 Hey there, Foundation staff, Sherm here, and welcome to Sherm's Declassified Skip Survival Guide. This video is meant to clarify the strange world of, quote, Canon that we live in as a creative writing community. Before I dive into the specifics of the SCP non-canon, let's get a couple basic definitions agreed upon. Canon is simply that which officially counts in a fictional universe. In one sense, this is the word of the work's creator. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle says Sherlock Holmes is a detective, so he is. He says that Sherlock is super smart, so he is. Canonicity is what is written. Fanon, or head canon, is what fills in holes between what is written in the minds of an audience. When a character has a murky or no-back story, an audience might fill in those details for themselves. Often, this leads to multiple interpretations or head canons among fans. Heck, in our modern age of information, sometimes the creator of the original work catches wind of the fandom's theories and decides to implement or disprove them, making them canon or non-canon as they see fit. And this is where things get blurry in the SCP community. Due to the wiki format, we are the creators and the fans rolled up into one. Every one of us could write our own SCP today if we wanted to and insert our own head canon into the site. We also have the power to vote up or down on everyone else's articles. There is no canon is a quote that's thrown around in discussions on the wiki, and it's important to remember that it's not meant to be taken literally. Because our canon and head canons can blend together sometimes, it's true that if you look at one article and then another, you might see glaring contradictions between pieces. For a great example, let's take a look at SCP-106. SCP-106 was written by user Dr. Gears. Later on, he wrote the tale The Young Man, which reads as an origin story of SCP-106. Great, the author has written an origin story. That seems like a canon right there, and in the real world, it would be. Several years later, user Oz Oroboros wrote SCP-3001. While completely unrelated, it inspired user Sul to write Until Death, which interprets SCP-3001 as an alternative origin story for SCP-106. For some fans, this became a head canon for them despite there being an origin story in place already. It might be more accurate, but not nearly as catchy to say, that we have a flexible canon. Things that we consider flex canon could be described as things that we would have to justify if we wanted to not use them. For instance, the Foundation is a secretive organization that captures and studies anomalies. If you wanted them to be a ragtag network of hunters in your story or article, you'd have to justify it. If you want to use a different object class from the standards, you'd have to justify it. If you want to screw with the format of the articles, you'd have to, you guessed it, justify. Justification is the magic word in all of writing. If you write an amazing story that makes perfect sense, you can usually break all the rules you want. The trick is that you have to know the rules inside and out before breaking them and break them in an interesting and pertinent way. In the end, you'll know you've successfully done it when the upvotes outweigh the downvotes. I hope this helps you understand the Foundation flex canon a little better. Thank you guys for tuning into another episode of Sherm's Declassified Skip Survival Guide. If you like what we're doing here on the channel, do that like, share, and subscribe Bumbo Jumbo. And if you really like what's going on around here, hit up the Site 42 Patreon or the Site 42 Store and support the channel that way. You can also join the Site 42 Discord server if you want to venture deeper into Site 42. See you next time, Foundation staff!