Talk: Canon

Comics

Hi,

I noticed that to some users comic books, especially from Marvel, are not perceived to be on the same level of canon as other entries such as, say, Lin Carter's prose or Chaosium source books.

I definitelty understand those that would rather ignore it. But considering that nobody can claim to own a license and thus can not make a serious claim about canon I find it impossible to objectively define the level of canon of anything past Arkham House's Derleth era

But I also consider we could have the same arguments about many other IPs which repurposed the Mythos into their lore, like Doctor Who or Evil Dead for instance.

My suggestion would be to split the "Expanded Mythos" category by creating new Prefixes but all with the same yellow colour for the reader to be able to distinguish some stories they would consider personally consider canon. As a first draft

• COMIC: which would contain any stories explcitely in the Mythos, be it Marvel or Dc or straight lovecrftian horror stories like Alan Moore's
• RPG: mostly Chaosium's CoC rpg products, but anything involving tabletop or with branching storylines would fall under it
• EXP: the rest, including video games, audios, Doctor Who, straight modern lovecraftian prose

Again, this is just a suggestion and I would like to know if others would agree on it and If they perceive we should have even more "expanded mythos" prefixes. Should we do the same with Adjacent Mythos stories (aka Stories retconned into the Mythos) ? ...

I know that on Gamepedia, it is possible to chose what you want to be able to browse or not (for instance, on the Binding of Isaac wiki), I don't know if we can do it with the lovecraft wiki but that's a feature that I think could be usable in the future for those who want to pick and chose what appears when they browse the wikiRingoRoadagain (talk) 17:39, 12 May 2021 (UTC)

Well… It feels to me like the fundamental question is whether these discussions should be rooted in in-universe or out-of-universe concerns — but in either case, a separation by medium doesn't seem to cut it. Simply put, a Batman comic with Cthulhu registers as a different thing entirely from Boom! Studios' Fall of Cthulhu, and lumping them together in 'COMIC' would replicate the same issue. With this in mind:

The in-universe perspective is that there is a difference between comics (or RPGs, or whatever) that purport to add to the tapestry of the Cthulhu Mythos per se, and comics about preexisting fictional universes with well-established cosmologies — which may insert Cthulhu Mythos elements into their world, but in which it cannot seriously be contended that all the Mythos (or even all of Lovecraft's work) is "real". The same perspective might lead us to create separate areas of the Wiki for other "parallel universes" conceived of by their authors as such, like The Innsmouth Legacy or those CGI "Howard Lovecraft and the..." movies.

The OOU perspective is that the Wiki should clearly separate "stories from preexisting series which bring in cherry-picked Lovecraft elements" from "stories that derive primarily from the Cthulhu Mythos", regardless of whether the story being examined is meant to take place in the continuity of the canonical Mythos.

Doctor Who might be a good test case, because All-Consuming Fire, at least, is very much a straight Mythos work — it is the rare case of a story belonging to an unrelated brand which is really and seriously positing that the brand has, all along, existed within the conventional Mythos universe. So in the former scheme it wouldn't be treated any differently from any other EXP Mythos Work. But from a real-world perspective it's "a Doctor Who story with Mythos stuff in it", so it'd be treated quite differently in the second broad scheme. Scrooge MacDuck (talk) 20:03, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

I’ll stick a couple of cents in now because I’ve been thinking about it for a few days. I’ll only cover Ringo's post, because I’ll need another few days to think about Scrooge's.

For myself, I have no problem with comic book stories/characters being on this wiki. There are two issues with most of the comic book pages;

• 1) is that the bulk of them are very light on actual information regarding anything Lovecraftian. For the most part they consist of either a short bio of the character with something thrown in as an afterthought about how they connect to the topic, or nothing at all (for an extreme example of this, see Violet Liddle, if I was blind-tested which wiki it was posted on, I wouldn’t have guessed even closely to this one); *
• 2) is the way that many of them are written. The story arc descriptions feel as if they are addressed to users with a knowledge of not only the characters, but also the history of the immediate setting. As has been said before, this is not an extension of the Marvel wiki.

