Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-6512-20150911195557

Hey guys. I'm Fantomas and believe it or not I'm the head-admin of the Metal Gear Wiki. I come and go more often than not these days for a bunch of different, varying reasons. One of the main ones is that I can't stand everyone's need to argue back and forth about things, and the inevitable name calling that comes from that.

So, I'm not completely surprised to come back in the wake of MGSV to find people arguing once again about Portable Ops! It might not be such a surprise to discover we've actually been arguing about whether or not Portable Ops is canon for years.

So I thought to myself, how should we go about considering things as canon on the Wiki? As I was thinking I was reminded of another dense and lore-heavy franchise which I'm a fan of: Neon Genesis Evangelion. Over on the #1 Wiki for everything Eva, they have a handy Tiers of Canonicity (http://wiki.evageeks.org/Theory_and_Analysis:What_Is_Canon%3F=") page.

Over there, they consider one thing law above all else: the Anime itself. Which makes sense, after all that's what the story is. That's exactly what the canon is all about after all. That's exactly how we should do it: the Games come first, above all else, even Kojima himself.

I know a lot of you are quick to dismiss Portable Ops as non-canon (for some reason?) but I think the best thing to do it treat exactly as it is: part of the main series timeline, but not an "important" part of the timeline. Same goes for Metal Gear Rising.

At the end of the day, whether some of you would like to admit it or not, what is or isn't "canon" changes from person to person. I don't care for Portable Ops, and I don't consider it canon. I do care for Metal Gear Rising, and I do consider it canon. But it's not up to me. And it's not up to Kojima. It's up to each of us as an individual to decide for our own (oh, that's one of the themes of Sons Of Liberty, funnily enough).

Portable Ops is a Metal Gear game, so it deserves a place on this wiki, and it's a part of the timeline. Sure, a lot of stuff in it is contradicted with other games in the series, but a lot of it is important to the overall timeline (Ocelot getting his hands on the other half of the Philosopher's Legacy, FOX disbanding, Big Boss setting up FOXHOUND, Ocelot asking Zero to let Big Boss in on the creation of Cipher). Ignoring it serves no purpose. 