Entry tags:
Formal Logic, Canon, and what we bring to the table
This is a post entirely about asking what is "canon" (and to what extent such an assessement is possible) and only uses Fire Emblem for examples. If this doesn't interest you, skip over.
What is entirely, unsubjectively, indisputably canonical?
If we take the games at their word -- that is, that they are an accurate representation of what happens in canon1 -- we can only agree that certain parts of canon say certain things. Here are some examples:
1a. The epilogue of Radiant Dawn states, "Once he saw stability returned, Ike left on a journey to lands still unknown. He was never seen again."
1b. Oscar testifies in his supports with Janaff that he is 24 years old.
1c. Beowulf testifies in his converastion with Lachesis that he knows Eltoshan.
1d. Lekain testifies that one who has signed a Blood Pact in blood can never break the terms of the pact.
Yeah, this is a pretty boring list. And one might claim that it's pedantic, too. I mean, why can't we just say,
2A. Once he saw stability returned, Ike left on a journey to lands still unknown. He was never seen again.
2B. Oscar is 24 years old.
2C. Beowulf knows Eltoshan.
2D. One who has signed a Blood Pact in blood can never break the terms of the pact.
(For those of you pedants who like to keep track of details, I'm using smallcaps for assertions and bigcaps for conclusions -- the use of these terms does not imply they are true.)
... Well, because then we start saying things that can't be true. Suppose I had these statements,
1e. In Part 4, the current Daein pact-holder engages in combat against forces apparently serving the Begnion Senate.
1f. Lekain orders the Pelleas to mobilize the Daein army to oppose the Laguz Alliance.
And then took the conditionals and other ambiguities out of them,
2E. Daein fights the forces of the Begnion Senate, which is not helpful to the Begnion Senate.
2F. Lekain orders Daein to fight on behalf of Begnion Senate and do no less than help the Begnion Senate.
And then from 2D and 2F, if they could be taken as absolutes, you would conclude that Daein would never ever fight against the Begnion Senate, which stares the absolute truth of 2E right in the face.
But they can't be taken as absolutes. Because the 2's don't follow perfectly from the 1's. In every case, you need something more.
What else do we need?
Well, for starters, how do we get from 1a to 2A? In this case, we would need a statement like,
3a. Ike's epilogue in Radiant Dawn is telling the truth.
(Which we might get from some broader and more powerful principle like,
4a. The omniscient narrator always tells the truth.)
Likewise for 2B-D to be true, we would need something like
3b. Oscar is telling the truth2 when he says he is 24 years old.
3c. Beowulf is telling the truth when he says he knows Eltoshan.
3d. Lekain is telling the truth when he says that one who signs a Blood Pact in blood can never break the terms of the pact.
And in each case, 1 and 3 together will give you 2. If Oscar is telling the truth when he says he is 24 years old, and Oscar says he is 24 years old, then he is 24 years old. If Lekain says "Numida is a butt-kisser" and he is telling the truth, then Numida is a butt-kisser. Of course, these conclusions are only as valid as the assertions you make. How would you conclude that Beowulf is being truthful? Or, let me ask you, how do people assess Beowulf's truthfulness? Their argument might follow like this:
"Beowulf is lying because poor mercenaries from Conote aren't likely to know Augustrian kings, and also the game never gives you any other hints that it actually happened."
A super-pedantic breakdown might look like this:
10a. Beowulf is a poor mercenary of Conote and Eltoshan is the king of Augustria.
10b. It is unlikely that poor mercenaries of Conote know Augustrian kings.
10c. Unlikely things are false unless more than one testimony exists.
10d. 1c is the only testimony about the likelihood that Beowulf knew Eltoshan.
(1c. Beowulf testifies in his converastion with Lachesis that he knows Eltoshan.)
10a + 10b = 10A. "It is unlikely that Beowulf knows Eltoshan."
10A + 10c = 10B. "Beowulf does not know Eltoshan unless more than one testimony exists.
10B + 10d = 10C. "Beowulf does not know Eltoshan."