As for splitting the prefixes, I’m not sure that’s a good idea. Supplementary prefixes such as Comics, RPG, Thematically Linked, etc., I would support. TheSmoog78 (talk) 04:32, 14 May 2021 (UTC)

I think and this is my personal approach that a notable literary figure such as H.P. Lovecraft and for whom this wiki is named, has to be the primary focus. On the next level down from his biography and writings are those of his Circle and with whom he clearly very happily shared his original ideas and concepts -- and indeed borrowed from them. Down from there, the successors and inheritors, such as August Derleth. Anyone of normal reading comprehension level can see that as of that second generation Lovecraft the man and his works have already shifted to "Lovecraftian", meaning a deliberate pastiche. The stories begin to be "about" the "Mythos" rather than anything else. That has continued for decades.

As jarring as it is to many people whose first exposure to Lovecraft was say Chaosium, or even the comic books that ...borrow (usually very lazily and with poor or no research) from Lovecraft's orginal works, none of those works, comics in most cases least of all, are more than pastiches. There is a knowing self awareness, and a rather forced affectation, whenever the Mythos is shoehorned in. For example Marvel began by imitating bits and pieces of Lovecraft but they created their own original evil book, equivalents to Old Ones, and so on. Adding Mythos elements more or less directly was hack work by much later writers, and it is clearly at least partly done to commercialise within the Marvel product lines the popularity of the Mythos. It's the same in its terms as adding in CB Radio heroes during that fad. It's a form of pandering.

Unscholarly cheesecake comic books are even less connected to the Mythos and really are on the level of namechecking.

So for comics, or other similar pastiche tier works, I suggest we implement a clear and simple policy of calling a spade a spade. Evil Dead directly has its own version of the Necronomicon (Ex Mortis). Its primary link to Lovecraft and the Mythos is there. Evil Dead in any medium is a Mythos INSPIRED work.

Xena Comics only exist in the Lovecraft milieu due to a totally arbitrary crossover. They are a PASTICHE at best. They couldn't care less about expanding the Mythos and it is silly to dignify these ultimately disposable and forgotten products as being in any way on the level of either broad appeal ongoing comic book series loved by a wide audience or as being remotely on the same level as original literary works by authors actually trying to write coherent and focused new Mythos material.

Chaosium, in its way, is every bit as deviant from Lovecraft as was August Derleth. Chaosium and Derleth are FORKS or DEPARTURES from the original concepts and should be marked as such. That eliminates the confusion where we have so many pages where a Great Old One made up by someone on Deviant Art or a Chaosium adventure four people have read is treated apparently in all seriousness as being in any way as relevant, well formed, fundamental to the Mythos or the original stories as Yog Sothoth from the Dunwich Horror. Other DEPARTURES would definitely be the Lumley and Campbell works, Lumley more so since he added definite superheroics and so on which was an uneasy amalgam of Lovecraft and Howard.

The endless comic book pages on this site are very poor, because they largely and lazily duplicate the information from Marvel wikia etc. rather than ignoring most of that minutiae in favour of focusing on the direct Mythos links (if any). And I personally oppose any pages whose only connection is a six degrees of separation kind of thing. Better to have half as many pages on the wikia and lose all the children of Set. Worse, lazily adding Marvel versions then treating them as canon (they are not) ignores the actual stories and original work from Lovecraft and his Circle. It is clear to me many people adding those pages have never read most of the original Lovecraft and Circle stories. If they had, we would have a Set page focused on Set's actual Circle appearances and not warped into fitting a Marvel comic book set of stories which themselves don't make sense. All needless editing work.

I think as well with comics, since this is NOT a comic book wikia, they have no general place here except in the most general terms. Are we going to also allow movie buffs to add pages for every actor who every appeared in a Lovecraft film? Some of those actors have deliberately maintained a presence in Mythos ADJACENT works - Crampton, Combs - but most just did an acting job and moved on. Likewise comics. Throwaway stories that don't even bother to get the continuity of their own universe correct should be relegated far down any reliability list in favour of close reading of the scholarly works on Lovecraft. Otherwise an enormous amount of serious work on Lovecraft is lost or buried by the transitory dross of brand management companies.

A lot of this is coming from an uncritical approach to listing additions to the site. A work namechecks Lovecraft - oh in it goes, with no commentary or analysis of if it is even actually trying to maintain the claimed continuity of original Mythos pastiches or the original Lovecraft stories. Using that logic, why aren't the wildly inaccurate and bizarre Turkish and Japanese pastiches of Spider-Man listed on the Marvel wiki? Does DC wiki list every Batman parody? Any of them?

