Board Thread:Lore Discussion/@comment-9062114-20140217190926/@comment-24999978-20140805091950

73.35.221.142 wrote: Canon is what is confirmed in games, or in "officially" released materials. Released by the Developers, not by an independent contractor.

Since a significant amount of TES Lore is written by MK, his writing does have great weight... but a lot of people seem to deify him, and take anything he puts out there set in the TES universe as instant caonon. This is Inaccurate.

The Nu-Mantia intercepts, for example; In-game facts bear out and are in sync with them, so they can be treated as canonic. However,  C0DA takes things beyond the point where Bethesda Developers would ever sensibly go with the series. It is a fun story, and...certainly may in the future influence canon lore. But it is not canon.

MK's work is not "mere fanfiction" since a large portion of in-game lore is written by him, but anything he produces independently should rather be regarded as pre-development work, conceptual. It may or may not be correct as actual in-game lore.

If inormation from such material is used in the Wiki, it should be marked as potentially non-canonical. To be fair, MK still keeps in touch with some Bethesda developers (for obvious reasons) and some of Zenimax's, too, and they both enjoy C0DA. Besides, people often like to state that canon is only restricted to what is in the games, and the novels, but Bethesda have not exactly been vocal supporters of that, nor have they ever had any problems with lore being accepted from outside of the games. That is just a fan-made definition, ironicaly, due to the fact that a lot of series do that, but the influence on Bethesda, as you noted, is undeniable. Kirkbride came up with some rather major features in Skyrim, like the White-Gold Concordat, and the aesthetics of the province itself was inspired by the PGE (amongst other things like the Companions, Heimskr's speech from the Many Headed Talos, the Painted Cows being a referernce to the Seven Fights of the Aldudagga etc). Of course, we also have his in-game works from Morrowind and Oblivion (36 Lessons of Vivec, Mankar Camoran's Commentaries, the Arcturian Heresy). As the Prince-of-Plots well put it elsewhere, many fans do not care about what is 'canon', the quality of the lore is of the most importance, and fans are free to accept the lore they find interesting and engaging. A lot of the people who seem to be anti-Kirkbride generally have difficulty understanding of his works, and understandably decide to call out after hearing he is no longer an employee (which is common outside of TES, people disliking something because they do not understand it, just look at evolution and creationists). There is little reason, however, to ignore perfectly good and accepted lore just to stick to some dogmatic definition of canon.

Much of that, barring the first sentence, was not aimed at you, they were just my thoughts on the matter, and neither am I saying that MK has to be accepted by everyone. I agree that included works outside of the games should be labelled for those wanting to ignore them, but my point is more that people should stop being so damaging and divise amongst the lore community by arguing over canon and telling people what they cannot follow MK's work (when people were still arguing over TESO, in addition to MK, it sparked the so called 'canon wars', and it would be nice if the lore community did not degenerate into such a bickering state again, rather than working together to make the most of the lore).