What is it?

Where did it come from?

Should new Transformers stories abide by it?

How does something become 'canon'?

I was recently discussing a few things with Gok in the Vector Sigma / Transmetal Driver thread (it's a good read, have a look) and Gok continually pulled me up on this little issue of Canon, as he saw me ideas as acting outside the boundaries of what is considered 'official' Transformers fact.

The reason I raise it is that I'm writing somewhat of a Transformers Comic, with a storyline that goes right back to the start with Unicron and Primus, spans the Great War, the Pax Cybertronia and the Beast Wars, then culminates with the change into TransTech (which we never saw because Beast Machines sucked too much [so I've worked the story so BM never happens])

But in my research, no official storyline details what happens between the signing of the Pax Cybertronia and the start of the Beast Wars, nor do they seem to cover the end of the Great War itself.

I realise that anything I write isn't Canon becuase it's not an officially licenced, Hasbro approved Transformers stuff. But neither was the 1st draft of the 1st episode of Transformers: Prime. Nor was the 1st draft of the 1st new movie. Only when it got the tick of approval did they become 'canon' and yet they started out not being so.

And it's not like these stories stuck to the original format of what 'canon' has seen before, they wrote their own universe.

I'm writing a story that rolls in and out of what we would consider G1/BW canon, yet that in itself is a very blurry thing.

Which G1? US TV series, US Comics, UK Comics, Japanese Comics?

Which BW? Just the TV series? Or do you include BWII and Neo? And Furman's Gathering and Ascending?

All of which contradict themselves and have no clear throughline to an understandable end, and yet they are held in reverence, in such high regard because they are 'canon'.

Why doesn't someone go back and do One. When I say One, I mean one story that makes sense from beginning to end.

Draw on whichever stories go together.

RID doesn't go with BW, just as BM doesn't go with ... anything.

But just make one work, instead of continually making up new stuff.

Thats what I'm trying to do anyway.

I have to kill Primus after the Beast Wars and replace him with the Vok to do so, but it works, just ask me But apparently Primus is already dead is one universe, but not in another, but I can't kill him because Unicron already did and I'd be contradicting canon, yet he's still alive so I can. Confused? Me too.

Get one Universe right, then you can go off and have all your weird offshoots. So long as there is one that makes sense from beginning to end, not countless unfinished stories.

I don't think I've made my point very well but I feel better to have got some of it off my chest.

Discuss.