I like really bad movies sometimes. And when I do, there are different roots to this problem. On occasion, it just has the right elements combined to get me on board. On occasion, it’s nostalgia. And on occasion, someone points out to me that said media is crap, and I give them my most puzzled stare.
And then I realize I’ve headcanoned it.
This happens to me all the time with plotholes and poorly conceived film climaxes. A friend is busy trashing the latest contrivance in some blockbuster, and I’m suddenly confused because I inferred elements that were never in the script. Oh, these characters are clearly a lot closer than the film is saying outright—that’s why the emotional arc works! I just made up an entire background for them in my head, complete with adorable scenes of them braiding each other’s hair as teenagers. They would die for each other. Fixed.
Of course, I can’t actually make that argument to someone. I can’t tell them “Oh, that movie works fine for me because I decided that these things you’re taking exception to make perfect sense by virtue of my nimble brain gymnastics.” That’s not a real argument. That doesn’t make a movie better. That doesn’t actually plaster over the holes, or excuse any lack of thought that went into said story, even if the author was intent on letting you fill in some gaps on their behalf.
Except I do make that argument sometimes. Not with the intent of telling someone that they’re wrong about bad writing or plotholes, but to explain why I like certain things. Sorry, I know it doesn’t make sense… but I made it make sense. I’m not saying that I disagree, I’m saying that I wanted it to work, so it did. Presto change-o. I’m a magical unicorn. (I’m not.)
Thing is, fandom is full of headcanons. But they come in a pretty wide variety, in different flavors and shapes. Some of them are incredibly subtle… to the point where you don’t realize that your version of a story is different from someone else’s until you’ve discussed it in depth. Often these boil down to difference in empathy; perhaps you are more inclined to like a certain type of character, or a certain system of government, or you always root for underdogs. We’re all bound to be more empathetic to characters and groups that align for us personally. Which might be why you have a tendency to cut tragic villains a whole lot of slack, while your BFF won’t give them an inch. Boom. Conflicting headcanon.
Some headcanons are different beasts altogether. For my own part, I have a tendency to reimagine lots of characters as queer people in the fiction I consume. Part of that has to do with my reading lots of slash fiction growing up. (The goggles, they never leave you.) But the main component of that comes from being queer myself; I’d rather be imbibing stories in which I felt better represented. It’s also easy to create wild variant headcanons for periphery characters or to do your own world building for universes that are a little on the thin side. There are canons that reconcile disparate versions of similar ’verses. (This is particularly common in comics fandom, where fans might chose to mesh comics themselves with movie universes and alternate realities until they come out with a version that suits them best.) Often fandom does work the author was never even planning to conceptualize, let alone flesh out. It’s one of the wonders of the creative process.
And then there are headcanons that technically cannot be disproven—they are (or appear to be) simply less common among the community. For example, there is a contingent of Harry Potter fans who think of Hermione Granger as a woman of color… and she could be. Nowhere in Rowling’s seven-tomed epic does she ever mention the color of Hermione’s skin (she mentions that Hermione’s mother is pale in the final book, but there is no record on Hermione’s father—he is only described as being brown-haired and brown-eyed), and by that logic, Hermione could be whatever color the reader envisions. The majority of HP fandom seems to have defaulted Hermione to a white girl, and she was played by a white actress on screen. But that doesn’t mean that these fans have created a headcanon that can’t or shouldn’t be recognized and taken seriously.
This particular aspect of headcanoning is perhaps its most profound; how it is often used to help fans relate better to stories they love dearly. Whether it’s changing the orientation of a few key figures, or imagining previous events that would lead to the more drastic action, these alterations can make the difference between whether or not someone connects with a work. While some fans (and even some writers) may take issue with that, I’d argue that’s it’s practically impossible to negate—the brain does its thing and you’re suddenly filling in the coloring book with your favorite markers. Probably drawing outside the lines too.
But I do wonder how many people encounter this problem outside of the internet. And I’ll always consider it one of the best things about creating and enjoying fiction in the first place. There are those who scoff at fans who create their own meticulous universes within another universe, but these are often the seeds that lead to other creative work. The separation between fiction, fan fiction, headcanons and fandom works are frequently much thinner than anyone wants to admit. So whether your head canon conflicts with mine or not, I’m glad we all have them.
