canon

HellCat wrote:I think next time someone starts this discussion yet again, they should be shot with a canNon.
Get a black powder type and load it up with grape or a good thick length of chain if you can't find/make enough canisters for it.
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Re: Sunrise's stance on canon

I swear Chris needs to enact a rule to never even mention canon or official as topics because they are pointless and always lead to the same conclusions. Canon as a term can go die in a freaking fire. So can official. I literally dislike both terms after so many dumb threads about them time after time.

What is the difference whether the pastebin is right and the previous thread is wrong or vice versa? Explain to me why it would really matter, if you would?

I, as a fan, can go "Hey, I like Rise from the Ashes from a story perspective. So to me? I think that's what happened." And then "Hey, I like Blue Destiny but I feel story-wise it doesn't fit in my head. I'll acknowledge it exists but ignore it when it comes to my idea of what happened." And then, if in animation they do Blue Destiny, then I guess I can rethink it so that it does fit, especially if other works start deriving directly from it. But as a non-animated side story I can choose whether it goes with my own head's version of events or not.

I can't really comment on the pastebin because I don't know where you got it nor can I translate for accuracy. I'm sure Mark can read it though and be a bit better with an answer.
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Re: Sunrise's stance on canon

I'm not trying to be confrontational here, but I feel like you've asked this question several times and keep bringing it up in the hopes that scrutinizing it from new angles or looking for minute loopholes will somehow produce the answer you want even after Mark's explanation has already sunk that ship.

It's really not that big of a deal. There's no great amazing NEED to have a defined Gundam timeline chiseled in stone like the UC Charter. Unlike the continuities of other big sci-fi franchises like Star Wars and Star Trek, Gundam has extremely few actual continuity conflicts, and those can be solved rather easily. Tomino's Gaia Gear novels assume that nothing big happens after CCA, but then he himself went and made F91 and Victory - so as per Sunrise's rule, the animated features are officially what happened, simple as that.
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Re: Sunrise's stance on canon

Ironically, the lockout canon creates is arguably why so many Gundam productions are now original universes. Canon is great for the dedicated fans but it becomes quite a lockout. Doctor Who has kept the same canon for 50 years but only because the nature of the show is non-linear and allows for it to mostly be a non issue. You don't have to have seen all the Classic era to grasp the show today, the formula allows for frequent jumping on points.
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teslashark
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Re: Sunrise's stance on canon

Turn A ate all of them. Seriously, up to everything before AGE. Call it the first canon.
The second, seperate canon is "our" world in BF... Not gonna explain.
And AGE is the possible only non-canon Gundam TV series.
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Re: Sunrise's stance on canon

doghunter1 wrote:
HellCat wrote:I think next time someone starts this discussion yet again, they should be shot with a canNon.

I wasn't asking about canon and officiality, I was asking about the pastebin link?
your pastebin link is an attempt to find some way to re-inject the idea of canon into a franchise that doesn't really use it.
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Re: Sunrise's stance on canon

If there were actual new information in that post, it would be worth reevaluating the question - I mean, this is kind of an important issue for fans, right? But those opening quotes, which sound so decisive, come from a couple of different sources taken out of context and mixed together (the fact there's no source attribution should be a warning there). Let me restore the original context and translate it more precisely.


The first and second quoted lines are from Yuka Minakawa's "The Encyclopedia of Gundam," published in 2007. This is a footnote to the U.C. timeline in that book, where Minakawa explains why some of the events in the timeline are marked with a cautionary asterisk (*).
年表に「*」を付けるのは、『機動戦士ガンダム公式百科事典 GUNDAM OFFICIALS U.C.0079〜0083』[皆川ゆか編著・講談社2001年刊]以来の手法。「公式」と銘打ってあることで誤解を呼びがちだが、載っていないもの=非公式といった考え方ではない (発刊後もガンダム世界は広がり続けている)公式・非公式というまっぷたつに分ける考え方でなく、 サンライズが許諾した書籍やゲーム、模型などはすべて公式とする。ただし、情報には優先順位があり、 白から限りなく黒に近いものに近づいていくという考え方だ(アニメ本編が白で、そこから「グレーゾーン」が広がっていく)。
 そこで、マンガや小説、ゲームでの展開を扱うときに、この年表では『*』を付け、本の中では「異説」とか「と思われる」「疑わしい」といった表現で、「準正史」扱いにしている(マンガ、小説のみに登場する機体などは、この本では扱わなかった。ゲーム化や模型化されたものを優先している)。
Translation:
The addition of "*" to the timeline is a method that began with "GUNDAM OFFICIALS U.C.0079~0083" (compiled by Yuka Minakawa, published 2001 by Kodansha). The designation "official" invites misunderstandings, but don't think that material it did not include is unofficial. (After its publication, the Gundam world has continued to expand.) The idea is not to divide things into official and unofficial, and books, games, and models approved by Sunrise are all assumed to be official. However, there is an order of priority to the information, and one could say that it ranges from white to very close to black. (The original anime being white, and from there it enters the "gray zone.")

