MK Canonicity?

[MetaCthulhu]

We have other tags? I know about the OOG tag and about normal citation, but how many tags do we have? And I didn't mean to suggest we need banners, just maybe a separate tag for Kirkbride stuff...because there's a lot . It would also free up the OOG tag a bit for things like the fan interviews and what have you (just a thought). Speaking of which though, who else writes OOG stuff besides Kirkbride?

[Lady Nerevar]

But you see, that's my problem: it's only official if it's in the game and Bethesda says it's official.

And the problem with that is that Bethesda almost never says something is or isn't official They've gone so far as to invent non-linear time for TES solely to get out of providing one "canon" ending.

Can we have levels of canon? Star Wars and TV Tropes do, and it seems like a good system. Not only would it help a normal person sort through all of the lore, it would also raise Kirkbride's work above most other fanon (into what TV Tropes would call Word of St. Paul).

Star Wars and most properties are a lot cleaner than TES. SW was written by George Lucas, and then other writers wrote stuff about it. TES was written by dozens of people over twenty years, many of whom disagreed or were just plain unaware of each other's work, some of whom continued to write works that were and were not acknowledged in future officially published works. Even the works of fans appear in officially published works. I mean... you could distill all this down into levels, but those levels wouldn't be something that the community would ever agree on. From the very first days of the series developer's involvement in the community and the idea that TES is shaped by your own interpretations has been at the very center of the lore. A lot of that has gotten lost in the days past Morrowind, when developers stopped interacting with the community as much and a PR team was hired, but it didn't go away. I can't imagine us having this conversation in 2002, when people were begging devs for answers to lore questions.

Other lore heavy games, like Dragon Age, aren't typically as old, are built on a foundation of design documents rather than devs just making stuff up and trying to outdo eachother, and none that I know of have the unreliable narrator built in like TES does.

Personally, I think the system we have right now is ideal. Rather than getting thousands of people to agree on levels, we just cite our sources. "TESII says this," "ESO says this," "MK wrote a text that says that," "Schick commented this on the forums." Everyone is free to decide which one of those sources they prioritize, or which ones to ignore. But if we say that ESO is the most canon because it's the most recent, or that Schick's word isn't official until it's been published in a game, there's bound to be arguments.

Take for a humorous instance: If someone took over the Transformers series from Michael Bay, and Michael Bay never wrote/produced/directed another Transformers movie. He could go online and say things like, "Guys, Optimus Prime is actually Bumblebee's father, and Megatron's mother. It's what I planned from the beginning of the series." But if that never appears in the movies, can it be considered canon? Here we have the guy who started the series, developed, produced and directed four of the movies. Does his word count? If not, why not? And if not, why should MK's?

Michael Bay isn't the one that invented Transformers, though. He isn't even the one who wrote them. Michael Kirkbride is, on the other hand, one of the people who came up with much of the lore for TES. The Monomyth? Him. Varieties of Faith in the Empire? Him. The first PGE, which is what pulled TES from D&D setting into what we know today? A good chunk of that is his, too. If you don't think that makes him a worthy source after he stops being on the payroll, that's fine. But he's not really at all equivalent to a director who was chosen to reboot a decades old franchise.

Which they said when asked if one of MK's OOG works was canon.

In 2006. And, according to those words, things like the Hero's Guide to Tamriel aren't canon, and neither is Gstaff asking the development team questions and then posting the answers on the forums. That never appeared in the game, after all. There's also much more recent examples that contradict that statement. When asked if OOG texts were canon, Pete on Twitter answered with "it depends." Even more recently than that, Schick gave a beautiful speech about how it is players and their experiences that matter to TES, not concrete facts. I'll paste part of it here, but the whole thing is really worth reading.

...people have different viewpoints - these viewpoints sometimes contradict each other, and so sometimes we have players saying “alright, this person believes that, and that person believes this other thing, but which one’s the real thing?” ... This is a world of myth. This is a world where reality is actually changeable, where the Divines can change not only what happens going forward, but what has happened in the past. So, you know, the idea there is an objective reality behind all these different people’s opinions is not necessarily the case in the world of Tamriel. So listen to what all these different people have to say, make up your own mind, make up your own beliefs about what happened and you’re as liable - since you’re playing in their world and you’re playing a character in their world - what you think happened is as legitimate as what that NPC thinks.