And I do apologize for loving some awful movies (and TV shows and books). The brain wants what it wants… and sometimes mine just wants to plug the plotholes with glitter.
Emmet Asher-Perrin has so many headcanons for so many universes, she has never been able to pick her favorites. You can bug her on Twitter and Tumblr, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.
I had to cultivate this extensively as a child. I was a vociferous reader, but my mother’s idea of quality reading(for herself) was rapey historical romances, so when I was a kid I pretty much read The Babysitters Club and Nancy Drew mysteries. And I’m oddly clingy with the things I like and have trouble branching out into unknown material, so depite being one of my libraries top summer readers all through elementary and middle school, I never read any quality children’s literature. If it looked like a book SCHOOL might make you read, I was out.
I eventually grew into Stephen King, who is an exceptional writer, but can be blind to plot holes and stiff characters like other authors.
So I headcanoned, A LOT.
I personally think that once a work of fiction leaves the creator’s head and enters the public, they have offered over the keys of meaning to the audience. What a creator intended and what audience infers will never be perfectly matched, and even when a writer puts something they believe to be explicitely explained into the text, any clever audience can find away around what is written to find evidence for their viewpoint. Probably what you are describing here is that process, that you liked a movie, tv show or book, and let yourself like it by glossing over its imperfections, or just simply filling in the missing parts with the power of imagination. All art, good or bad, has this potential, and is the best art is that willingly surrenders to the audience and says, “you’re a smart bunch, fill in the gaps.”
I’m a magical unicorn. (I’m not.)
False.
Well, I don’t usually do this often, but I have recently come up with a new one – I was watching The Avengers the other day, and the young cop at the end looked familiar. So I went on IMDB (what did we ever do before that?) and he is the same actor that plays Agent Souza in Agent Carter – Marvel recycling actors as usual. So my brain says must be his grandson who grew up on stories of Cap and Peggy so of course he obeys him right away!
I am sad to say that it never occured to me that Hermione could be a woman of color, which exposes my own blindness. That fanart has completely sold me, though, so I’m taking that headcannon as my own.
(Which is one of the nice things about headcannons. Other people can totally sell you on theirs, and now you see the world in a different way.)
Hear hear.
Must….avoid…explosively…humorous….visualizations…of…headcannons…..
@@.-@
Marvel recycling actors as usual.
To my knowledge, Enver Gjokaj(and Vin Diesel if the Black Bolt rumors are true) is the only actor to play two different characters.
In addition, in The Avengers deleted scenes, that young cop dies.
I also am finding myself a bit embarassed that I never considered that Hermione was anything other than white, but I would kind of love to see JKR make that real canon, lol.
But now I am going to sit here and think about all my head canons. I am sure that is also why things like the prequels got such a huge backlash – we had 20 years (well, I didn’t, I was a relatively new Star Wars fan at the time) to come up with our own versions of the way things were. It is actually why I find myself more nervous than excited about the new movies, especially as it concerns Luke, whom I have EXTENSIVE headcanon (and…maybe fanfiction…look, I was 14, okay!) about.
I think your explanation is why I am able to, for the most part, adore Disney movies, despite some of their more unrealistic aspects. I can make the romances more deep in my head…a lot deeper. I’ve always just kind of filled in those blanks. And I think for me, the best example of blending canons is with Lord of the Rings, where I have pretty much accepted the movie ‘look’ and even temperaments and backstories of certain characters and grafted them onto the books (EXCEPT WITH FARAMIR. Um…I may be a little emotional about that particular change – although I am perfectly happy to imagine David Wenham in that role when I read).
Actually, speaking of the Tolkien legendarium, I recently finsihed a reread of the Hobbit, the trilogy, the Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales, and Tolkien himself couldn’t even decide what his headcanon for a lot of things were (and it amazes me that he had so many miscellaenous writings about totally obscure things lying around). So…what was Galadriel REALLY up to when she came to Middle Earth? And plenty of other examples…for me, I tend to take LOTR and Silmarillion as canon, and then fill in the blanks with anything from UT that doesn’t directly contradict. But it’s interesting to see all the other possible explanations…
Aeryl, did you have BSC headcanon????? Becuase I was super into BSC as a kid.
