Recursive Canon - Television Tropes & Idioms

"How can you make a Double Dragon arcade game movie based on the Double Dragon arcade game if the Double Dragon arcade game is in the background?! Has everybody lost their minds?! It's like seeing Frodo in JRR Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings movies reading the book: JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings! It makes no sense! The movie's universe should have just imploded! They should have been moseying along saying their dialogue until... DOES NOT COMPUTE *Earth Shattering Kaboom* "

—The Nostalgia Critic on "Double Dragon"

"Even though it may be a clever joke or a nod to the original, all it does is make you wish you watching the original instead. It's as if the best part of the movie is seeing the first movie within the movie, and that's the only good part, and for that it doesn't count."

—The Angry Video Game Nerd, Alien Invader Movies and Their Remakes, Part 3

When a work or set of works that appeared to stand on its own in Real Life turns out to be fiction Very Loosely Based On A True Story in its greater universe.

Occasionally, the producers of a new production in an existing universe want to tie it in with the current real life present, but face the problem of trying to get people to believe it's set in the real world when they obviously have the fictional product right before them.

So: Why not make that explicit? Simply make the series itself a fictionalized account of the real.

The problem this causes is that you're left with several onion-like layers of canon: That presented in the original show, and that presented in the new show presenting the original show as fiction, and of course, that of the actual real world.

This trope is related to the Literary Agent Hypothesis with a touch of Ret Con and Show Within A Show for good measure. In the case of a fictional character being the cause of a real-world or alternate canon event, see The Gump. See also Celebrity Paradox.

Often overlaps with Literary Agent Hypothesis. Because there seems to be some confusion between Recursive Canon and Literary Agent Hypothesis, the distinction is as follows:

If the work is claiming that it was created/transcribed/retold by one of the characters, then that is a Literary Agent Hypothesis.
If the work is claiming that some or all of itself exists in its own reality (perhaps as a work of "fiction"), then that is a Recursive Canon.

Examples

Anime and Manga

The anime Super Dimension Fortress Macross has a movie version, Do You Remember Love, which the producers later explained away as a propaganda video made by UN Spacy to portray the events of the TV series in a better light. The deaths of certain characters are made far more heroic, the love triangle made far more romantic, and in general, UN Spacy comes out smelling a lot better than in the TV series.
In the third series of Digimon, the first two series are just a TV show, though they later turn out to be very loosely based on real events. In addition, one character originates from the season 1/2 universe.
- The TV show aspect was actually added in the dub. In the original Japanese version only the card game and video games existed, having been created using the Monster Makers/Wild Bunch' research as basis. It is generally the same idea, only to different degrees.
  - This troper's pretty sure that Word Of God claimed that the shows did exist in-universe in the Japanese version, it just wasn't stated.
  - Well, if you're referring to Ryo above, you could argue that he doesn't come from the Digimon Adventure (first two seasons) universe; rather Ken went to a parallel universe and met him. After all, supposedly all of this Millenniummon (the Big Bad of the Ken/Ryo Japan-only games) business was huge, yet the main characters never seem to reference it. So let's say that Adventure is Digiworld A, Ken went to Digiworld B somehow and met Ryo, then Ryo went to Digiworld C and became a Tamer. Yeah, this is Fan Wank of the highest level, but I'd rather believe that than believe that Ryo was a native of the Digimon Adventure universe.
  - Given that Everything Is Online and that the Digimon franchise capitalizes on jumping between the Digital World and the "real" world, it's not so hard to assume that Adventure is real and a Show Within A Show. The games explain it as Milleniummon taking Ryo to another universe since he was tired of the Adventure universe, and so he eventually wound up settling in the Tamers universe. Dimension-hopping is just confusing in general. Too bad they didn't continue the trend and have Ryo make small cameos in the next two series.
  - I believe the main reason Ryo decided to go to the Tamer universe is, well, in the previous game, the rest of the Digidestined outright manipulated him in order to get him to defeat Millenniummon again. Not wanting to go back when your friends outright lied to you when they didn't need to would kinda be understandable, even if they did apologize. If there's ever a crossover involving Ryo, this troper wouldn't be surprised if the Adventure Digidestined were called out on it.
- One must wonder where Digimon Frontier fits in. There's no mention of such things, but a Wormmon toy is seen at a store in the human world.
Death Note has an unusual version of this - the pilot chapter mentions that a manga was written based on the "real story" it tells (well, mostly on the concept of the Death Note itself). This leads to a scene where Ryuk passes a poster for the live-action Death Note movie.
An episode of the Pokemon anime "Candid Camerupt" was about movies. One of which features Red.
Similar to the Macross example, the Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha movie is revealed in the movie Sound Stages to be a film being produced by one of the planets in the Nanoha universe, with Nanoha and Fate helping as technical advisors.

