What Should Count as Canon?

I am a nerd.  Like, let's get that out of the way.  There's really no way to package someone who regularly makes spreadsheets for projects without getting paid as anything other than a nerd.  I am an awards nerd, a Lost nerd, a Harry Potter nerd, a political nerd, and about a dozen other levels of nerdy that can be applied to me with pretty accurate precision.  As a result, I occasionally entertain a number of things that aren't considered "important" except in the annals of my own internal dialogues.  This past weekend (yes, it's Wednesday, but I had a four day weekend so it really isn't that long ago), I had a conversation with my brother over whether author's comments should qualify as canon, and wanted to present my thoughts on the subject here.  It'll be a nice interruption between worrying about the president being a heartless jackass for going to Houston without seeing flood damage or flood victims, and worrying about the president killing us all because he isn't smart enough to admit he knows nothing about foreign policy, so enjoy.

For those who are unfamiliar, canon is essentially the rules and "facts" of a specific fictional world.  Technically, all works of fiction, whether they be in the form of a movie, TV show, play, comic book, or novel, have their own canon, though frequently we hear the term most associated with major franchises, particularly fantasy and science-fiction.  Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Walking Dead come to mind as major ones, but like I said-all fictional worlds have some form of canon, an accepted series of facts and events that are proven by being part of that world.

If you're still confused, let's look at an example, specifically the Harry Potter books.  In the books, examples of things that are canon are that Fred and George are twins, that Sirius Black is killed by Bellatrix Lestrange, and that Scabbers is really Peter Pettigrew.  These are facts within the universe of the books because they are stated by the author (in this case JK Rowling) within the confines of the seven books.  An example of something that isn't canon would be that the Dursleys are under the affect of a horcrux (Harry Potter) for ten years and this is why they were so mean.  This isn't actually mentioned within the books, but one could make an argument that it's true.  However, JK Rowling never explicitly states this in the series, and as a result, it's a theory rather than considered "canon."

The problem here, however, is wondering whether or not something should be considered canon, or in layman's terms, considered "the truth" and that depends entirely on what we consider to be canon.  With Harry Potter, again, for example, you can assume that the seven books in the series are canon as they were written by JK Rowling specifically chronicling the adventures of Harry Potter's time in school.  However, you could easily expand that lens to side stories that Rowling wrote about the books as they have the same definition of "canonicity" as the original seven novels.  She wrote, for example, real-world examples of three texts within the story (something like Quidditch through the Ages), or her recent play Harry Potter and the Cursed-Child, or the screenplay of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.  Then there is Pottermore, where Rowling frequently will write definitions, short stories, and texts about the world of Harry Potter.  All of this, using the canon definition of "Harry Potter works written by JK Rowling" all these would qualify as part of the canon.

But my question above, and where I think things get dicey, is whether or not we are willing to let author comments count as being "canon" or whether these are some sort of "semi-canon," tangentially related to the work but not entirely true because it didn't meet the rigid criteria set forth as being "written about the world of Harry Potter by JK Rowling."  Specifically here, for example, we can highlight Rowling calling Albus Dumbledore gay after the series ended as being in question, because as far as I can tell, it's never actually happened in one of the books or the additional writings Rowling has put forth.

One could quibble here-if Rowling says it, it must be true-after all, she's the authority on this fictional subject, and indeed, if it was written in one of the books or featured in one of the stories, we wouldn't be having this discussion, but she never did.  Despite ample opportunity (Dumbledore may be the only character that is featured in virtually every writing about Harry Potter put out, including writing the fictional forewords to two of the books), she never once made even a passing reference to Dumbledore being gay.  This is, to co-opt a word that is much maligned on Twitter, "problematic," but it also means that there's no proof of Dumbledore being gay in any of the written works about Harry Potter.  Rowling never invested in this idea enough to make it true, just floating it out into the universe.

This is a problem in defining canon because like it or not, Rowling is not the only person who helped create the final "canon" product in these cases.  Editors, publishers, producers, even illustrators, brought canon to the world of Harry Potter in a way similar to Rowling.  If there's a picture of Sybil Trelawney with a specific style of glasses in a book, those are the kinds of glasses she wears.  It's entirely possible that Rowling, were she to have pushed for Dumbledore to be gay in one of these books, would have been told no.  Now, it's hard to imagine someone pushing Rowling around on something she believed pretty fervently, but it also has to be said that she didn't care about this "fact" enough to ever put it in a single book, only bringing it up in an interview.  It's entirely plausible when actually making something true that she would have said "not a big deal" and moved on from the fact.  Additionally, Rowling has occasionally contradicted herself even within the canon (for example, whether or not the Room of Requirement was something Dumbledore was aware of is different depending on if you look at the books or at Pottermore), so this adds in another element that hasn't been "fact-checked" by an editor.

This problem is exacerbated when you go to other fictional worlds, particularly ones with multiple authors.  With a show like Lost, for example, the actual episodes and the mini-episodes would constitute canon, but would a comment from showrunners Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof count?  They weren't the only authors contributing to the canon, and as a result aren't the sole creators of the canon.  The same could be said for George Lucas & Star Wars or Stan Lee & his Marvel Universe.  Authors also change-Aaron Sorkin didn't write the last three seasons of The West Wing and Amy Sherman-Palladino didn't create the seventh season of Gilmore Girls, but these television series absolutely should be considered canon under the guise of being an episode of the show.  When you count costumers, art directors, editors, visual effects artists, and actors themselves sometimes tens of thousands of minds are used to create something that is canon, and with so many cooks in the kitchen, the only thing that really should count as canon is the actual finished product put forth before the audience, regardless of what a principle author intended or supposed while writing.

As a result, I think that only the finalized product can count as the definition of canon, and as a result, an author stating something in the real world, rather than within the confines of the fictional one, should not be considered canon, just merely an interesting artistic inspiration.  So until Rowling puts it into a screenplay or subsequent book in the series, Albus Dumbledore remains a mystery in terms of sexuality.  He might be gay in JK Rowling's mind, but until she puts it into a story, it's not canon.