10C + 1c = 10D. "Beowulf testifies in his converastion with Lachesis that he knows Eltoshan and Beowulf does not know Eltoshan." IE "Beowulf is not telling the truth."4
(Those of you who actually have taken formal logic/philosophy/math may recognize that the way these statements feed into each other is more nuanced than just THIS PLUS THIS, but this is overly technical already -- the important thing is that each result comes from those pieces parts.)
So, since this conclusion relies crucially5 on 10a-d, we need all of 10a-d to be true in order to make this conclusion. Except that only 10d follows directly from canon!
Well, maybe you'd say, 10a more or less comes from canon -- Beowulf joins you for money so he's a mercenary by definition. He says he's from Conote and I guess he looks scruffy and hangs out with sketchy people so he's poor, and, uh, various characters act and speak like Eltoshan is the king of Augustria so I ... guess... it's... true?
Okay seriously, where are we going to get 10a-c?
Not from canon.
Where are we getting this?
From "common sense." But common sense is the least common when you need it the most. So let's not call it that.
We can classify these things we take for granted as what we believe about the way the Fire Emblem universe works. In this example, I'm gonna call this "Beohater001's FE Realism". So, Beohater001's FE Realism apparently includes ideas ranging from "people do not lie about their place of origin" and "scruffy people with sketchy friends are poor"6 to the fairly reasonable "Unlikely things are false unless more than one testimony exists" and "X is a king if other people act as if X is a king."
Okay, but why does Beohater001 believe these things are true in the FE universe?
Beats me. Ask Beohater0017.
But in general, it should go without saying that different people come to believe different things about their fictional universes. There are a few different steps along the way. Sometimes we talk about theories in the context of what the developers intended, and in those contexts our beliefs about developer intent weigh in. Some of us are scientists and we believe that simpler explanations are better. But no matter what the middling steps are, in the end it goes back to what we believe about reality.
Not Fire Emblem reality. Just reality.
And that's where things really get out of hand.
But what's so contentious about reality?
Take, for example, the relatively simple idea that "Oscar is telling Janaff the truth when he says that he is 24 years old." How would you argue that?
Well, you could say that you believe that Oscar has no reason to lie about it, so he doesn't. That logic instantly tells me quite a few things about what you believe:8
11a. Oscar is an honest person.
11b. Honest people do not lie about things without significant reason.
11c. Canon always gives evidence for significant anythings.
(11d. Canon has not given evidence for any reason that would cause Oscar to lie about his age.)
(Note that I would have to nudge you further for how you got to 11a, and we could really clarify "reason" here, but in the interest of space let's not pursue these trains of thought.)
And so this may seem perfectly fine to you, but what if someone disagreed with one of 11a-c? Suppose someone replaced 11b with,
12b. All people may lie about trivial facts like height and age to make themselves look better.
All of a sudden, it doesn't really matter that canon doesn't tell us that Oscar's lying. Oscar's a person, and all people may lie about their age, and so this pessimist might think that Oscar being 24 is not a foregone conclusion.8
Ah, and then we come to irreconcilable territory.
"But how can you say that?" boggles someone who hasn't read this post. "Seriously, why would he be lying about that? That makes no sense."
"That makes no sense!" = Your reality is different from mine.9
I guess this is philosophically interesting, but does it really matter?
Quite. Witness this exemplary exchange from GameFAQs: (These peoples are given numbers for names (30 and 40) to make naming their statements easier)
30: If Ike somehow appeared in Awakening and told everyone that Paris is indeed his direct descendant people would still think of ways for Ike to be gay.
40: i just want to let [30] know that gay people breed as well. not just breeders hold the key to passing their genes
30: Explain how Ike could possibly posses the ability to breed with another male without modern science.
40: He had sex with a random woman because he wanted kids? There were gay people around in the olden days who had to get marry and stuff.
[At this point 30 does not deign to address 40.]
Addressing only the crux of this argument, 30's paradigm might speculatively be,
30A. Direct descendents in fiction necessarily continue a line originating from something gay people don't do. (I don't know if 30 considers this to be romantic or sexual or whatever.)
While 40's paradigm seems to contain on the contrary,
40A. People and characters in fiction only require heterosexual sex to be conceived.
40B. Gay people/characters may have heterosexual sex for the purposes of bearing children.