Comic Books

The Silver Age Flash series portrayed the Golden Age Flash's adventures as merely being a comic book series. It was not until much later that the two actually met, revealing the GA Flash's comics to be a fictionalized account of what happened on another Earth.
The 1980s revival of The DCU's Blackhawk showed the original 1940s series to be a comic book rendition of the team. Weng Chan, the Chinese member of the team, understandably complained about the Unfortunate Implications of his portrayal as the stereotypical caricature "Chop-Chop".
Inverted in Neil Gaiman's Sandman, when it was discovered that the previous DC superhero named Sandman had been living a delusion in a dream dimension created by two denizens of Morpheus' realm.
In Cigars of the Pharaoh, a sheik recognizes Tintin from having read all about his adventures, showing a copy of one of the books. The book was originally Tintin in America, but in the later color editions it was anachronistically changed to Destination Moon.
Marvel comics exist within the Marvel Universe. In universe they are true stories as told to Marvel by the superheroes themselves. In at least one instance She-Hulk is seen reading an actual issue of The Savage She-Hulk.
- This varies. She-Hulk is a bad example because in most versions of the character, she has No Fourth Wall. However, Recursive Canon exists to at least some degree to most superheroes in the Marvel universe. At one point, the company published one-off issues of most major comics called "Marvels Comics'', depicting how they are viewed in-universe. For some characters, like Captain America, the recursive canon version was almost indistinguishable from the usual comic, except that his secret identity was a secret. For others, like the X-Men, who have been pariahs in-universe for most of their history, they couldn't very easily be treated like superheroes. So instead, a backstory was made up for them, which supposed that they were a top-secret government project of paroled mutants, sort of like the Thunderbolts turned out to be.
In Gilbert's stories in Love And Rockets Volume 2, Fritz stars in a gangster film Very Loosely Based On A True Story about the life of her own mother Maria, causing a rift between herself and her sister Luba. Gilbert later launched a series of graphic novels that purported to be adaptations of films in which Fritz had appeared in-universe.

Film

The commentary track to the DVD release of The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The Eighth Dimension is written under the assumption that the film is a fictionalized account of real events. The commentators go so far as to constantly explain how the events depicted differ from "what really happened", or make comparisons between Peter Weller's portrayal and that of the "real" Buckaroo.
Russo's Living Dead movies assume that the film Night of the Living Dead is a Hollywood adaptation of a true story, on which the later movies are based. Romero's sequels, on the other hand, are set in the same fictional universe as the first film.
The 2005 movie Bewitched is based around the conceit that witches are real, but that the 1960s TV series was fiction. Hilarity Ensues when a real witch is cast in a remake of the TV series.
The movie version of Double Dragon features an actual Double Dragon arcade machine in the background of one fight scene. The Nostalgia Critic pointed out that this should have caused the universe to explode.
- The Neo Geo Double Dragon fighting game based on the movie has a stage where production stills from the movie are displayed on a large monitor.
The 2002 adaptation of The Time Machine when Alex travels to the future to research time travel, the librarian offers him a copy of The Time Machine by HG Wells, as well as the 1960 George Pal film.
Gremlins 2 has a scene where the Gremlins attack Leonard Maltin while he's giving a bad review to the first film. Then again, this is also a movie where the film is torn in half by the Gremlins, and Hulk Hogan has to threaten the Gremlins into re-starting the movie. (This was different in the original theatrical release. The film overheats, the Gremlins make shadow puppets on the screen, and then the "usher" comes in and yells at them until they restart the film.) So Yeah.
In Ten Things I Hate About You characters mention studying Shakespeare and admiring him, which is quite an odd thing to do in a Shakespeare adaptation. If they had studied the works of Shakespeare, then they would probably realise that their situation was extremely like the one in The Taming Of The Shrew; and they might also note that some of them share the same name with their characters in the play.
In Beware The Blob; the pseudo-sequel to The Blob, a man actually watches "The Blob" on TV as it attacks.
The kids in "Halloween 3: Season Of The Witch" watch the original Halloween on TV.
In Rumor Has It..., the main character discovers that the movie The Graduate was based on her grandmother.
Hilariously lampshaded in Spaceballs when the bad guys watch a tape of the movie they're currently in to learn where the good guys are headed. They end up stopping the tape at the exact same scene.
- They then fast-forward to learn what's about to happen. If only they'd continued and learned they couldn't win, We Could Have Avoided All This.
Rosencrantz, in Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead, makes a paper airplane (among other things) out of... pages of Hamlet.
Hellboy mentions in The Movie that he absolutely hates the comics, as they always get his eyes wrong.
Galaxy Quest, anyone? The main characters find themselves in a world that based itself entirely around the in-universe Galaxy Quest show.
The 1990s film The Saint hints that the Leslie Charteris novels exist within it, and that the film hero was inspired by and is consciously imitating the prose character.