I shipped Claudia and Staci something fierce. And my daughter share’s the same name as Staci’s New York BFF, though spelled differently.
The greatest tragedy of headcannons was that Deus Ex’s Gunther Hermann never got the one he requested from UNATCO.
@7 RobMRobM
XKCD beat you to it 4 or 5 months ago:
Alt text: The nice thing about headcannons is that it’s really easy to get other people to believe in them. (XKCD 1401)
@13 – well played!
@8:
Laura Haddock played Star-Lord’s mom and had a bit role in Captain America. Probably a different characer (although, speaking of head canons… http://www.reddit.com/r/FanTheories/comments/2d4ueg/)
Also, while separate franchises, Glenn Morshower played a General on S.H.I.E.L.D and a Colonel in X-men: First Class. The characters are similar enough that it would have been funny if they WERE the same character… but they are not.
While JKR may have never described Hermione as white, Mary Grandpre’s illustrations certainly did
Google Mary Grandpre Hermione
I always considered those depictions pretty canonical, and casting did not stray too far from them.
Plus, Hermione’s parents were dentists, right?
@16, What does their profession have to do with their race?
I have a theory that there’s a correlation between the available narrative space for headcanons and the quantity of fanworks. Especially if there’s enough blank space on the page for more than just fix-it stories.
JKR, bless her heart, didn’t get everything perfect nor was she a particularly rigorous worldbuilder. So fans can easily make stuff up to make the world and characters of Harry Potter better or more detailed. Teen Wolf has holes you could float a supertanker through but they make excellent playgrounds for fandom. Doctor Who literally has all the time in the universe for side adventures and barely respects its own ‘canon.’ Sherlock is essentially all fanfic at this point, some people just get paid for theirs.
Headcanon is a dangerous thing. That’s why if I know a movie or TV show is being made, I shift the source material (if I haven’t read it already) to the end of my reading list. That way the headcanon doesn’t jar my enjoyment. It doesn’t even have to be changes in the plot or a character’s appearence, but the way a word is pronounced. I blame having one Welsh, one Irish and two cockney grandparents (one of whom came home after WW2 speaking fluent French) but how a word or name sounds in my head can be totally different to how the actors deliver it. And it’s not just the made up ones. Until a teacher wrote down arrogant, the word I used in discussions didn’t sound like the one in my head when I read the word (that one kind of only had two syllables)….
And on subject of Tolken Canon, only LOTR and The Hobbit can really be thought of as “official”. The rest of his writings are his notes, never intended for publication. Of course they’ll be inconsistent. For instance, he gives (I think) about 4 conflicting accounts of how the Orc race was created. My headcanon is that Middle Earth has all four tales, but no one (not even the Orcs) know which one is true, much like North Europe has conflicting myths.
I believe the Silmarillion was INTENDED for publication, he just never finished it (and in fact, even the Silmarillion has some inconsistencies and things he never fully worked out, and even some errors – for example, I think Gil-galad was actually supposed to be a different Elf’s son, but Christopher Tolkien made a mistake in transcriping the family trees or something similar). Even all of his general notes I think he had at some point possibly intended to put in some type of appendix he had initially promised (the appendix at the end of Return of the King is, I think, shorter than what he had been thinking he’d do).
So, I personally chose to make Silmarillion part of the ‘canon’, despite it being posthumously published.
As for him having all sorts of notes that he might not even have intended to publish, I kind of love him all the more for that :) It makes me feel a little bit better that even know, I go around and play in the fan fic universe I created at 14 and think about different ways the story might have happened or flesh out some of the worldbuilding when I’m feeling kind of bored and day dreamy (and have time).
I mostly create headcanon with name pronunciation. Growing up on the Wheel of Time and Card’s Homecoming saga, I butchered most of the names I read. When I got to college and met other fans, I couldn’t figure out what they were talking about half the time. I’m still not sure who was right.
a more on point example would be Hermione’s name. Not being familiar with the shakespearean/greek reference, I thought her name was Her mee own.