Thus, when it comes to manga, novel, and game expansions, this timeline attaches an "*" and the book uses expressions such as "opinions differ," "it is thought," and "doubtful" when dealing with such "semi-official history." (Machines that appear only in manga and novels are not included in this book, and priority is given to those that have appeared in games and models.)
The main thing you'll notice here is that this is a description of Minakawa's stance, not Sunrise's. And even though Minakawa assumes that everything Sunrise approves is in some sense "official," the non-anime material is questionable "semi-official history" (準正史) that has to be branded with the asterisk of shame in Minakawa's own U.C. timelines.


The third quoted line is from an entirely different passage of text - the afterword of Minakawa's "Gundam Officials," published in 2001. Here's the full context for it.
このような状況に対して版権を所有するサンライズは、今日、「フィルムにおける表現を優先する」というスタンスを表明しています。ガンダムはそもそもフィルムとして始まったわけですし、サンライズはアニメーションの製作会社ですから、至極、当然な見解です。〈ガンダム世界〉の魅力は重量感のある設定ですが、これがフィルムの面白さを制限するようになっては製作会社としては本末転倒なわけです。
 単純に整合性を模索することは、ややもすれば過去に生み出されたものの否定という作業に陥ります。 曖昧であること、矛盾することを明確にしたいという欲望は無論、否定されるものではないでしょう。 しかし、これを個人や限られた人間で行うものなら、現在〈ガンダム世界〉に与えられている重量感は途端に失われてしまいます。
 重要なことは、現時点で表明されているサンライズのスタンスが、フィルム以外を否定するものではないということです。盆栽的に枝葉を切り揃えて形を整えるのではなく、フィルムという幹に沿ったシルエットこそが〈ガンダム世界〉である──サンライズのスタンスはそのように解釈できるでしょう。様々なメディア展開を行うガンダムですが、根本にフィルムを据えようというわけです。
 『GUNDAM OFFICIALS』はこのスタンスを補完する意図で執筆されました。
This is a long one, but I'll do the whole thing in the vain hope of laying this thing to rest. Translation:
Faced with this situation, the copyright-holder Sunrise currently expresses the stance that "depictions in film have priority." Since Gundam originally began in film, and Sunrise is an animation production company, this is a very reasonable point of view. Much of the charm of the "Gundam world" comes from its abundant setting, but it would be counterproductive for a production company to let that limit the enjoyment of the filmed works.

Simply by attempting to seek consistency, one is likely to end up rejecting previous created material. There is a natural desire to clarify things that are ambiguous or contradictory. However, even if a limited individual person were to do this, they would be losing the abundance of the present "Gundam world" in the process.

The important thing is that the stance currently expressed by Sunrise does not negate everything except film. Rather than being managed like a bonsai tree, where the side branches are trimmed off, the "Gundam world" has a silhouette that follows the trunk called film - perhaps Sunrise's stance could be interpreted in this way. This is because, although Gundam takes place in many media, its roots are grounded in film.

"Gundam Officials" was written with the intention of supplementing this stance.
So once again, this is Minakawa - not Sunrise - explaining the editorial stance of the "Gundam Officials" encyclopedia.


Blah, that was a big chunk of stuff and I have work to get back to. I'll let you consider this for yourselves in the meantime.

(Yes, I know there's a whole other chunk of Japanese text pasted in to the end of that message. I'll look at it later, but given that the poster starts out by taking a handful of unsourced lines out of context and misattributing them to Sunrise official policy, I'm not hopeful that this will support the poster's point either.)

