Okay, I stayed up extra extra late on a scary hotel floor to answer this thread, so you all have to appreciate it. There's a pizza (crust?) next to my head and I don't know where it came from.
Clearly, I'm missing a great deal of the canon -- heavens know I'd never even heard of the Confederation Handbook before I started seeing it referenced here, for instance -- and so, a lot of it looks disjointed and perhaps contradictory. Possibly some of it has to do with the fact that I simply didn't enjoy large portions of the non-game canon, and part of it had to do with those feelings of disconnection; that it felt like many of these things were being developed independently and only later married up down the road.
This isn't what a canon is for. The Wing Commander 'canon' is those products which *future* products should consider 'real'. It has no bearing on which you enjoy or which you do or do not choose to personally accept. If the Wing Commander movie is 'canonical' then whoever writes Wing Commander 7 should try to avoid contradicting it. It isn't a gauge of quality or popularity... it's not even a promise that the movie itself isn't contradictory to other elements of the canon in some way... it is just saying that it must be considered in the future.
It means essentially nothing to you, the fan - nor can you change it. We refer to the Wing Commander canon in our continuity discussions as it is (obviously) a reasonable baseline to adopt for polite argument... fan projects generally utilize it because they wish for their output to fall into line with future official products. Beyond that, it is nothing to you. If you don't like the movie, then... so what? Don't talk about it, or argue about why you don't like it, or eat a marshmellow, or whatever you like. Keep on keeping on - don't rage against an unrelated term you've mistaken for praise.
I may be in the minority but I would love a remake of Wing Commander 1 (Console marketplaces/ Steam maybe?). Minor additional scenes, and nods to these ties in continuinty in such a remake would be awesome.
Lets be clear, Wing Commander did exactly this in 1994 - Super Wing Commander is a remake of the original game plus extra cutscenes and new material to 'better' tie it into Wing Commander 2 (or possibly a proposed *Super* Wing Commander 2...). I think it worked fairly well, common complaints about the game aside... and if you haven't tracked down SWC, you have all the time in the world.
I think a(nother) remake of Wing Commander I would work well in that it would introduce the modern audience to the basic conflict and setting of the Wing Commander universe. Sad as it may seem, the basic makeup of Wing Commander's conflict are no longer common 'gamer' knowledge. I don't know if it has to be a shot-for-shot remake of Wing Commander I, though - a loose adaptation set around the same time in the war might work just as well. I think there is some benefit (and risk) to just selling 'Wing Commander' instead of 'Wing Commander: Fancy Subtitle And Maybe a Number' next.
Is now a bad time to admit I liked some of what was done with the Star Wars special editions?
It put Star Wars back in theaters and introduced another generation of kids to the films - and then lead to a massive resurgence for the brand. The wags can debate exactly how much unblurring the underneath of Luke's landspeeder ruined their childhoods, but on some grand level it did do exactly what I'd like to see the next Wing title accomplish.
The game with the biggest contradictions in it's story line is Alone in the Dark. They didn't exactly explain why Edward Carnnaby was in the 30s and all of the sudden here he is looking younger than before, and in 2001?
In Galaga you're part of the elite Galaga Corps and also you're fighting evil Galagas. I point this out not only because it's really funny that there's a Galaga continuity, but also because it says something about us: for the vast, vast, vast majority of people absolutely none of this matters.
So far, in my long experience with the internet, Wing Commander has the most concise "canon" out there. Once you start doing that whole "levels of canon" like Star Wars does, you've lost.
I'm going to disagree with that first part - I don't think Wing Commander is or is not especially good with continuity. It's roughly the same as any fictional setting... prone to exciting details and simple mistakes which come about for a variety of reasons. Nothing is perfect, not even our favorite. The key here is in accepting *that* fact and not in deciding that we're just going to close our eyes and ignore particular novels or trading cards or websites.
Follows: some specific things from Farbourne's post.
