- OrderedComa
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- Noble Member
Posted by: paulmarv
I believe that posts like the one you quoted ought to be typed up in the most understandable and concise mode of the English language possible, and I just don't understand how you think my post used anything other than ordinary English. Please help me understand your accusation. Let's break down my post to see where you could possibly find legal jargon.
The only words perhaps not known by an average 1st grade student are "absolute", "objective", and "apparent". These words are simple, commonly used in everyday conversational dialogue, and have no more concise or more understandable synonyms that I can think of.
It's not the words you're using that make your posts hard to understand and sound like legal text, it's how you're using them and how you have strung them together to create your post. I have no trouble at all understanding the words you used at all, it's just the overall way you write your posts that gets a bit confusing.
You say that canon is whatever the writers say. I do not understand how you can entrust your beliefs to the whims of this mysterious group called "the writers". Are they God? I have written this post - am I not a writer? Aren't you a writer? Then are you saying that canon is whatever you want it to be?
You must at some point draw a line, for the sake of naming and words, that defines the identity of a group of things. Halo is certainly the story found in Bungie's Halo Trilogy - you can call Bungie the "writers" of that story if you really want. I suppose it makes no difference. But since you can call whatever you want by whatever name you want, your tolerance of anybody deemed "official" by 343 to inject their personal imagination into what you consider canon eliminates the meaning of the word "Halo" and turns it into a word that refers to a large, incoherent body. I am trying to say that there is a certain body that is the real Halo canon. I might not always be able to say surely what it is; I know for instances that the first three Halo games are part of the true canon, but it isn't always that clear. Point is, we can't just go running out choosing and picking what we feel and think is canon; it is already determined by the original meaning of the word "Halo". Sure, you could call something else "Halo", but it doesn't make the two things the same. See what I'm saying?
Yes, for all intents and purposes, the writers of any story series are "god" for their own universe, whatever the writer/creator of any given series says goes as long as they're still the owner of the IP. *sigh* You should know what I mean by "writers". But since you obviously can't divine my meaning I will spell it out for you. I am talking about anyone officially contracted by the owners of the Halo series, or those they have placed in charge of the series (this is the case with Microsoft, they own the Halo series, but 343i has been creative control of it they write the script for the games and hire various novelists to write a story set in the Halos universe), to write the script for a game, or book, comic, or short film.
I think I understand what you're saying now, but I can say that I don't agree with it at all, the canon is not some abstract thing that exists outside of anyone's control. The canon is whatever the people who have been given the power to craft the story by the owners of the IP decide it is. What you are saying is fundamentally the same as picking and choosing what you think is canon. Unless of course you don't call anything non-canon, then there's not really anything wrong with your method at all.