-- Mark
Last edited by toysdream on Mon Nov 17, 2014 5:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.
toysdream
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Re: Sunrise's stance on canon

Okay, I took a look at the text dump at the end of that post. It's a grab-bag of material, mostly with no sourcing information (of course), but the first chunk is from Great Mechanics Vol.15, published in 2005.
では、ガンダムワールドにおける“オフィシャル”とは一体どう言った考えの基に決められるのだろうか?本誌連載でもおなじみの、サンライズ企画開発室室長・井上幸一氏にお話を伺った。

「まず最初に言っておかなければならないのが、ガンダムワールドにおける真のオフィシャル……いわゆるサンライズ公式設定と呼ばれるものは、厳密に言えば映像化されたもの及び映像作品の中に登場するものに限って認められると考えていいということです。

ただし、前述のようなものでなくても、ガンダムワールドを扱った書物やゲームなどに関してはサンライズが監修して出版許可を出していますから、そこに登場したオリジナル設定も広義的には準オフィシャルと言えるのかもしれません。

ガンダムの創造者、ある意味“神”である富野さんが作ったガンダムならばメディアを問わず、皆が正史と捉えますよね?

そもそもファーストガンダムだってTVシリーズと劇場版と小説版がそれぞれ違うんですから、“どれが本物?”と言われても全部富野さんが手掛けている訳で、本当のところを言うと困ってしまう訳です(苦笑)
Translation:
So, what is the basis for saying what's "official" in the Gundam world? This magazine asked the well-known Koichi Inoue, head of Sunrise's planning and development office.

"The first thing we have to say is that, where the Gundam world is concerned, the true official--that is, what could be called Sunrise official setting--should, strictly speaking, be thought of as limited to the films and to things that appear in the filmed works.

However, even if they're not like the above, Sunrise supervises and gives publishing permission to books and games that deal with the Gundam world. Thus, in a broader sense, the original setting that appears in these could be called semi-official.

Doesn't everyone treat the Gundam works produced by Mr. Tomino, the creator of Gundam and in a sense its 'god,' as being official history regardless of medium? From the beginning, even the TV series, movies, and novels of First Gundam all differed from each other. So even if you asked 'which is the real thing?' they were all supervised by Mr. Tomino, so it's hard to say which is the truth. (laughter)"

So, uh, the first item in the giant text dump flatly contradicts the premise of the post. And, unlike the sentence fragments quoted at the top of the post, this is actually an official Sunrise policy statement. No wonder the poster didn't bother translating it!

-- Mark
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Re: Sunrise's stance on canon

Thank you, Mark. I hope we can finally put this issue to rest with this and that people link to your posts.
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Re: Sunrise's stance on canon

Well, I'm glad Mark stepped in and did what I was going to do. I read the troll post on /m/ and was going to reply with more or less what Mark had to say on the subject, but as always he beat me to it.

Thanks, Mark! =)
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Re: Sunrise's stance on canon

Gundam: The first show that became its own genre.
Example: Dragonar and Cross Ange are Gundam shows without Gundam units.
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Re: Sunrise's stance on canon

We should be discussing more relevant things like the Tallgeese's Dobergun :)
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Re: Sunrise's stance on canon

balofo wrote:We should be discussing more relevant things like the Tallgeese's Dobergun :)
RAT'S AAASSSSSS!
No. They hand wavedIit as two guns with the same design.
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doghunter1
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Re: Sunrise's stance on canon

toysdream wrote:If there were actual new information in that post, it would be worth reevaluating the question - I mean, this is kind of an important issue for fans, right? But those opening quotes, which sound so decisive, come from a couple of different sources taken out of context and mixed together (the fact there's no source attribution should be a warning there). Let me restore the original context and translate it more precisely.


The first and second quoted lines are from Yuka Minakawa's "The Encyclopedia of Gundam," published in 2007. This is a footnote to the U.C. timeline in that book, where Minakawa explains why some of the events in the timeline are marked with a cautionary asterisk (*).
年表に「*」を付けるのは、『機動戦士ガンダム公式百科事典 GUNDAM OFFICIALS U.C.0079〜0083』[皆川ゆか編著・講談社2001年刊]以来の手法。「公式」と銘打ってあることで誤解を呼びがちだが、載っていないもの=非公式といった考え方ではない (発刊後もガンダム世界は広がり続けている)公式・非公式というまっぷたつに分ける考え方でなく、 サンライズが許諾した書籍やゲーム、模型などはすべて公式とする。ただし、情報には優先順位があり、 白から限りなく黒に近いものに近づいていくという考え方だ(アニメ本編が白で、そこから「グレーゾーン」が広がっていく)。
 そこで、マンガや小説、ゲームでの展開を扱うときに、この年表では『*』を付け、本の中では「異説」とか「と思われる」「疑わしい」といった表現で、「準正史」扱いにしている(マンガ、小説のみに登場する機体などは、この本では扱わなかった。ゲーム化や模型化されたものを優先している)。
Translation:
The addition of "*" to the timeline is a method that began with "GUNDAM OFFICIALS U.C.0079~0083" (compiled by Yuka Minakawa, published 2001 by Kodansha). The designation "official" invites misunderstandings, but don't think that material it did not include is unofficial. (After its publication, the Gundam world has continued to expand.) The idea is not to divide things into official and unofficial, and books, games, and models approved by Sunrise are all assumed to be official. However, there is an order of priority to the information, and one could say that it ranges from white to very close to black. (The original anime being white, and from there it enters the "gray zone.")

