Canon, as continuity of events
Canon is the accumulated set of facts a series has established. Unlike a face or a wardrobe it has no visual reference, so a contradiction cannot be caught by comparing frames. One page on this file names it as something the product holds. As of 2026-09-12.
| What canon covers | How a failure shows | How it is caught |
|---|---|---|
| Who knows what | A character acts on information nobody gave them | By reading, not by watching |
| Who is present | Somebody appears after leaving | By a cast list per instalment |
| State of the world | A locked door is open with no explanation | By notes on each location |
| Elapsed time | A wound heals in the wrong order | By a timeline held outside the tool |
Inclusion rule. Four kinds of established fact a serial accumulates, with the failure each one produces. The table describes craft and cites no product implementation. Order. From the failure an audience notices most to the one it notices least.
1Canon is the continuity nobody budgets for
Faces get reference sheets and rooms get plates. What has already happened gets a conversation, and conversations do not survive a staffing change halfway through a run.
The failure is also the one an audience remembers. A slightly different jaw is forgiven; a character knowing something they were never told is what makes somebody stop watching.
2Holding canon in a product is a larger claim than holding a face
A face can be compared with an image. A fact about the third instalment can only be compared with the third instalment, which means the product would have to have read its own output and remembered it.
One page on this file states that sets, characters and canon persist across a series, bundled as the show's world. How a contradiction inside that bundle is resolved is not addressed, and it is the interesting failure.
3What a production can do without any tool support
Keep a one-line record per instalment of what became true, and read it before writing the next one. It takes minutes and it catches the errors no reference image can.
Where a product claims to hold canon, that record is also the only way to check the claim. The register cannot check it, because checking needs a run rather than a page.
4Where these figures come from
A definition kept for this register: the term, and what vendors state about it, each figure read on 2026-09-12. The tools themselves are on the register. Related: Lip sync, Season.
5Continuity in practice
Serial work like “Show canon” depends on continuity; SceneMixer's guides describe how it keeps it:
That is SceneMixer's core design: characters live in a persistent asset library with locked reference art, and every segment that features a character is generated against those references — same face in episode 1 and episode 50.
SceneMixer, The AI Micro Drama Production Pipeline — “Can AI keep the same actors across 50 episodes?” (read 2026-10-13)
Every character gets an AI-generated full-body reference sheet at analysis time. Face and body crops from that sheet are injected into every video segment that features the character, so the same face, hair, and signature look persist across all episodes.
SceneMixer, Turn a Novel into a Video Series with AI — “How does SceneMixer keep characters consistent across episodes?” (read 2026-10-13)