Pixar Cars Wiki:Canonicity

The canon of a fictional universe refers to a system of generally accepted events and specifications, which serve to determine which representations of the world and its chronology are considered the "true" way of things. Unlike some franchises, Cars does not have a consistent nor established canon that has ever been officially recognized by Disney and/or Pixar. Apart from loose connections that may link certain installments together, one will often find discrepancies in how elements are portrayed – a quality evident in not only "expanded universe" material like video games, books, etc, but even between each of the main films. This characteristic is extremely important to the function of our wiki, because of the way it impacts how we present our information.

We use an out-of-universe style of writing to document in-universe events. Compared to something like Wookieepedia, we treat individual works independently when detailing their portrayal of the Cars universe: You'll often see a section beginning along the lines of "In (installment title)...," followed by a re-telling of plot events. Because the creators do not observe an official canon, we as fans face a dilemma - In theory, we must be the ones to discern what is "canon" or not. However, there's simply no reasonable, unbiased criteria that we can use to determine why any particular installment should be "weighted" highly versus another in terms of its canonicity.

However, we do still encourage the documentation of discrepancies or differences between installments. It's sort of a matter of how. For example, let's take THQ's Cars game trilogy, of Cars: The Videogame, Cars: Mater-National Championship, and Cars: Race-O-Rama – after the second installment changed and expanded upon the world map of its predecessor, the next then largely reversed those decisions and restored the first game's map layout. When making note of this, it's not the best practice to say something like, "The Ornament Valley Airport was demolished prior to Race-O-Rama, and all new roads were re-paved to how they originally were." This is considered speculative writing, a practice that interferes with the wiki's mission to present information factually. But that doesn't mean the differences can't be noted: In fact, they should be! A perhaps more fitting way to accomplish this while keeping consistent with the wiki's goals, could be "In Cars: Race-O-Rama, many of the changes from Cars: Mater-National are not present, and the overworld instead closely resembles the original appearance as seen in Cars: The Video Game." This would allow us to service everyone who enjoys speculating on the overall Cars canon and lore (who doesn't?), without committing to that insurmountable picking and choosing of "canon" events.

It probably goes without saying that fanon or any unofficial content not created by Pixar is not allowed here (unless in extremely rare cases, where the creators themselves may choose to acknowledge or reference a parody or fan creation in a meaningful capacity).

See also

• Coverage