Plus, the idea that it is money that dictates what we are and aren't allowed to talk about is just too god damn depressing for me.

Speaking of which though, who else writes OOG stuff besides Kirkbride?

I can't quite find an official word on what is encompassed in OOG on UESP. What I did find, though, is that UESP seems to include game data files (like those of Arena) that didn't end up appearing in game as OOG, in which case, we've got a couple dozen megabytes of pre-release data from ESO to file into that category, including a pretty thorough description of southern Alinor. Forum posts and appearances by Matt Grandstaff (on behalf of BGS) and Lawrence Schick (on behalf of ZOS) would also qualify. The Loremaster's Archive is almost entirely OOG, though UESP doesn't seem to class it as such.

And then we've got stuff like Men'Do's travel stories, entirely fan written, but published (and therefore officially endorsed) by Zenimax.

Those are just the recent ones. Used to be a lot more informal and a lot more varied, like I mentioned above. Check out TIL's Obscure Texts section and our Forum Archives for a comprehensive list.

[Rezalon]

Those are just the recent ones. Used to be a lot more informal and a lot more varied, like I mentioned above. Check out TIL's Obscure Texts section and our Forum Archives for a comprehensive list.

"I wish to spare my brain cells from reading MK's off-canon works" - BetaB17

In all seriousness though, even though I personally don't believe a single piece of MK's OOG works are canon in the slightest, even if they were, they are incredibly, to put it kindly, silly. To put it harshly, utter nonsense. From what I've read/heard of MK's works, there are Mer with TVs for heads, swearing (which I have no problem with IRL), and future space-robots. For me, those works completely ruin the immersive medieval/fantasy feel the TES franchise is based on. Adding sc-fi elements or modern day swearing/dialect breaks the immersion for me, ruins the "science" behind TES (because everyone is so reliant on magic, there is no need for technology in the TES universe to evolve), and seems like a sore loser's way of destroying a beautiful piece of work they helped create with a group of people, but left the group for whatever reason.

[Lady Nerevar]

MetaCthulu asked who wrote OOG works, I pointed him to a list of OOG works. He doesn't have to read any of them if he doesn't want to. I'm not sure what quoting some random third member has anything to do with it.

As for that description of MK's works, it seems like you've only read, what, C0DA and KINMUNE? The majority of works on his list have nothing to do with space or TVs, and are instead either things that already appear in game in some other form or that very well could.

[Minor Edits]

Okay, wall of text #2, because I'm an equal opportunity critic:

Spoiler:

Any lore editor worth their salt will freely admit that the UESP is constantly failing the reader. If it wasn't, there wouldn't be editors of the lore. TES deserves a wiki which is perfect, and we're not it. I'd argue we're still pretty damn awesome and are best suited for what we do, but in what is said and left unsaid, and in how it's all put together, there are errors and imperfections. Always will be. And I wish I had time to properly address the errors and omissions I can find (including ones I've created), but I'm too busy writing forum rants...

I believe the lore section is built upon several great utilitarian compromises which well serve fans who want to get a handle on the lore, but the policies are not always perfect, or perfectly followed. The site inevitably reflects the interests, interpretations, prejudices, and failings of the contributors, particularly those who have exhibited greater editorial participation. But it's virtually all done in good faith, by well-meaning volunteers. At some point, you have to make a decision, hope you didn't **** it up too much, and move on to the next one.

We could cherry pick specific faults all day. The pages of Pelinal and Akatosh both continue to bother me, and Morrowind's back path option is only one of several player choices which I do not believe the lore section addresses properly. But without a doubt in my mind, they are minor in the face of the UESP's greatest failure: accomodating community coverage and analysis of the lore. Looking back on the disputes which ultimately resulted in the UESP's reputation for an "orthodox" approach and which artificially diminished scope of the site as a whole, I think these schisms were largely avoidable. The most significant ones were well before my time, but it seems in retrospect that people have often been overly concerned with restraining the conduct of others. At critical junctures, members have been unwilling to reach some fairly easy compromises, and intolerant of some relatively insubstantial improprieties, to the ongoing detriment of the site.