Until all the Lovecraft works, then the Circle works, then the derived works in the DEPARTURES by Derleth, Lumley & co. and Chaosium & co. are complete, it is not even worth adding 99% of the comic book entries to this site, if it ever will be. They add almost nothing even when relevant, and worse, are being used as an excuse to turn the site into a lazy secondhand listing of comic book entries from other wikis. And worse even than that, most of them are littered with grammatical and spelling mistakes whilst arrogating to some random comic book equal status (or even superior status) over the actual works of Lovecraft. Ridiculous. And destructive. This is the H.P. Lovecraft wiki and it has not yet even properly listed his actual canon (his own works) to anything like the detail of all these comic books. Let the brand management companies worry about their own brands (comics) and let's try and get Lovecraft, the Circle, the major DEPARTURES (Derleth and Chaosium) and the EODapa stuff completed.

In terms of categories, we need an overhaul to stop this from happening. And I suggest locking comic book pages and all sub pages. They aren't adding enough to justify drowning the site in them. And it will stop the "Set is connected to Thor according to the Marvel database so I am adding the Marvel version of Thor" stuff. There needs to be better literary analysis than that to justify inclusion. --User:Zombienomicon

Now… Hello! This is an interesting and stimulating mini-essay. I agree with a lot of it. The following message will focus on my areas of disagreement, and I will not mince words on those, but please don't take it as anything other than earnest intellectual engagement with a view that I respect, even if I disagree with it in parts.

Primarily, I would caution all who read this, in the strongest possible terms, against the kind of reasoning where the Wiki would cast judgement on the literary merits of a work over another. Certainly Lovecraft and his Circle should be given a kind of primacy on the Wiki, but this should only be because of their obvious historical, foundational importance to the Mythos in terms of literary history. Not out of a subjective belief that they have more "literary merit" than a pulpy comic story.

I have little time for such views at the best of times, but I think this sort of mindset is especially difficult to take seriously when it comes to the works of Lovecraft, because to put it simply: he was a pulp writer himself. Lovecraft in his own time was a writer of popular fiction, not highbrow literature; you will find these days scholars dissecting his work at great length — as well they should — but you will also find scholars dissecting Marvel Comics, or Doctor Who, or any number of later such works, in much the same way. To pretend that the works from Lovecraft's own time are somehow inherently worthier in absolute terms (as opposed to "insofar as they relate to the topic of a Wiki focused on Lovecraft") is perpetuating the kind of attitudes that, eighty years ago, would have been dismissing the Mythos itself as pulpy trash.

Beyond that… again we return to the question of whether this Wiki is

• A, a "Doylist", out-of-universe Wiki, focusing on the works of Lovecraft-the-man, and on those in direct conversation with that; or if it is,
• B, a "Watsonian", in-universe Wiki, focusing on the Cthulhu Mythos, the fictional universe and lore born primarily out of Lovecraft's work, but which has been added to by many other authors.

If we are ‘B’, then there is no reason that works chronologically distant from Lovecraft's should be treated any differently from those of his immediate Circle, so long as they are written in the same spirit of fitting in with the lore established by Lovecraft. "Pastiche" is the wrong framework in this Watsonian context: what we need to question is authorial intent on whether something is set in the ‘true’ Mythos universe, or some parallel alternative thereof. Something which rewrites the lore freely should be sequestered to a different area of the Wiki from the "main" pages, no matter when or by whom it was written; and vice-versa.

Certainly Lovecraft's own works should be given a kind of primacy, but beyond that, I think it is important that any later works deemed professional enough for coverage on the Wiki, and which make an earnest effort to be set in Lovecraft's world, be treated on an equal footing. The Cthulhu Mythos is huge and complicated and largely public-domain, and those are some of its best features; it is perfectly possible to be a fan of the Mythos while not caring much for many of the original Lovecraft tale, or even while thinking the man himself was morally repugnant.