Both seem to admit,
35A. Paris is Ike's direct descendent. (A corruption of the canonical axiom, "Paris testifies that he is a sort-of descendent of Ike")
and yet drew entirely different conclusions from this exchange. To 30, whether it's because of conventions in fiction or beliefs about the world, babies are proof of heterosexuality. 40 sees it quite differently -- proof of heterosexual sex is inadequate to disprove gayness. Although 30 expresses the opinion that the other side denies canon to make their case, in fact both of them agree about the facts related to canon. It is the entire context, their deeper beliefs about what to expect from fiction and people -- reality! -- that cause them to disagree.11
But if we can't even agree on really basic things like Oscar's age, what can we even say about canon?
Well, as is true of all things, there is really quite little you could say that would elicit unanimous agreement from everyone, though I believe most people believe axioms like 11b'9,c that lead up to believing in Oscar's age. But once you step away from that, even into relatively inconsequential territory like whether Beowulf was a liar, you get tangled up in furious arguments about what appears to be a simple matter of a fictional character's reputation -- but really reflect (albeit indirectly!) less simple facts about what you believe about the world, and in turn, what kind of person you are.
I do want to say that one might take this to a social-justice extreme and say that hating Ike/Soren necessarily means that somewhere deep inside you believe something gross about gay people, but the logic alone12 doesn't show that. Maybe they merely believe that
41a. Liking a ship necessarily requires liking its fans.
41b. I don't like Ike/Soren fans.
41a + 41b = 41C. I don't like Ike/Soren.
Or hell, maybe you even think Ike/Soren isn't canon, because
41d. Canon is what inevitably happens over the course of every playthrough to any arbitrary "good end".
41e. Very little evidence for Ike/Soren happens inevitably over the course of every playthrough. (Technically something you get after you define "very little," etc.)
41d + 41e = 41F. Ike/Soren isn't canon.
This kind of thing is a very long debate and I addressed it more specifically over here.
But here's the important point -- even if, even if some person started with blatantly problematic beliefs, there is actually nothing intrinsically wrong with their understanding of canon!
50A. Characters in fiction are gay if and only if this is explicitly stated in canon.
50b. There is no explicit statement in canon that Ike is gay.
50A + 50b = 50C. Ike isn't gay.
Yeah, sure, Person 50 is pretty egregiously heteronormative, but there is actually nothing factually wrong with their understanding of canon -- 50b is one of those rare things that is canonically true. The difference is that those of us who aren't quite so heteronormative don't have anything like 50a that would make us believe something because of 50b. We don't actually care about 50b. 50b has no bearing on the situation for us. But 50b is true, and we can agree on that.
okay okay but what CAN we even SAY about canon?
Yeah, about that. Because we can say nothing with canon by itself, we need to bring in our realities. Beohater001 exists in his own reality and I exist in mine, and when people agree it means only that their realities happen to overlap in happy ways. I believe it is no coincidence that the DW crowd, which agrees on many issues of FE and what is "canon", also fundamentally agrees in many ways about social topics, literature, and human nature.
What can you even say about canon other than the bleedingly obvious? This is to ask, how much can you actually take for granted outside of canon itself? To answer this question is to know one's audience.
To convince anyone else13 requires changing their beliefs about the world.
1 Not everyone agrees on this. Aside from a minority of people who claim that the games "got it wrong," one could also argue (as![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mark_asphodel has) that certain games could be viewed as biased retellings of what "actually happened" in that Fire Emblem universe. This makes a great deal of sense in some ways (especially re: Jugdral) and should not be discounted as a general approach. However, this essay is meant to address what we take for granted as truths that others may not, and common opinion is widely in favor of accepting that canon tells us the truth.
3 Notice that "is not lying" is more ambiguous; in common usage, "lying" requires that the speaker know that what they are saying is untrue, among other such details of usage. It does not cover cases where a speaker reports something to the best of his/her knowledge, but their knowledge is incorrect.
4 This last step follows from the definition of telling the truth, which I decided was generally overly pedantic to include.