Thankfully, the Imperial Library and some similar projects have been there to make up for the UESP's failures. Because as I've been trying to emphasize, while I believe it is necessary to distinguish the official material, world-building has always been a critical part of TES, and fans are often looking for more substantive guidance than the bare-bones information, the broadly common denominators we can generally agree upon, which is all the lore pages are theoretically able to provide.

I agree with some of Rezalon's concerns, but on the basic question of relevance to lore discussions, Kirkbride's work often, undeniably, deserves attention. The deliberately esoteric nature of much of his unofficial work results in inordinate amounts of attention and discussion, imo, but still, some attention is warranted, once you've started hitting the outer reaches of our knowledge. You can't really have a substantial conversation about the Towers without a reference or two to the Nu-Mantia Intercepts. When discussing the untimes or water as memory, it's difficult to ignore that these concepts was first explicitly disclosed in Kirkbride metalore. In a great assortment of metaphysical inquiries, it would be foolish in the end to totally disregard the unofficial input of the author of the Monomyth, Varieties of Faith, etc, even if you don't give those thoughts the same credence as what appeared in the final product(s). Sometimes, fans want to know about the histiography of the lore, not just the official material. And you can't fully understand the evolution of TES lore if you're not familiar with the influence Kirkbride has had upon it. I personally cannot ignore the fact that Kirkbride's official contributions are directly responsible for making me a diehard TES fan. As for his unofficial work, it does not have to be TES, per se, to be frequently brilliant.

[Lady Nerevar]

I don't know about you, Minor Edits, but personally it's exactly the fact that what we have is imperfect and incomplete that keeps me going. If TES ended tomorrow and we had all the info we'll ever have, the community would inevitably die. As it stands, TIL, UESP, and every other TES site has way more information coming out of ESO than we can handle.

I think that's the other purpose for the OOG texts, be they by MK or anyone else: to keep us going when there's no official new info to discuss.

[Pilaf The Defiler]

I miss the days when it wasn't JUST Michael posting the OOG stuff, though. I mean, yeah, I understand the ES guys are doing a ton of stuff that's technically OOG right now, but for some reason just because it's posted on a pretty HTML page with graphics instead of on a forum, people tend to have no problem counting it as "official canon" whereas they may dismiss old forum posts like this (not MK, by the way).

The notion that "only what's in the games is canon" is silly when you consider what's in the games consists entirely of accounts by unreliable narrators, whether it's from NPCs or the books written by in-universe authors. How can three books that tell entirely different versions of the same story all be true? They can't. That's the whole point of how ES Lore works. It has been for a very long time now. Even Daggerfall had that kind of vibe going for it. It's always been understood that anything you hear should be taken with a grain of salt, because every author has an agenda and a bias. The fact that Bethesda chose to include some of MK's works in their games doesn't magically mean those stories fit in Tamriel better than the ones they didn't include. There are a myriad of other reasons a work may be excluded. Either it doesn't fit the tone of what's being presented, or it contains subject matter that wouldn't make it past the censors, like the excluded passages from Song of Pelinal or the Reman saga. That doesn't mean it doesn't belong in-universe or that it's not part of Tamrielic lore, especially when you have characters in the game literally quoting from it.

[legoless]

Adding [...] modern day swearing/dialect breaks the immersion for me

I'd just like to add that vanilla TES is filled with Americanisms and modern slang. It's definitely immersion breaking, but that's probably because Tolkien-esque fantasy is traditionally associated with the Queen's English. I'd still rather have NPCs speaking as if they're from Maryland over Shakespearean London any day.

I miss the days when it wasn't JUST Michael posting the OOG stuff, though. I mean, yeah, I understand the ES guys are doing a ton of stuff that's technically OOG right now, but for some reason just because it's posted on a pretty HTML page with graphics instead of on a forum, people tend to have no problem counting it as "official canon" whereas they may dismiss old forum posts like this (not MK, by the way).

Personally, I find the use of forums as a publishing medium unforgivably lazy. In this regard, TIL is a godsend for its forum archives, because I wouldn't be caught dead referencing an actual forum post in any kind of formal writing.