User blog comment:Maxlance/The Great Canon God of Quicksand/@comment-24393258-20160403111433

I believe the gist of speaker Meng Zi was that adaptions or extended works shouldn't be put-down as being less legitiment or sensible than their original ("canon"). That canon is the raw seed, not the fruited tree as he succinctly put it. There are many works and crafts that are superior to their orginial concepts and deserve to supplant them. Meng Zi's beef in my view is that there are "canon purists" too stubborn to acknowledge or accept a superior or credible spin-off/off-spring and so exiles truly gifted manga/anime creators with a differenent and maybe superior take on a work. He believed it's crippling and self-limiting to compare successive takes on a theme with canon which might be inheretly faulty in logic or character development. I see this a lot outside the SAO (sadly) universe. Sucessful long-lived TV shows can't stay anchored to their "canon" pilots if they wish to grow their characters emotionally and in new environents. I hope to contact Meng Zi directly and invite him to drop in anime/manga sites besides Reddit to get his views from the horses mouth.