5 It is possible to make wrong assertions and have a sound conclusion, so long as the conclusion does not rely on those wrong assertions. This is pretty important. Someone's entire argument is not automatically invalid in the presence of a single flaw. For example, if I can prove that 90A is true because 90b + 90c = 90A and also 90d + 90e = 90A, then if it turns out that 90b is false but the others hold up, then 90A is still true because of the latter train of reasoning. We are trained to require an abundance of evidence, but when you start from the bottom, logic really only needs one path. An abundance of evidence is for science, because they start from the top and are trying to work their way toward the bottom and they want to make sure they're coming up with the right path. When you start from the things that you know absolutely to be true and work up, having multiple arguments merely means that your conclusion might still hold even if some of those things are false. As an example, "All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrates is mortal," is a valid conclusion here, but even supposing that Socrates were found to not be human at all, there is still a logical chain that reaches the same conclusion: "Socrates died. Therefore Socrates is mortal."
6 This also tacitly assumes that people who are presently poor have always been poor. And no, I don't think this is a good way to determine whether someone is poor. For what it's worth, Beowulf's starting gold is the same amount as Alec and Noishe's.
7 There isn't actually a Beohater001.
8 Strictly speaking, there are other combinations of beliefs leading to the same result and explanation, but for the purposes of this discussion let's say this is your train of thought.
9 Oscar's honesty about his age can be salvaged for pessimists if one replaces 11a. with "11b'. Oscar is an honest character," and pessimists do not believe the same of (honest) fictional characters. This is not an ad hoc distinction; many people do apply different standards and beliefs to fictional characters than to real people.
10 My favorite snooty meta in-joke.
11 Also, while I'm on the subject, I'd like to note that a surprising proportion of the GameFAQs populace argues that Ike being gay is the more likely theory. Heartening!
12 I do want to say, however, that observations about large-scale fandom trends are evidence of a different kind for prevelant stigmas, but this is not pertinent to this essay.
13 Unless they are legitimately mistaken on who-said-what-where, which does happen, but generally does not remain the crux of the debate.
Incidentally, real, interesting disputes over what is canon-canon as in who-said-what-where do occur, usually while someone is trying to meta and we believe that the omniscient narrator/developers' notes are truthful. Hello, Jugdral.
What is entirely, unsubjectively, indisputably canonical?
If we take the games at their word -- that is, that they are an accurate representation of what happens in canon1 -- we can only agree that certain parts of canon say certain things. Here are some examples:
1a. The epilogue of Radiant Dawn states, "Once he saw stability returned, Ike left on a journey to lands still unknown. He was never seen again."
1b. Oscar testifies in his supports with Janaff that he is 24 years old.
1c. Beowulf testifies in his converastion with Lachesis that he knows Eltoshan.
1d. Lekain testifies that one who has signed a Blood Pact in blood can never break the terms of the pact.
Yeah, this is a pretty boring list. And one might claim that it's pedantic, too. I mean, why can't we just say,
2A. Once he saw stability returned, Ike left on a journey to lands still unknown. He was never seen again.
2B. Oscar is 24 years old.
2C. Beowulf knows Eltoshan.
2D. One who has signed a Blood Pact in blood can never break the terms of the pact.
(For those of you pedants who like to keep track of details, I'm using smallcaps for assertions and bigcaps for conclusions -- the use of these terms does not imply they are true.)
... Well, because then we start saying things that can't be true. Suppose I had these statements,
1e. In Part 4, the current Daein pact-holder engages in combat against forces apparently serving the Begnion Senate.
1f. Lekain orders the Pelleas to mobilize the Daein army to oppose the Laguz Alliance.
And then took the conditionals and other ambiguities out of them,
2E. Daein fights the forces of the Begnion Senate, which is not helpful to the Begnion Senate.
2F. Lekain orders Daein to fight on behalf of Begnion Senate and do no less than help the Begnion Senate.
And then from 2D and 2F, if they could be taken as absolutes, you would conclude that Daein would never ever fight against the Begnion Senate, which stares the absolute truth of 2E right in the face.
But they can't be taken as absolutes. Because the 2's don't follow perfectly from the 1's. In every case, you need something more.
What else do we need?
Well, for starters, how do we get from 1a to 2A? In this case, we would need a statement like,
3a. Ike's epilogue in Radiant Dawn is telling the truth.
