Fallout Wiki:The Vault Academy 2.0/TVA/Canon

Canon is a tricky subject when dealing with the Fallout series. This resource is intended to help clarify what it is in the context of the Fallout Wiki and what it isn't.

What is it?[]

The idea of canon in fiction is not new. Broadly speaking, it refers to elements of the franchise that are part of the main continuity, i.e. happened within the world crafted by the present owner of the Fallout intellectual property, Bethesda Softworks.

Conversely, non-canon refers to elements that are not part of the continuity, for a variety of reasons: They were cut, belonged to a game that was aborted before release, or in rare cases, were declared as "never having happened".

What is the Fallout canon?[]

The Fallout canon was never publicly defined. During the Interplay years, the franchise was still in its infancy, with its fundamental rules and principles still in flux, allowing for the inclusion of real-world weapons or a multitude of pop-cultural references in Fallout 2. Some creative decisions were even dictated by simple economic concerns, such as the reuse of ghouls and supermutants in the sequel in order to release it within a year.

Since acquiring the IP, Bethesda Game Studios has concretized many of the principles of the setting and its retrofuturistic aesthetic, but has refrained from publicly stating, precisely, what is canon and what is not. The few statements on the subject provided guidelines, rather than hard rules, the most important of which is the fact that the games always come first. That includes:

• Fallout
• Fallout 2
• Fallout 3 and its add-ons
• Fallout: New Vegas and its add-ons
• Fallout 4 and its add-ons
• Fallout 76 and subsequent updates

What's non-canon?[]

You may notice that two games are missing. That's because Todd Howard clarified, that they did not happen for the purposes of Bethesda Game Studios:

• Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel
• Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel

To elaborate: Non-canon always had a specific meaning on the meaning, referring to things we know are outside the main continuity. This includes cancelled games, Tactics and Brotherhood of Steel, ejected from the continuity, and anything related to them.

While ideas from these games can be reintroduced, these are considered to be new creations, rather than sudden bolting on of games that didn't previously happen in the continuity.

Examples of this include the Chicago detachment of the Brotherhood, clearly inspired by the Eastern Brotherhood, and the Legion from Fallout: New Vegas being recycled from its Van Buren counterpart.

So what about everything else?[]

Everything else is basically a supplementary source, providing additional context and explanation, but unless it makes into a released game, it's subject to change or removal. As the guiding principle for the Fallout Wiki is comprehensivess, and to that end we group all non-game sources into a separate category, simply canned Non-game sources.

This is intended to allow the reader to quickly identify the source of a given information and whether it's part of the games, and thus a permanent part of the continuity, or outside of them and may be changed in the future.

(ATX and Creation Club?)

Referencing[]

How to mark sources? Simple, when editing in source mode, you can just add a group code:

Replace <ref> at the beginning of the reference with:

<ref group="Non-game" />

To display under the references section of an article, add the following under the section:

<references group="Non-game" />

So it appears like:

==References==
{{References}}
'''Non-game'''
<references group="Non-game" />

All lessons