For Lord of the Rings (probably shaped by some slasha and fanfic), there’s one thing that seems so natural for me it took a bit to realize that it isn’t explicit. The Three Rings of the Elves (Nenya, Narya, and Vilya) were made by Celebrimbor for particular people, who, except for Galadriel, were not their final wielders. Nenya was made for Galadriel, natch. Vilya, the chief of the three, was obviously made by Celebrimbor for his personal use. But who was Narya for? It certainly wasn’t for any of the other Noldor; Celebrimbor was on the outs with Gil-Galad & Co. It seems obvious that The Ring of Fire was specifically made for his good buddy and fellow ring-smith, Annatar, aka. Sauron. That it eventually ends up in the hands of a different Maiar, who uses it to help bring about Sauron’s defeat, is just perfect, and I can’t bring myself to believe that Tolkien didn’t intend it.
Personally, I’ve head-cannoned Shallan from The Stormlight Archive as looking extremely Asian but with red hair. I’m a white (woman), and I can’t understand why people hate that idea so much when even Sanderson himself has said that they have an epicanthic fold.
source: http://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/1ced7z/iamstilla_novelist_named_brandon_sanderson_ama/
@19, 20,
Whether The Silmarilion was “intended” for publication or not I think depends on your definition of “intended.” As I understand it, Tolkien wanted to publish it, but didn’t believe he would be able to because he didn’t think people would be interested in it. Thus, he didn’t bother to iron out all of the contridictions or work through putting the different aspects of the story together. The final result is something considerably more than just “his notes,” but it wasn’t quite a “novel in progress.”
At any rate, my personl “headcanon” regarding The Silmarilion’s canon status (is that “headmetacanon”) is that The Silmarilion is the canon version of First-Age events, and everything else, the Unfinished Tales and various Histories of Middle Earth, are all Tolkien’s fanfic for his own universe.
@23 – considering that people couldn’t even accept that Rue in the Hunger Games was black despite being EXPLICITLY described as such…that doesn’t surprise me, sadly.
I’m a Transformers fan. Personal canons are a necessity in this fandom, since even Hasbro doesn’t bother keeping things consistent.
Hell, we even have ways of categorizing them (mine is Primax 185.0 Theta)
@17 – the profession of Hermione’s parents has little to do with their race, beyond identifying them as not English.
As a kid, watching Doctor Who, I was convinced that the TARDIS only took him where she wanted him to be, because that was where he needed to be. It explained the times the TARDIS worked and the times it didn’t. Really good headcanon for years.
Aeryl @8
Actually, the most notable case of Marvel recycling actors is this: Chris Evans played Johnny Storm in the FOX “Fantastic 4” movies (at least the first one; I haven’t seen the second, and from all accounts this is a Good Thing) and then wound up being cast as Steve Rogers in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Which has led to a whole range of fanfic headcanon, ranging from an “uncanny resemblance” between the two of them, to one person’s theorising a secret Army breeding program (where they dragged in another of Chris Evans’ action movie characters from an unrelated universe as well) based on frozen semen taken from Steve Rogers back in the early 1940s.
Then there’s the other head-canon which has shown up (based on a news report about Mr Evans written when he was promoting The Fantastic Four, which stated he originally wanted to get into movies via animation and artwork; added to by the frequent observation that MCU Tony Stark is basically Robert Downey Jnr with knobs on) which theorises various MCU actors are actually the MCU characters as projected into this world, which would account for their uncanny success in the roles when Marvel hires them…
My favorite headcanon is that, because Chris Hemsworth plays Kirk’s father in the Star Trek reboot, this means Captain Kirk is Thor’s son.
@Megpie71 While I am familiar with fics in question ;D I do not count that as a legit Marvel recast because the FF movies were made by Fox.
@28 NeilGaiman – I read the comment before reading the name of the commentor and was like “yes but that is how the Tardis does work because of that episode ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ and Idris actually says that about taking the Doctor where he needs to go”
and then i read your name and I was like well that is one way of making headcannon into cannon – write the episode yourself:)
@16 “Plus, Hermione’s parents were dentists, right?”
……whut? That’s some A+ non-sequitar trolling right there, my friend. Only explaination.
I see no issues with people enjoying “bad” media for headcannon, if that headcannon improves said media for you. If you can find a little bright spot in the muck and expand on it, good on you.
When we can share those theories/fanfic/fanart/etc. it means an improvement in enjoyment for even more people. Isn’t this the basis of fandom?