Literature

In Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography, it was strongly suggested that the A Series Of Unfortunate Events books exists in the eponymous universe. In addition, the Lemony Narrator is himself a character of the books - which he dedicates to his deceased beloved, Beatrice. When you really think about it, the whole idea sounds rather stalkerish.
- Uh, the whole point of A Series Of Unfortunate Events is that the books do exist in that universe, only much much later in time, since the author is supposed to be writing a biography of the Baudelaire orphans and frequently refers to this fact, including on the letters-to-the-reader on the back cover. It's not "strongly suggested"; the books do exist but as narrative accounts of something that actually happened — in much the same way that any non-fiction book exists in the very real universe that it portrays. Did the above troper even ''read'' the books other than The Unauthorized Autobiography?
Thursday Next has this in spades. Two different fictional versions of Thursday - i.e., the character we observed in earlier books - play a role in the fifth book of the series.
- On top of that, the Thursday Next series is mutually recursive with the same author's Nursery Crime series, in that each book is fictional within the context of the other.
"You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly."
In Hamlet, Polonius mentions that he played Caesar in Julius Caesar. Which makes this, as usual, one of The Oldest Ones In The Book.
- Possibly also The Alkazar if the same (original) actor played both roles...
Interview With The Vampire is stated in its sequels to be published by the character Daniel Molloy inder a pseudonym. Indeed, the second book begins with villain Lestat reading it and claiming he was horribly misrepresented by Louis, the book's narrator.
Jose Phillip Farmer wrote a famous series called World Of Tiers, set in a Multiverse that included our own universe. These books were used to create "Tiersian" psychotherapy in the real world. Farmer then wrote another book, Red Orc's Rage, in which a fellow undergoing said psychotherapy actually travels to the Tiersian universe.
The Number of The Beast by Robert A Heinlein is confusing. It starts out with only modern canon weirdness, as the main characters visit worlds they know are fictional (like Oz). Then they meet up with a character from an earlier series by the same author, they know he's fictional and then he reveals they are too, since he only knew where to meet them by reading their stories. The first of which was this book. My head hurts.
In Bret Easton Ellis' Lunar Park, a character from American Psycho shows up, holding a copy of American Psycho to talk to Bret Easton Ellis, who wrote American Psycho, about murders inspired by American Psycho.
The Neverending Story is a novel in which the main character, Bastion, finds a copy of the novel, The Neverending Story, and begins to read it. Bastion finally realizes that the story is more than just a story, when he gets to the part where a character in the story within the story starts retelling the exterior story - the one you're reading, in which Bastion is the main character - from the beginning, word for word.

Live Action TV

War of the Worlds reveals that the 1938 Radio Drama was part of a government disinformation campaign to cover up a real invasion. The 1953 film, on the other hand, is in-continuity.
The original Star Trek television series, featuring the starship NCC-1701 Enterprise, was so popular that a massive write-in campaign convinced NASA to name the first real-life space shuttle OV-101 Enterprise. Much later, when Star Trek: Enterprise (a prequel to the original Star Trek) was created, there were several almost-explicit references implying that the NX-01 Enterprise was indeed named after the space shuttle. Let's recap: the fictional NX-01 was named after the real OV-101, which was named after the fictional NCC-1701, which was named (in-universe) after the NX-01. The mind boggles.
- To help treat boggled mind, this troper suggests one recite the MST3K Mantra while keeping Bellisario's Maxim firmly in mind.
Borderline example in Doctor Who's 25th anniversary serial Remembrance of the Daleks, which is a sequel to the original pilot episode and is set in the same place and time; at one point we hear a BBC continuity voice announcing the time and date the first episode of "a new science-fiction serial" was broadcast — it's cut short just before the name of the series is actually dropped.
The opening scene of the short-lived sitcom version of Ferris Buellers Day Off explained that the movie was a fictionalized retelling of the real Ferris Bueller's life, with the "real" Ferris (Charlie Schlatter) criticizing Matthew Broderick's portrayal of himself.
The ARG The Lost Experience acknowledges Lost as a fictional TV series which incorporates "real" elements such as The Hanso Foundation and the Widmore family.
In an episode of Mad TV, you can actually see an extra reading an issue of Mad Magazine.
- In another episode, House (played by Michael McDonald) is actually watching an episode of Mad TV. It features Stuart (played by Michael McDonald) causing him to remark that he looks just like him.