(Which we might get from some broader and more powerful principle like,
4a. The omniscient narrator always tells the truth.)
Likewise for 2B-D to be true, we would need something like
3b. Oscar is telling the truth2 when he says he is 24 years old.
3c. Beowulf is telling the truth when he says he knows Eltoshan.
3d. Lekain is telling the truth when he says that one who signs a Blood Pact in blood can never break the terms of the pact.
And in each case, 1 and 3 together will give you 2. If Oscar is telling the truth when he says he is 24 years old, and Oscar says he is 24 years old, then he is 24 years old. If Lekain says "Numida is a butt-kisser" and he is telling the truth, then Numida is a butt-kisser. Of course, these conclusions are only as valid as the assertions you make. How would you conclude that Beowulf is being truthful? Or, let me ask you, how do people assess Beowulf's truthfulness? Their argument might follow like this:
"Beowulf is lying because poor mercenaries from Conote aren't likely to know Augustrian kings, and also the game never gives you any other hints that it actually happened."
A super-pedantic breakdown might look like this:
10a. Beowulf is a poor mercenary of Conote and Eltoshan is the king of Augustria.
10b. It is unlikely that poor mercenaries of Conote know Augustrian kings.
10c. Unlikely things are false unless more than one testimony exists.
10d. 1c is the only testimony about the likelihood that Beowulf knew Eltoshan.
(1c. Beowulf testifies in his converastion with Lachesis that he knows Eltoshan.)
10a + 10b = 10A. "It is unlikely that Beowulf knows Eltoshan."
10A + 10c = 10B. "Beowulf does not know Eltoshan unless more than one testimony exists.
10B + 10d = 10C. "Beowulf does not know Eltoshan."
10C + 1c = 10D. "Beowulf testifies in his converastion with Lachesis that he knows Eltoshan and Beowulf does not know Eltoshan." IE "Beowulf is not telling the truth."4
(Those of you who actually have taken formal logic/philosophy/math may recognize that the way these statements feed into each other is more nuanced than just THIS PLUS THIS, but this is overly technical already -- the important thing is that each result comes from those pieces parts.)
So, since this conclusion relies crucially5 on 10a-d, we need all of 10a-d to be true in order to make this conclusion. Except that only 10d follows directly from canon!
Well, maybe you'd say, 10a more or less comes from canon -- Beowulf joins you for money so he's a mercenary by definition. He says he's from Conote and I guess he looks scruffy and hangs out with sketchy people so he's poor, and, uh, various characters act and speak like Eltoshan is the king of Augustria so I ... guess... it's... true?
Okay seriously, where are we going to get 10a-c?
Not from canon.
Where are we getting this?
From "common sense." But common sense is the least common when you need it the most. So let's not call it that.
We can classify these things we take for granted as what we believe about the way the Fire Emblem universe works. In this example, I'm gonna call this "Beohater001's FE Realism". So, Beohater001's FE Realism apparently includes ideas ranging from "people do not lie about their place of origin" and "scruffy people with sketchy friends are poor"6 to the fairly reasonable "Unlikely things are false unless more than one testimony exists" and "X is a king if other people act as if X is a king."
Okay, but why does Beohater001 believe these things are true in the FE universe?
Beats me. Ask Beohater0017.
But in general, it should go without saying that different people come to believe different things about their fictional universes. There are a few different steps along the way. Sometimes we talk about theories in the context of what the developers intended, and in those contexts our beliefs about developer intent weigh in. Some of us are scientists and we believe that simpler explanations are better. But no matter what the middling steps are, in the end it goes back to what we believe about reality.
Not Fire Emblem reality. Just reality.
And that's where things really get out of hand.
But what's so contentious about reality?
Take, for example, the relatively simple idea that "Oscar is telling Janaff the truth when he says that he is 24 years old." How would you argue that?
Well, you could say that you believe that Oscar has no reason to lie about it, so he doesn't. That logic instantly tells me quite a few things about what you believe:8
11a. Oscar is an honest person.
11b. Honest people do not lie about things without significant reason.
11c. Canon always gives evidence for significant anythings.