One problem with this line of thinking is using verbiage such a ‘everyone’ for something involving head canon, fan fics, etc. I saw a preview of Kingsman Secret Service two weeks ago with a friend who said to me afterwards, ‘once you told me this was based on a comic book, I sort of learnt to let go of the stupidity.’ And this is someone who never even read Garfield in newspaper dailies. The screening was free, and other than the value of two hours of my life, something I won’t really think about again – if I get asked, I’ll call it a dumb and idiotic movie that would have been served by more nudity (at least some more shirtlessness or wet clothes scenes) in the dorm room by the male potentials.
Similarly, I recently got the dvd from my local library of The Giver. I was not familiar with the book until the film adaptation came up here and elsewhere with prodigious antagonism of same. Again, it was pretty, with a pretty cast and a paint by numbers plot. So Obvious It Was Like Being Hit Over The Head.
I could list more movies and you could stop one hundred people at a movie theater or in the TV set section at your local big box retailer and most of them will tell you they see bad movies or stupid TV shows and think, boy, was that a waste of time. Or they’ll love something for it’s explosions, distruction porn, etc. and not need any reason to love it other than that.
Most viewers don’t do it, in other words.
I’ll admit to never having thought Hermione was anything other than white, but I think her actual name kind of supports me on that front – the name Hermione simply *screams* White Middle Class English (Probably Home Counties With Parents In One Of The Professions). I spent the nineties in a private girls’ school that was in approximately equal parts WASP/Jewish/Hindi (with some girls ticking more than one of those boxes, and some who didn’t tick any), and the *one* way you could tell which girl came from which background was her name. There were a few exceptions, but they were definitely exceptions.
@27–What? Did I miss something? Dentistry doesn’t seem to be connected to either race or Englishness, and Englishness and race aren’t connected either, right?
@@@@@ 36 – I assume that’s an American “joking” about English teeth.
This explains so much about why I like bad movies. Well, medium bad movies because you need some ideas or characters that are interesting enough to think about. The only other requirement is plot holes.
Back to the Future is a good movie and very tightly written, but how did Doc and Marty meet? (?!?!?!) There’s not much BttF fanfic, and the majority of it is centered around this question.
Your example of Hermione as black reminded me of something similar. When I read Robert Heinleins Starship Troopers, I always assumed that the main character was black. I was disappointed when they used a white actor in the movie. Of course, the movie bore very little resemblance to the book anyway.
There are actually some further interesting issues opened up by the concept of headcanon, but to get there, we have to deal with a couple of things first.
One is that what you’re calling “headcanon” seems to me to fit more in the category of a fannish handwave. These can overlap somewhat, and some of that can be that final category, that which is in no way incompatible with the actual canon. It’s not on the screen/page, but it could be true.
As someone who’s been around scholars and students and schools for a huge portion of my 53 years, one thing I’ve learned hard and fast is that any student who is serious about learning respects, values, seeks out, and above all prizes annotations by previous students. When you buy books at the college bookstore, you head straight for the used books, for which you pay less, and in which your helpful forebears have left highlights and notes and scribbles that illuminate and inform your own study. You may argue with your predecessors, disagree with them, build your own understandings entirely in contrast with them, but even so, their input has huge, enormous, gigantic value to any student with a genuine desire to learn and understand.
