It's a Mythology, Not a Canon
                                     or
                  How To Stop Worrying And Love Transformers

                      copyright 2001 by Dave Van Domelen

     I've made comments on this subject before in other ways, but I figure
that with the arrival of the Robots in Disguise cartoon, it's time to put it
all together into an essay.
     First, let's get some definitions out of the way.

     Mythology - from the Greek mythologia, or collection of stories.
Generally understood to refer to a group of similar stories from a particular
culture.  A mythology consists of stories told by people.
     Canon - This one's a bit trickier, since it has many meanings, some
religious, some not.  But going back to the Greek, kanon, it is a measure of
things.  The canon determines what's "really" a part of some group of people
or ideas or works.  A canon is set by some authority, some "measuring" body.
Go to dictionary.com, and you'll see that the vast majority of definitions
for canon involve some variant of the idea "This authority tells everyone
else what's going on."

     A mythology, on its own, is very much ground-up, grass roots, populist.
It's just a collection of stories about a certain group of people, events or
concepts.  A canon may be imposed to say "This is part of X mythology, that
is part of Y mythology," but the canon is not necessary to the mythology.  To
have the canon, you need to have an authority with both the desire to measure
stories against a standard, and the means to make people accept those
decisions.

     So, do Transformers stories count as a mythology?  Sure.  They're a set
of stories with many common characters and themes, and they "belong" to a
group of people who keep them alive and pass them on.  In this sense, the
Transformers mythology belongs to the fans as much as it belongs to Hasbro
and Takara, because we all tell the stories.  The stories may differ from
teller to teller, just as I'm sure the Athenians had a different take on the
Pantheon than the Thracians did, way back when.  But while Zeus may have done
slightly different things, or even been called different names from city to
city, you could tell who they were talking about, and see parallels in your
own stories.
     Note that it is not necessary for there to be worship for a mythology to
exist.  There may be veneration without spiritual belief, after all.
Consider the mythology of the American West: most people raised in the United
States know stories about cowboys and settlers and so forth, stories that may
or may not reflect actual events.  They're myths, and we look to them for
inspiration even if we don't worship the people described in them.  Sure,
Optimus Prime isn't real, and people don't pray to him to intercede in their
lives.  But people, especially children, do look to him as a role model, as
an examplar of what a good person should try to be.
     Transformers stories, with all their varied details and timelines, are a
modern mythology.  You don't need to know whether the gun Megatron and the
T.rex Megatron and the six-changer Megatron are related to one another to see
that "Megatron" is a strong mythic presence.  Odin, Woden and Wotan may be
distinct individuals, but they represent many of the same things in myth, and
so do the many Megatrons.  There may not be 100% overlap, but there's some.

     Is there a Canon for Transformers?  Not really.  Various writers have
made efforts to tie things together here and there, referencing older stories
and so forth.  Just as later Roman storytellers referred to goddesses like
Lucinda and Hera when spinning tales about Juno.  But there's no canon,
because there's no one to enforce one.
     Or, perhaps, it's better to say that there are many little canons.
There's no shortage of people trying to make everything fit into one or two
neat timelines, and they can certainly try to convince people to accept this
canon of theirs.  Every Transformers MUSH has its own canon that it can
enforce on players.  Many major fan personalities have explicit or implicit
canons that get spread around simply by their popularity.
     But there is only one authority in this country that can set up a proper
canon and make it stick: Hasbro.  Everything they own as Intellectual
Property is canonical in the sense that it is official.  They have the
authority to say "stop that right now" to anyone telling Transformers stories
without their express written permission.  If there is to be a single
official timeline, a canon of stories that fit the timeline, then Hasbro is
the only authority that can make that decision.
     And they don't seem to want to.
     Hasbro is quite satisfied with the loose mythology that the official
stories provide.  A few links here and there to keep trademarks that might
otherwise expire, and they're happy.
     And why SHOULD they want a canon?  Transformers stories are a mess.
Even within a source, like the G1 cartoons, there's contradictions.  Then you
get into the comics, the toy techspecs, the Japanese and European lines...
it's a nightmare.  It would be costly to have someone maintain such a canon
and try to enforce it, and it would place unneeded limitations on the
company.  Even Paramount, which is pretty rabid about maintaining the
official canon, goes ahead and violates it when convenient.
     The only measuring rod that Hasbro needs to use when determining its
canon is "Did we authorize this, and thus, do we own it?"  The kind of
canonical "This story is in the official timeline, that one isn't" list fans
seem to want is never going to happen.

     So, I say this: don't sweat the details.  It's a rich, multi-layered
tapestry of a mythology.  Embrace the variety and fullness, don't try to
unravel the tapestry to get a single thread.  Optimus Prime is a concept, not
a biographical listing.  Cybertron is a state of mind, not an entry in the
astronomical catalogs.  Transformers are about CHANGING, not adhering to a
static pattern.