Teclo wrote:I don't really look at it that strictly. I see the manga as the source of it all and the anime of a generally pretty faithful adaptation. The movies I see as fun little side stories that don't really fit in. However dodgy GT often seems, it did get Toriyama's approval. Since it's all fiction, I can't really say "Well this DID happen, but this SO didn't!" It's like, in the LotR movies they removed Tom Bombadil - now that didn't make me think "Oh no, Tom doesn't exist!" but nor did it make me lose interest in the movie, thinking that the movie is "fake" - they're both real to me, insofar as fiction can be real.
Well, something being canon or not canon to something else doesn't exactly make it 'fake'. It's just a way of saying that they have no bearing on each other. For instance, you could say that the LotR books are canon to each other, and the LotR movies are canon to each other. But something that happens in the movie and only the movie doesn't have any bearing on the plot of the books.
Like you said, it's silly to say "this happened, but this didn't" when talking about fiction -- but only because there's no context in that statement. If instead you were to say, "this happened in the series, but didn't happen in the comics," then that's different, you know?
The way I see it is it only becomes important when trying to look at things in this way. It's mostly important to the writers themselves; to avoid causing plot holes or inconsistencies, you have to know in your head what happened within within the fiction and what didn't happen. And this kind of thing often comes up in our fan discussions too, when trying to figure out character motives from the author's point of view or something (so we wouldn't take into account something that wasn't written by the author, for instance).
Of course, there's nothing wrong with liking the whole franchise as a hole. There are plenty of Star Trek novels I've liked, even though I know that the events on them have no bearing on the TV series' or movies.