And that makes Hermione Granger’s reaction to the Half-Blood Prince’s textbook so monstrously out of character that is basically a betrayal of everything JK Rowling ever told us Hermione stood for. What can possibly make sense of that reaction? For me, it’s clear: Hermione is a seer. She is clairvoyant, and got seriously scary evil vibes from that book… But Hermione, being the intensely logical, rational young woman she is, does not know she possesses these “psychic” gifts. Dumbledore and MacGonnagall decided that she simply didn’t need to know, and that trying to tell her would both upset her and undermine her trust in them, as she’d be loath to believe it. So all Hermione knows that she feels a huge sense of revulsion for the book, and wants herself and her loved ones to have nothing to do with it. So she rationalizes a reason to back up her revulsion. As far as I’m concerned that’s canon (And that’s the meat of discussion for later on,)
Another similar case is the brief appearance of Amy and Rory in the Doctor Who episode Closing Time. You’ll recall that the Doctor, who has left them so as not to endanger them further, sees them in the department store where he’s hunting down Cybermen. Amy is the face of a perfume called “Petrichor” with a slogan of “For the girl who’s tired of waiting.” She’s approached by a little girl, who asks for an autograph, and gives it graciously. A friend who watched that ranted that it was typical Moffat sexism. Amy Pond travels through time and space, saves the universe multiple times, and all she’s good for is to be a fashion model! But, I pointed out, there was nothing to say that all she was was a model. Maybe she was the CEO and owner of the company! Maybe she posed for the advertising the same way Paul Newman put his face on every box, cup, bottle and jar of Newman’s Own anything. “No!” She said. “That wasn’t in the script, it wasn’t on the screen!” I stopped there, because you get nowhere arguing with a Moffat-hater, but I think there’s way more to support my version than hers: The perfume is named after one of Amy’s favorite scents. Its advertising tagline is a clear reference to her life experience. That doesn’t sound to me like she’s just the hot red-head someone else thought would look good on that box. That sounds to me like the product was made for her. Doesn’t it then make sense that she’s the one who made it? Again, as far as I’m concerned, that’s Canon.
And here’s the thing. “As far as I’m concerned?” That doesn’t attack canon or fly in the face of canon. That defines it, because what nobody really understands, and there seems to be an entrenched power-structure with a vested interest in nobody understanding, is that Canon isn’t actually a universal, objective thing imposed from the top down, with which readers and viewers are stuck.
Canon is the individual decision of every single reader or viewer.
I’ll say that again, because it’s important:
Canon is the individual decision of every single reader or viewer.
That’s it. “Headcanon” is canon. There’s no other kind. Because, when you cut down through all the guff the meaning of “Canon” is, essentially, “This is the real version. This is what really happened.” But there is no “real” version, because none of it really happened.
Fiction, you will be shocked to realize, is imaginary. Harry Potter and Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger and their adventures are imaginary. All twelve Doctors and their dozens of companions? All imaginary.
And do you know what’s every bit as real as an entirely imaginary thing? Any other entirely imaginary thing! So what you imagine in your head as you read a book or watch a movie or listen to an audiodrama is every bit as real as what the author intended. Ron being married to Hermione while Harry’s married to Ginny, and their offspring Hugo and Rose and James and Lily and Albus Severus are no more real than Ginny having dumped Harry because she always came in second place to her brother and his girlfriend, leading to Harry, Hermione and Ron settling down together as a polyfidelitus triad, married in the Wizarding World’s first three-way wedding, and living happily in a true menage a trois (Which, remember, is French, not for some gymnastic sexual activity, but Household of Three.)
That latter is my canon. It’s entirely imaginary… And therefore no less “real” than 19 Years Later. You might call it “headcanon,” but to do so implies that there’s less legitimacy to it than to what’s there in print. But what’s in print has no more reality than what’s in my head. (Okay, and in my AO3 account, but never mind that!) To buy into the notion that “Canon” comes from some authority and you’re stuck with it is to give ownership and control of your brain and your imagination to someone else. That’s a form of slavery!
So, yeah, long live handwaves, and long live headcanons. Because they’re all canon, really, as long as you, the audience, decide they are.
(And if that means that in someone’s personal Canon, Harry Potter is all about Hermione getting a makeover, becoming the most popular girl in school, and choosing between a smitten-to-the-point-of-redemption Draco Malfoy and a ruggedly heroic Harry Potter, that’s nobody’s problem but theirs.)
@7 ”
Must….avoid…explosively…humorous….visualizations…of…headcannons…..”
There is a real headcannon in the first chapter of Stephenson’s “Diamond Age.”
@40 that definition of canon broadens it to uselessness. A distinction between canon and headcanon is important for facilitating communication among fans. Declaring something as canon allows for a common frame of reference upon which it is possible to gain agreement. The text does exist separately from the fans and using the term ‘canon’ is a recognition of it. Canon is also useful in determining which parts of the text will be used in sequels. If there’s ever next-gen Harry Potter, it will follow from the epilogue (unless the epilogue is retconned out but canon is messy).
The demand that fans grant greater reality to any give set of imaginary events is so onerous that its surrender of personal mental autonomy outweighs any possible benefit from shared references. Any fan can refer back easily to the original source and point at it as his/her base assumptions. There’s no need to define the them in a way that shoves your choices down the rest of fandom’s throats.