Thus, when it comes to manga, novel, and game expansions, this timeline attaches an "*" and the book uses expressions such as "opinions differ," "it is thought," and "doubtful" when dealing with such "semi-official history." (Machines that appear only in manga and novels are not included in this book, and priority is given to those that have appeared in games and models.)
The main thing you'll notice here is that this is a description of Minakawa's stance, not Sunrise's. And even though Minakawa assumes that everything Sunrise approves is in some sense "official," the non-anime material is questionable "semi-official history" (準正史) that has to be branded with the asterisk of shame in Minakawa's own U.C. timelines.


The third quoted line is from an entirely different passage of text - the afterword of Minakawa's "Gundam Officials," published in 2001. Here's the full context for it.
このような状況に対して版権を所有するサンライズは、今日、「フィルムにおける表現を優先する」というスタンスを表明しています。ガンダムはそもそもフィルムとして始まったわけですし、サンライズはアニメーションの製作会社ですから、至極、当然な見解です。〈ガンダム世界〉の魅力は重量感のある設定ですが、これがフィルムの面白さを制限するようになっては製作会社としては本末転倒なわけです。
 単純に整合性を模索することは、ややもすれば過去に生み出されたものの否定という作業に陥ります。 曖昧であること、矛盾することを明確にしたいという欲望は無論、否定されるものではないでしょう。 しかし、これを個人や限られた人間で行うものなら、現在〈ガンダム世界〉に与えられている重量感は途端に失われてしまいます。
 重要なことは、現時点で表明されているサンライズのスタンスが、フィルム以外を否定するものではないということです。盆栽的に枝葉を切り揃えて形を整えるのではなく、フィルムという幹に沿ったシルエットこそが〈ガンダム世界〉である──サンライズのスタンスはそのように解釈できるでしょう。様々なメディア展開を行うガンダムですが、根本にフィルムを据えようというわけです。
 『GUNDAM OFFICIALS』はこのスタンスを補完する意図で執筆されました。
This is a long one, but I'll do the whole thing in the vain hope of laying this thing to rest. Translation:
Faced with this situation, the copyright-holder Sunrise currently expresses the stance that "depictions in film have priority." Since Gundam originally began in film, and Sunrise is an animation production company, this is a very reasonable point of view. Much of the charm of the "Gundam world" comes from its abundant setting, but it would be counterproductive for a production company to let that limit the enjoyment of the filmed works.

Simply by attempting to seek consistency, one is likely to end up rejecting previous created material. There is a natural desire to clarify things that are ambiguous or contradictory. However, even if a limited individual person were to do this, they would be losing the abundance of the present "Gundam world" in the process.

The important thing is that the stance currently expressed by Sunrise does not negate everything except film. Rather than being managed like a bonsai tree, where the side branches are trimmed off, the "Gundam world" has a silhouette that follows the trunk called film - perhaps Sunrise's stance could be interpreted in this way. This is because, although Gundam takes place in many media, its roots are grounded in film.

"Gundam Officials" was written with the intention of supplementing this stance.
So once again, this is Minakawa - not Sunrise - explaining the editorial stance of the "Gundam Officials" encyclopedia.


Blah, that was a big chunk of stuff and I have work to get back to. I'll let you consider this for yourselves in the meantime.

(Yes, I know there's a whole other chunk of Japanese text pasted in to the end of that message. I'll look at it later, but given that the poster starts out by taking a handful of unsourced lines out of context and misattributing them to Sunrise official policy, I'm not hopeful that this will support the poster's point either.)