To put it another way, there is "a canon" of Lovecraft in the sense of "a set of stories which are the backbone of the entire enterprise"; a literary sense of canon. But this has no bearing on what is and isn't "true" in a Sherlockian-game sense; about that, Lovecraft never made any pronouncement, and if he didn't, then it's not clear who would have the moral right to do so, particularly now that most core elements of the Mythos are public-domain. Hence, a Watsonian Wiki, if it's going to muddle in on 'canonicity' at all, should treat as "canonical secondary sources" (a notch below H.P. himself, but otherwise all equally "real") any professional works intended to be set in the Mythos, regardless of medium, authorship, or perceived quality.

It seems clear to me, from reading the way this canon page is currently set up, that the Wiki was created with the intent of being more Watsonian than Doylist, and therefore my conclusions are obvious.

I would agree on the six-steps-removed nonsense, however. In cases of crossovers between established properties and the Mythos, we should cover the crossover story as if it were any other Mythos-related work, and derive our pages solely from what can be gleaned from the crossover story itself, banishing from our minds all external knowledge of the characters involved. For example, The Doctor should be written entirely based on what is known about the Doctor from All-Consuming Fire (and any other Who/Mythos crossover); the page is some way towards achieving that already, but all those aliases in the infobox are not derived from the Mythos crossovers and are thus irrelevant. And the infobox image itself should probably depict the Seventh Doctor as seen on the cover of the novel itself, not this random promotional art showing several 21st-century Doctors who've never come anywhere near a Great Old One.

As for pages about the cast and crew of Lovecraft films, this is another matter entirely, but if we are a Watsonian Wiki then it stands to reason that we should principally focus on writers and other "creatives", rather than technical minutiae. So while not really related to "canon", it would make sense that we decide not to have pages about everyone who worked on every story covered by the Wiki, even stories held to be fully "canonical". Scrooge MacDuck (talk) 00:05, 15 May 2021 (UTC)

I think things need to be CLEARLY differentiated. And under no circumstances is it defensible to treat random comic books, particularly long forgotten ones, as remotely on a level with the original works of the author after whom the wikia is named. It's simply intellectually dishonest, at best. If this is some sort of puzzle, consult the well maintained Sherlock Holmes wikia for how different works are treated, or how manga are categorized on the Agatha Christie wikia. Not sure why something so simple and obvious becomes quantum physics on this wiki. --User:Zombienomicon

Again, I am not proposing that we treat vintage comics as equivalent to Lovecraft's stories in terms of "canonicity"; merely that we not act like one is superior to the other in the absolute. This is similar to how a dictionary of the English language is not going to have much German in it, but that doesn't mean it can, or should, justify that by saying that "English is a better language than German". The comics being "long-forgotten" doesn't factor into anything whatsoever.

I don't think the Agatha Christie and Holmes Wikis are the right example at all. Those are primarily Doylist Wikis, which document works of fiction from a real-world perspective; to them adaptation and sequels are behind-the-scenes trivia whose content is almost irrelevant. But as I previously highlighted, this Wiki isn't that. It appears to be a Wiki about the Cthulhu Mythos, which is an ever-expanding shared universes; Lovecraft was but its main founder (but wasn't even the only one; Chambers' King in Yellow is certainly as essential an element of it as many a creature devised by H.P. himself).

Though obviously the actual policies must be different, I would more recommend this Wiki take inspiration from certain policies of the Tardis Wiki. The Cthulhu Mythos is much more like the Doctor Who Universe than it is like the narrow canon of A.C. Doyle's Sherlock.

Oh, and incidentally, please sign your posts. Scrooge MacDuck (talk) 01:58, 15 May 2021 (UTC)

For the sake of clarity, the wiki aims for everything "lovecraftian" not just Lovecraft's writing. But yes, I certainly understand those who care only about Lovecraft and the Circle.

I thought the distinction between Lovecraft, the Circle, Derleth and then the rest (or "pastiche" some wuld consider) was already made clear on our pages thanks to the logo at the top of pages and the prefixes (blue = Lovecraft & all his correspondants; green = derleth & Arkham House under him; yellow = everything else using an element of the mythos; red= stories retconned into the mythos; purple = things influenced by the mythos but without using any of their name)

Compared to other large IPs, most if not all of Lovecraft's work is in the public domain while say, Star Wars or Batman need a license for the IP holder.RingoRoadagain (talk) 16:42, 15 May 2021 (UTC)