This is because the games IMPLY one thing, that is often in contradiction with other things, or make a statement that, taken only within the context of the game, indicates one thing that is at odds with others. A good example of this is the recent discussion about Maniac's and Blair's first meeting. In WC1 Maniac greets Blair with a "Please to meet you!" with no other context about his background aside from the Claw Marks manual, which says nothing about him knowing Bluehair. Normally, when someone says "pleased to meet you" to someone else, this strongly implies that they are meeting them for the first time, unless there is obvious context that they are saying it ironically. However, that context is absent in the game, and it is only apparent after reading the strategy guide or watching Academy (neither of which I have unfortunately had the opportunity to do).
I just want to be clear - a lot of these things aren't *intentional*, they're (possibly) examples of retroactive continuity (or worse). As with all things, the specific examples vary in importance and history, and I'll note a bit on each of the three. Suffice it to say that in most cases you aren't *missing* some secret planned story... it was (or in at least one of these cases wasn't) added later.
... except for possibly the first one! My understanding is that the intention was always for Maniac and {Blair} to be friendly rivals. It's not specifically stated in the original game, but Claw Marks hints at it with its mention that Maniac is a new Academy graduate (like, presumably, Player Character).
The idea that he's being "ironic" is something fans came up with as a (fun) explanation. That certainly wasn't the intent at the time - they just needed to introduce the characters to the players, the majority of whom didn't care about Claw Marks and *certainly* didn't care about any planned future continuity.
There are many other examples...people familiar with WC1 know Bossman dies during the Sivar Eshrad (sp?) incident, yet the movie states that Bossman died before Blair joined the Tiger's Claw. In the canon, Bossman was not really dead at that point, only captured or something (I understand from LOAF, although how he managed to get captured and his fighter somehow made it back intact to the Tiger's Claw I still need explained), but there is no context in either the game or the movie to clarify this...so it's a glaring contradiction to people who have only played the game and seen the movie.
This one isn't actually a retroactive continuity - it's a 'mistake' that fans have adapted into the continuity. The 'taken prisoner' bit isn't referenced anywhere - the true story may (or may not) be establishd canonically at some point in the future. As it stands we simply have two stories of his death in the canon and we know that there's some way to rationalize them.
We should talk about WC1 a bit, though - it once had a complex status in the continuity. For several years it was suggested internally that the character in the original Wing Commander was *not* Blair and was in fact some other pilot (Carl LaFong? Armstrong? Hotshot?). If you look at the original pitch for Wing Commander Academy (TV), it sets up Blair as a new pilot arriving after The Secret Missions. He shows up in this respect in Freedom Flight, even... it's not really until Kilrathi Saga that we're *absolutely* sure WC1-Player is Maverick. The movie script was written in this same era, and may well have been another attempt to "introduce" WC2/3/4 Blair into the series in a particular and new way. Just like Academy and other stories it evolved a lot from that first draft... but you can still appreciate where it came from.
As you casually touched on, there's obviously something we don't really know about the Bossman story - how *do* you recover a space fighter belonging to a dead pilot in (apparently) perfect condition? Though it's an awkward mistake for longtime fans, it's also a fascinating future point to write a story around... which is one of those things that such a canon is good for.
A third example is the Pilgrim wars...the movie implies that these were a major, major event in Terran history, with a lot of lingering prejudice and ill will, and yet they are never, ever mentioned directly or implied at indirectly (unless you count distrust of Border Worlders in WC4...but I thought the Border Worlders and the Pilgrims were distinct) in the span of six whole games. I think such contradictions are what the original poster is driving at, and I can certainly see his point of view. Remember, hardcore fans, what the universe looks like to those of us who haven't read (or helped to write) every scrap of material that is out there...
Okay, this one is a plain and simple retcon - a war we hadn't heard of before was added earlier in the timeline. This is a standard and acceptable thing for future histories. It's not a *contradiction* because there's nothing to contradict - it's filling in a blank space in the notepad. Note that the Border Worlds themselves were such a retcon. Wing Commander 4 tells us they were resposible for holding back the Kilrathi... but they weren't created as a concept before that game.
(Also, in a kind of funny coincidence the 'Pilgrims' were actually the 'Border Worlders' in the 1996 version of the movie outline...)