-- Mark
But one thing is this: Was the poster at least right with "seishi" and "koushiki?"
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Re: Sunrise's stance on canon

You quoted that whole enormous block of text for no reason, and then asked such a vague and unclear question at the end...

"Right" in what sense? Yes, they're actual Japanese words. The elaborate rules the poster came up with based on these terms seem to be basically made up, though. "Everything is official unless Sunrise makes an animation that specifically says it's not! Wheeeee!"

There's actually a Wikipedia article on the concept of "official history" (正史). The corresponding Japanese Wikipedia page says the same thing - this means the "official version" of historical facts approved by a government. In Minakawa's books, this reflects the fact that the timeline is supposed to be written within the U.C. world and approved by the Federation government. If you wanted to use it in a fictional sense, it's more like "continuity" than "canon" - that is, the current official view of what did and didn't happen.

As a favor, please could you notch back on quoting every single line of other people's posts, and concentrate on writing clearer questions?

-- Mark
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Re: Sunrise's stance on canon

No offense, doghunter, but why do you have this almost OCD-like fixation with UC canon? Why is it so important? You've been going at it for so long, and how many more threads will it take for you to finally get what people have been telling you each time?
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Re: Sunrise's stance on canon

toysdream wrote:You quoted that whole enormous block of text for no reason, and then asked such a vague and unclear question at the end...

"Right" in what sense? Yes, they're actual Japanese words. The elaborate rules the poster came up with based on these terms seem to be basically made up, though. "Everything is official unless Sunrise makes an animation that specifically says it's not! Wheeeee!"

There's actually a Wikipedia article on the concept of "official history" (正史). The corresponding Japanese Wikipedia page says the same thing - this means the "official version" of historical facts approved by a government. In Minakawa's books, this reflects the fact that the timeline is supposed to be written within the U.C. world and approved by the Federation government. If you wanted to use it in a fictional sense, it's more like "continuity" than "canon" - that is, the current official view of what did and didn't happen.

As a favor, please could you notch back on quoting every single line of other people's posts, and concentrate on writing clearer questions?

-- Mark
When I meant by "right," I was referring to whether or not this excerpt from the post is what you've been telling us all this time:

First of all, there is no word for "canon" in Japanese. There are two separate terms, however, referring to similar concepts. These are:

"Koushiki" 公式 (official) which means
1) It's officially sanctioned
2) The background information (like mech specs and the existence of MSV units, but NOT the actual events of the story) is officially considered part of the Gundam universe

"Seishi" 正史 ("correct history") which means
1) The actual events of the story are officially considered part of the Gundam universe

Film has PRIORITY over other sources, so if something contradicts film then the film is right and the something is wrong. Even among film there are different levels of how much priority the information is; TV shows having the most, side stuff like Evolve animations which might contradict them having far less.

Something can be koushiki while NOT seishi. For example, the Turn A novels and Zeta movies and Evolve and such are koushiki which means the SETTING STUFF (like, say, Zeta being able to use that beam confuse thing) is part of the Gundam universe, but the STORIES (Kamille not going full retard at the end of Zeta, Hamaan and Axis leaving the Earth sphere) aren't.

Side materials are considered to be both koushiki and seishi unless openly contradicted by animated sources. The Unicorn novels were both until it was animated, at which point it became only koushiki (the Unicorn's abilities are official) but not seishi (the story of the novels is no longer what actually happened in the established universe). Another odd example is Senkou no Hathaway- The setting is clearly officially approved (we see Gustafs and funnel missiles in Unicorn) but the story obviously can't be connected to the established Gundam universe (as it's a sequel to the CCA NOVEL and a key element of the story is Hathaway's guilt over killing Quess himself, which he did not do in the film continuity).
Now, as for how the paste was messed up in the first, here's the answer I got from a question I asked:

OP originally posted the Japanese text and sources first in the seed troll thread and then quoted and translated the important parts. The pastebin is presumably the other way round because when he posted the Japanese text first in the seed thread people threw fits.
Proof? Go here, here, here, here, and here.
Chris wrote:
No offense, doghunter, but why do you have this almost OCD-like fixation with UC canon? Why is it so important? You've been going at it for so long, and how many more threads will it take for you to finally get what people have been telling you each time?
Not just UC. More or less bits like Kira surviving Athrun using the Aegis' self-destruct sequence to destroy Strike and After Colony's expanded universe. If making headcanon is the solution to all of this, so be it.
Locked