(11d. Canon has not given evidence for any reason that would cause Oscar to lie about his age.)
(Note that I would have to nudge you further for how you got to 11a, and we could really clarify "reason" here, but in the interest of space let's not pursue these trains of thought.)
And so this may seem perfectly fine to you, but what if someone disagreed with one of 11a-c? Suppose someone replaced 11b with,
12b. All people may lie about trivial facts like height and age to make themselves look better.
All of a sudden, it doesn't really matter that canon doesn't tell us that Oscar's lying. Oscar's a person, and all people may lie about their age, and so this pessimist might think that Oscar being 24 is not a foregone conclusion.8
Ah, and then we come to irreconcilable territory.
"But how can you say that?" boggles someone who hasn't read this post. "Seriously, why would he be lying about that? That makes no sense."
"That makes no sense!" = Your reality is different from mine.9
I guess this is philosophically interesting, but does it really matter?
Quite. Witness this exemplary exchange from GameFAQs: (These peoples are given numbers for names (30 and 40) to make naming their statements easier)
30: If Ike somehow appeared in Awakening and told everyone that Paris is indeed his direct descendant people would still think of ways for Ike to be gay.
40: i just want to let [30] know that gay people breed as well. not just breeders hold the key to passing their genes
30: Explain how Ike could possibly posses the ability to breed with another male without modern science.
40: He had sex with a random woman because he wanted kids? There were gay people around in the olden days who had to get marry and stuff.
[At this point 30 does not deign to address 40.]
Addressing only the crux of this argument, 30's paradigm might speculatively be,
30A. Direct descendents in fiction necessarily continue a line originating from something gay people don't do. (I don't know if 30 considers this to be romantic or sexual or whatever.)
While 40's paradigm seems to contain on the contrary,
40A. People and characters in fiction only require heterosexual sex to be conceived.
40B. Gay people/characters may have heterosexual sex for the purposes of bearing children.
Both seem to admit,
35A. Paris is Ike's direct descendent. (A corruption of the canonical axiom, "Paris testifies that he is a sort-of descendent of Ike")
and yet drew entirely different conclusions from this exchange. To 30, whether it's because of conventions in fiction or beliefs about the world, babies are proof of heterosexuality. 40 sees it quite differently -- proof of heterosexual sex is inadequate to disprove gayness. Although 30 expresses the opinion that the other side denies canon to make their case, in fact both of them agree about the facts related to canon. It is the entire context, their deeper beliefs about what to expect from fiction and people -- reality! -- that cause them to disagree.11
But if we can't even agree on really basic things like Oscar's age, what can we even say about canon?
Well, as is true of all things, there is really quite little you could say that would elicit unanimous agreement from everyone, though I believe most people believe axioms like 11b'9,c that lead up to believing in Oscar's age. But once you step away from that, even into relatively inconsequential territory like whether Beowulf was a liar, you get tangled up in furious arguments about what appears to be a simple matter of a fictional character's reputation -- but really reflect (albeit indirectly!) less simple facts about what you believe about the world, and in turn, what kind of person you are.
I do want to say that one might take this to a social-justice extreme and say that hating Ike/Soren necessarily means that somewhere deep inside you believe something gross about gay people, but the logic alone12 doesn't show that. Maybe they merely believe that
41a. Liking a ship necessarily requires liking its fans.
41b. I don't like Ike/Soren fans.
41a + 41b = 41C. I don't like Ike/Soren.
Or hell, maybe you even think Ike/Soren isn't canon, because
41d. Canon is what inevitably happens over the course of every playthrough to any arbitrary "good end".
41e. Very little evidence for Ike/Soren happens inevitably over the course of every playthrough. (Technically something you get after you define "very little," etc.)
41d + 41e = 41F. Ike/Soren isn't canon.
This kind of thing is a very long debate and I addressed it more specifically over here.
But here's the important point -- even if, even if some person started with blatantly problematic beliefs, there is actually nothing intrinsically wrong with their understanding of canon!
50A. Characters in fiction are gay if and only if this is explicitly stated in canon.
50b. There is no explicit statement in canon that Ike is gay.
50A + 50b = 50C. Ike isn't gay.