In fandom practice, “canon” is used too much as a bully’s truncheon. What the original creator created is still wholly imaginary. It’s not more real than what you or I decide to accept.
When you insist on your definition of canon, you’re just engaging in a power play, positioning yourself for fannish dominance.
It’s more real in that it’s more accessible and has an existence that predates the fandom. It’s more real by virtue of fandom consensus and knowledge. While it’s true that canon and it’s interpretation can be used by bullies that doesn’t mean it should be given the same regard as idle flights of fancy about who Harry should be hooking up with.
While others might use canon for dominance, I do not. I’m not insisting that there’s only one interpretation of canon but rather than canon is something distinct to interpret. Otherwise, discussion of fandom must devolve into endless definition of which text is under discussion.
@@@@@ 22: Gandalf got Narya from Cirdan. I see no reason why he would have not been the original owner. Sure he’s Teleri, but he’s always been an important figure in Middle-Earth, even if he stays on the fringes. Also, I never got the sense of conflict between Celebrimbor and Gil-Galad. Celebrimbor specifically denounced the actions of his father, and while they might not have been the best of buds, I suppose I prefer to believe the family feud had cooled a bit down the generations.
@45 – total aside, but I just finished reading Unfinished Tales, and in one of the versions, there is the implication that Celebrimbor had some unrequited love for Galadriel ;)
@40,42,43:
Let’s take this argument to another popular franchise.
I find the debate you two are having particularly fascinating in this context. The creator of the content went so far as to change the content in a subsequent release and actively destroy all previous releases of the content that didn’t match up with his intentions.
Bottom line? Canon is what the content creator puts out in a fixed medium. Except… mediums are no longer fixed. Quandry? Just a bit. Frequently, there is room for interpretation of canon because not all the information is present. But is Jonathan really trying to argue that if a person thinks the Death Star should have been called the Death Moon that Death Moon is canon just as equally as the Death Star?
And while, yes, neither is real, only one of those versions of canon belongs to the content creator. And that’s the diference.
Canon is what we know the content creator wrote, shot, or otherwise intended. Head canon is what we wish they had written, shot or otherwise intended. Its not a matter of “positioning yourself for fannish dominance,” as much as it is respecting the intellectual property of someone else.
Now, obviously, there are cases where the content creator’s intention, vision, meaning is unclear, and interpretation is necessary. Fans might have differences of opinion on the race of a character, or if someone who disappeared truly died, or whatever. Until and unless the original content creator weighs in on the subject, no opinions can really be considered canon.
The long and short of it is, while one fan’s “canon” may not be inherently more “real” than another fan’s “canon”, the creator of a fictional universe is essentially God. They get to decide what’s canon and what isn’t. “Canon” in this context (in other words, the way fandom uses the word canon) isn’t a matter of being real, but having actually occured within the ficitonal universe, and the final arbitor of that will always be the content’s creator.
My current headcanon is that Agent Jack Thompson on “Agent Carter” is the grandfather or great-grandfather of Spiderman’s high school nemesis, Flash Thompson. Both the appearance and the personality are very similar.
Ursula K. le Guin, who is known for writing diverse characters in her fantasy and sf fiction, once wrote, and I’m paraphrasing her, that she believes once the reader is reading her works, and they come across character names, country, nation and/or location names and terms, the reader can pretty much pronounce it any way they want. She’s not going to tell her readers how the words sound in her head!
That’s cool of her… other authors are pretty specific about it. And most of the time, audiobook narrators ask the publisher and authors for pronunciations. And since nearly everything is getting an audiobook these days… the point becomes moot. We can pronounce them however we like, ut the audiobook version is generally correct.
@39
Wasn’t the main character in Starship Troopers filipino? And in the movie they changed his location to Argentina for some reason.
@37
Actually I’m a Canadian, of recent English descent, joking about bad English teeth. Which, to some extent, I inherited and have spent a lot of money fixing.
My point was, of course, to respond to a ridiculous statement with another ridiculous statement of my own. Apologies to @36 for any confusion.
