Term · Anime fandom
Canon
The word fandom uses to settle which parts of a story actually happened, and which parts a studio invented to stall.
In Otakana the clue reads: Officially part of the story, not invented later
- Type
- Term
- Series
- Anime fandom
- Letters
- 5 · Normal
Canon means the material the story's owner counts as real. In anime the line matters more than in most media, because a weekly series often catches up with the manga it is adapting and has to invent episodes to fill the gap. Those episodes are filler. They happen, the characters remember nothing afterwards, and the manga carries on as though the whole detour never occurred.
Naruto is the usual example. Long stretches of Shippuden are anime-original, and viewers pass around episode lists marking which ones can be skipped without losing the plot. Other shows solve the problem by inventing an ending instead. The 2003 Fullmetal Alchemist ran past its source and wrote its own finale, and the 2009 series went back to the manga and adapted the whole thing again from the start.
The word arrives from religion by way of Sherlock Holmes. Scholars used canon for the books a church accepted, and readers of Arthur Conan Doyle borrowed it, half joking, for the sixty stories and novels he wrote himself. Fandom now argues over degrees of it: manga canon, anime canon, film canon, and an author's stray remarks online, which fans call word of God and trust about as far as they feel like.
Spelling CANON
CANON has one N in the middle and one at the end. The trap is the artillery piece, CANNON, which doubles the first N and will not fit a five-tile row. Same sound, different word, different length. If you are hearing the word in your head rather than seeing it, count the N's: one, then one.