Tabletop Games

In the new World Of Darkness, Frankensteins Monster was the first of his Lineage of Prometheans. When he tried to create a "bride," he ended up making a horrific monstrosity in human form. One way the "bride' got revenge was by telling Mary Shelley a story that painted him in the worst possible light, thus spawning Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus.
- Similarly, every vampire in London was scrambling for a while to find out who spilled the beans on Dracula to Bram Stoker.

Theater

Lampshaded in Steve Martin's adaptation of the 1910 farce by Carl Sternheim, The Underpants. Gertrude says that she has just seen a comedy by Sternheim; when Louise asks if she should see it, Gertrude says "Wait until it's adapted."

Video Games

Tron 2.0 states that the events in the original Tron movie happened, and then the rights to the story were sold to Disney, who made a movie about it. The opening scene of the game begins with the main character playing an old Tron arcade cabinet.
The Myst video game series is based — or so canon claims — on the actual journals of the characters, but the games are heavily abridged versions of the "real" events, and starring a faceless, sexless Stranger instead of the as of yet unnamed real character. This was taken further with the release of URU, which tells the story of modern-day archeologists exploring the caverns of D'ni, and even further still in Myst V, which tries to specificise some events hinted at in URU. It was finally taken to the Kayfabe level, where Cyan Worlds employees often present the idea that all of the Myst series, including Myst V and URU, exist as fictionalized accounts of real events.
Video game example: The 'plot' (such as it is) of We Love Katamari is driven by the idea that, following the success of the first game, Katamari Damacy, the stars (that is, the King and the Prince) have become hugely popular, and must therefore answer requests from adoring fans. Things get sillier when the King convinces himself that he owes his huge popularity to his stylish, captivating chin.
In Metal Gear Solid, Otacon's lab is decorated with a poster for Policenauts, Hideo Kojima's previous game. Despite the presence of a "Meryl Silverburgh" in both games (or at least alternate universe counterparts), Policenauts is implied to exist in the Metal Gear universe as an anime that Otacon is a fan of. Likewise in Metal Gear Solid 2, a poster for the alternate continuity Game Boy Color spin-off Metal Gear: Ghost Babel is hidden in the B2 floor of the Shell 1 Core.
Weird example: Nick makes a reference to Half Life when picking up a crowbar. Odd when you consider that the events of Half-Life are canon to Left 4 Dead 2's alternate universe.

Western Animation

In the universe of The Simpsons, Futurama is a fictional TV show. Conversely, in the universe of Futurama, The Simpsons is a fictional TV show, thus plunging these universes into an infinite regression of fictionality.
- It should be noted that both universes did crossover with each other in a comic book story, where they noted that they were fictional to each other. Similarly, Radioactive Man is also "real" in one universe and has crossed over to Bart Simpson's world (at least the Bartman version's.)
- This is done similarly in, of all places, The DCU and Watchmen. In a few throw away lines a news vendor and a retired superhero in Watchmen make references to old Superman comics and in the DCU proper The Question at one point reads a copy of Watchmen and recognises Rorschach as a Captain Ersatz of himself!
  - "Behind the Mask" has the first Night Owl mention he got the idea for his costume from the Blue Beetle, of whom he is a Captain Ersatz.
In Marvel's New Universe, Marvel's main universe is fiction.
The Ghostbusters films exist in the Real Ghostbusters universe as a retelling of actual events. Cartoon Peter Venkman notes that Bill Murray looks nothing like him. Toys from the TV series, however, show up in Ghostbusters II and the video game, which is noted as canon to the movies. So the cartoon is a retelling of events in the movies which is a retelling of events in the cartoon which is oh dear I've gone crosseyed.
The Smithsonian/US Presidents episode of This Is America, Charlie Brown, had the characters go to the museum and look at an original Peanuts comic that can be found in the museum, as well as information about the Apollo 10 modules (that were nicknamed "Charlie Brown" and "Snoopy").
Star Wars Clone Wars has a Ret Con to imply that the episode/scene/five minutes with Mace Windu was an in-universe cartoon later drawn by the kid watching the whole scene, in an attempt to account for Mace Windu's abilities being turned all the way Up To Eleven.
In Mega Man Legends , the video game store in Apple Mart apparently stocks the game Mega Man Legends.