This is why I am a fierce defender of fanfiction. What is Wicked but Wizard of Oz fanfiction that happens to be legal because Wiz is in the public domain? League of Extroardinary Gentlemen is multi-crossover fanfic. Any movie adaptation is essentially fanfiction. Fanfiction is just another form of retelling stories, which goes back to the earliest storytelling. Is the Flood from Genesis Gilgamesh fanfiction? Certain authors make a big fuss about fanfic being posted based on their work (coughRobinHobbcough) but they can’t stop headcanon.
With some stories, I have multiple headcanons, and that’s okay too. My headcanon of Inkheart is that there are an infinite number of alternate universes for every story based on every reader’s headcanon. But then how did multiple Silvertongues get into the same one? Well, there’s also the headcanon that they go into the author’s headcanon. But than what happens when a character is read out of the story? Do they disappear from the fictional world, or is an alternate fictional universe created? My headcanon is yes.
There are fierce debates on the movie “Birdman”. (Spoiler!) Can he really fly, or did he kill himself? Or is the whole movie just a dream? The only absolute answer is:
None of the above, because it’s a movie and the characters don’t really exist. That is my headcanon of that movie: It’s just a movie and some kind of philosophical statement. There is no way to reconcile the plot to make complete sense, so there is no headcanon.
I think the greatest compliment to an author is to write fanfiction on their work. I only do fanfic on the stories I love. There’s a reason Harry Potter has the most fanfiction ever written on it, and it’s because every reader can see their own life reflected in the world and the characters of the story. I love the story of the little girl who told J.K. Rowling that Harry Potter was her book, and didn’t like all the other fans thinking it was theirs (can someone find this? I know I read it somewhere). Rowling thought it was a huge compliment.
If I like a story,I can’t help but imagine extensions in my head,backstory or sequels or whatever.But I respect creators’ intent and am first to foam in fury when adaptations alter things.
As a reader I do not like the writer deliberately leaving things to my imagination.
As a writer I want to leave as little room as possible for readers to misinterpret.
I don’t write fanfic and wouldn’t want to be fanficked…it’s a matter of respect.
Well, what a fascinating topic. Am I just in time to stomp the life out of it?
The greatest enjoyment of a story for me is in fully understanding the author’s intent and perspective. Some authors make that far more difficult than others, sometimes intentionally leaving the over-arching perspective vague, in order to allow the reader to personalize the story, inducing greater empathy with one or more of the characters.
I don’t need that. I don’t want that. I want to experience the story as the author thought to have it experienced during inception and compilation.
Now, I need to be careful to not be misunderstood. No prose can so faithfully describe the details of each scene, that the reader envisions the exact same landscape, or architecture, or interior design, though some are more thorough than others. Those are not the details to which I refer, but the context of the characters’ interrelations with each other, their motivations, and the thousand other personal minutiae that may or may not be explicitly penned. These can be faithfully represented in the prose to the point that I share the author’s intended levels of empathy and interest for, or against, each of the significant characters. All other things being equal, these are the stories in which it is easiest for me to become engrossed.
Because of this (or perhaps it is the other way around), I don’t habitually manufacture details of a story that are not written. Having an imperfect memory, I may certainly mis-remember bits and pieces of a very long and detailed story, unintentionally re-arranging a scene here or there, but that is not the same as creating head-canon out of thin air.
Therefore, it was always odd to me to be discussing a scene from a book on this or another site, and end up having someone defend an alternate set of events to those written, with the argument “that’s just how I’ve always seen it in my head, even if it wasn’t written that way”. I find the notion, if you’ll pardon the term, inconceivable. I expect that I’ll be accused of having no imagination. There’s no proper defense to such a charge, unless I were to produce my own original creative works. For myself, I tend to trust a good author, and want their story as they intended it. If it isn’t to my liking, I will accept being dissapointed, but I will spend no effort on mentally “fixing” it.
@41 – yes there is. Good catch.
Sometimes I get new headcanon at the same time I’m getting canon–while watching and listening to “The Worst Pies in London” while watching SWEENY TODD, my brain was also seeing and hearing the Muppet version (Miss Piggy with her charming little cockroach backup dancers, who were wearing glittery bunting). Or the part of me that insists Oswald Cobblepot is Tom Riddle’s weird American cousin. Who may or may not be a Squib.