Canonical Perspective

Across many contexts, the word "canon" refers to a rule or law that establishes some type of concrete criterion by which something is measured.

In film, the established canon is derived from a collection of works generally considered to be the best ever made. The Criterion Collection, for instance, attempts to pull these works together, and would-be filmmakers learn about the canon of their craft from viewing and analyzing and discussing such works.

When applied to stories, and especially long-term stories like those found in TV series, comic books, or other works that develop over time, "canon" refers to facts and happenings that are worked into future narratives within that work.

So a protagonist having grown up in a specific area or having dated another character can become canon, which means it's factual within that ever-evolving storyline from that point forward.

In contrast, works that are technically part of the larger narrative but which don't do well or align with the bigger-picture evolution of those works can be outcast from canonical record-keeping, which then means that—despite canonical characters and locations and events being included in that work—it's not part of the larger record, the main storyline, and thus doesn't influence the core timeline of events and encyclopedia of "stuff that actually happened" for the purposes of in-story myth making.

In psychology, “canonical view” refers to the representative image of a thing or concept that comes to mind when we think about that thing or concept.

If you imagine a horse, there's a good chance the knee-jerk image that pops into your mind (if you're able to visualize things in your mind, anyway) is a slightly imperfect side-view of a horse, possibly standing, possibly running, showing all of its legs and part of its back, because that view allows you to see that this is a three-dimensional object rather than a flat, iconographic, cardboard cutout.

Researchers have found that our internal aesthetics seem to prioritize spacial composition when we're tucking away representative models of single objects—a composition that favors what’s called “canonical perspective.”

So when we imagine a coffee cup, we'll tend to imagine a side view, but from a slight height, so that we can see a little bit of the inside of the cup: just enough to give us a sense of its three-dimensionality (a geometric form called a "geon"), but otherwise close to an iconic representation.

This is interesting in part because it suggests the visual heuristics we develop for things we encounter favors information that allows us to best place these things into real-life, which makes sense from a survival perspective, but also from the perspective of utility and accuracy: we don't tend to mentally flatten things we encounter, even if we might primarily encounter them from a flat-seeming angle, because that flatness isn’t useful (and information-rich) in the same way a rounded-out visual memory can be.

It also suggests that we might do something of the same with larger, dynamic scenes, which could—in some cases, at least—result in a de-flattening (or slight rounding-out) recalibration of our memories, putting things into intelligible but inaccurate context and bringing our sense of the specifics of what happened (as contained in some of our memories) into question.