Yeah, sure, Person 50 is pretty egregiously heteronormative, but there is actually nothing factually wrong with their understanding of canon -- 50b is one of those rare things that is canonically true. The difference is that those of us who aren't quite so heteronormative don't have anything like 50a that would make us believe something because of 50b. We don't actually care about 50b. 50b has no bearing on the situation for us. But 50b is true, and we can agree on that.
okay okay but what CAN we even SAY about canon?
Yeah, about that. Because we can say nothing with canon by itself, we need to bring in our realities. Beohater001 exists in his own reality and I exist in mine, and when people agree it means only that their realities happen to overlap in happy ways. I believe it is no coincidence that the DW crowd, which agrees on many issues of FE and what is "canon", also fundamentally agrees in many ways about social topics, literature, and human nature.
What can you even say about canon other than the bleedingly obvious? This is to ask, how much can you actually take for granted outside of canon itself? To answer this question is to know one's audience.
To convince anyone else13 requires changing their beliefs about the world.
1 Not everyone agrees on this. Aside from a minority of people who claim that the games "got it wrong," one could also argue (as
mark_asphodel has) that certain games could be viewed as biased retellings of what "actually happened" in that Fire Emblem universe. This makes a great deal of sense in some ways (especially re: Jugdral) and should not be discounted as a general approach. However, this essay is meant to address what we take for granted as truths that others may not, and common opinion is widely in favor of accepting that canon tells us the truth.3 Notice that "is not lying" is more ambiguous; in common usage, "lying" requires that the speaker know that what they are saying is untrue, among other such details of usage. It does not cover cases where a speaker reports something to the best of his/her knowledge, but their knowledge is incorrect.
4 This last step follows from the definition of telling the truth, which I decided was generally overly pedantic to include.
5 It is possible to make wrong assertions and have a sound conclusion, so long as the conclusion does not rely on those wrong assertions. This is pretty important. Someone's entire argument is not automatically invalid in the presence of a single flaw. For example, if I can prove that 90A is true because 90b + 90c = 90A and also 90d + 90e = 90A, then if it turns out that 90b is false but the others hold up, then 90A is still true because of the latter train of reasoning. We are trained to require an abundance of evidence, but when you start from the bottom, logic really only needs one path. An abundance of evidence is for science, because they start from the top and are trying to work their way toward the bottom and they want to make sure they're coming up with the right path. When you start from the things that you know absolutely to be true and work up, having multiple arguments merely means that your conclusion might still hold even if some of those things are false. As an example, "All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrates is mortal," is a valid conclusion here, but even supposing that Socrates were found to not be human at all, there is still a logical chain that reaches the same conclusion: "Socrates died. Therefore Socrates is mortal."
6 This also tacitly assumes that people who are presently poor have always been poor. And no, I don't think this is a good way to determine whether someone is poor. For what it's worth, Beowulf's starting gold is the same amount as Alec and Noishe's.
7 There isn't actually a Beohater001.
8 Strictly speaking, there are other combinations of beliefs leading to the same result and explanation, but for the purposes of this discussion let's say this is your train of thought.
9 Oscar's honesty about his age can be salvaged for pessimists if one replaces 11a. with "11b'. Oscar is an honest character," and pessimists do not believe the same of (honest) fictional characters. This is not an ad hoc distinction; many people do apply different standards and beliefs to fictional characters than to real people.
10 My favorite snooty meta in-joke.
11 Also, while I'm on the subject, I'd like to note that a surprising proportion of the GameFAQs populace argues that Ike being gay is the more likely theory. Heartening!
12 I do want to say, however, that observations about large-scale fandom trends are evidence of a different kind for prevelant stigmas, but this is not pertinent to this essay.
13 Unless they are legitimately mistaken on who-said-what-where, which does happen, but generally does not remain the crux of the debate.
Incidentally, real, interesting disputes over what is canon-canon as in who-said-what-where do occur, usually while someone is trying to meta and we believe that the omniscient narrator/developers' notes are truthful. Hello, Jugdral.
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I'm sorry I don't have much else to say ^^;;;
*thumbs up*
*scurries off*
edit wait I just noticed the cut text on this post
ilu<3
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