Very interesting. Thanks for going through with this.
In the following post, "canon" is being used according to the subjective definition, under my criterion for "approved," which is essentially "that which sheds light on the world of Myth which resides in Bungie employees' heads." If you prefer a different meaning of the word, substitute the aforementioned much longer and weightier phrase for it. :-)
Andrew Meggs is certainly not to be gainsaid on the nature of the design docs. On the other hand, I'm not certain that he's fully qualified to state how much attention Bungie paid to the story. I'm not saying I'm any more qualified, of course...just that I'm not sure he knows Rob, Jason et al. well enough to close the question.
Should Bungie have had a more coherent and complex backstory than he believes, it must clearly have been more in their heads than written down in the design docs. This means that, as I see it, possession of the design docs in itself would not qualify a party to write "canon" material--as Meggs says, they could write virtually anything they wanted and manage to fit it to the docs, with no knowledge of whether it corresponded with the unwritten knowledge Bungie used to create the game.
In that case, the only way anyone other than Bungie could write "canon" material is if they extracted some of that additional information from Bungie employee's heads by asking them questions. Gene Seabolt did this, but obviously there were quite a few communications glitches. And so far as we know, nobody else did. So, for me, in this scenario, TFL and Myth II and Tales would be high-level canon; GURPS and pre-release info would be low-level; and there could never be any other canon materials unless someone goes back to the original creators of the story and interviews them.
On the other hand, should Meggs be entirely correct--in that even in the minds of Bungie themselves, there isn't really a coherent Bungie backstory--then that pretty much removes my purpose for being at the Asylum. (Other than hanging out with people and ranting about dead languages and quantum mechanics, of course.) Nothing, in that case, could really be canon in my eyes, since even the games don't represent a world which actually exists out there in someone's head. Canon doesn't really have a meaning that in any way connects with the innate quality or consistency or accuracy of the material.
In other words, if there's no right or wrong, then story theorizing is a subset of fan fiction--or, as Meggs says, creative writing in general--and I've got Seventh God for that. :-)
That doesn't mean, of course, that theorizing about the world of Myth III wouldn't be rewarding even if theorizing about TFL and Myth II was not. But that would require--for me--that MJ *did* have a large amount of consistent backstory that didn't make it into the game, so that extensive analysis of its story did *not* become creative writing. And I don't get the impression that that's planned. MJ seems fairly comfortable creating Myth III as they believe Bungie created earlier Myths...an interesting, complex story within the game, and tempting hints and further knowledge, but little additional info left out.
--Silicon"50% chance that my life has been a lie"Dream
