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.
This article was originally published in February 2015.
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.
“The googles never leave you.”
No, no they never do. ;)
My only argument against Hermione Granger as a woman of color would be the cover art from Prisoner of Azkaban where Hermione is depicted as white. However, we’ve all seen horrible cover art, so I don’t take it as canon and am quite fine with Hermione being whatever other people want to imagine her as.
One great story I thought was Scalzi’s Locked In. a couple of my friends and I read it and we all made different assumptions about the MC based on our backgrounds. I was fun talking about our own headcanons after that read.
I think at some level, what you’re calling “headcanon” is simply a “willing suspension of disbelief” without which no fiction would survive contact with reality.
Some movies/novels/songs/poems/interpretive dance/etc./ad nauseum don’t work for one person and do for another for the simple and adequate reason that we each have our personal touchpoints of things we simply can or cannot accept. What knocks us “out of the story”.
For example, people who enthusiastically accept a plot involving a magic ring that will allow a vaguely satanic being to take total control of all the things everywhere and that can only be destroyed in a PARTICULAR volcano, but then when two beings that don’t actually exist (and probably can’t exist because of problems involving caloric intake relative to their size) are too close the lava of that volcano, and they aren’t broiled/suffocated by toxic gas, they snap about THAT little detail? That was just was the thing that knocked THEM, personally out of the story…not a mortal storytelling sin.
Another example, from that same series. My wife, who rode horses all her life, has no problem with the lava scene, but when a non-human princess is escaping with a calorically impossible, mortally stricken other character from a batch of semi-corporeal villains on horseback and is constantly reining IN her horse, I hear about it. Every time. That’s where SHE snaps. Elf princess? No sweat. Mystically stricken hobbit? Right there with you. Beings that both exist and don’t exist simultaneously chasing her on their own horses? Check. What she’s doing with her damn bridle and bit during the chase? Whoa there, buster, I can’t go there for you!
My only, sole problem with “headcanon” as headcanon, comes when viewers/consumers of fiction become pissy when their personal headcanons are violated, acting as if their headcanon were law…headdogma so to speak. And then get on a soapbox and make value judgments about other people based on whether or not their headcanon was shared. To use your example of Hermione above, the problematic headdogma would be if they’ve decided Hermione is a person of color, and then when Chris Columbus cast Emma Watson as Hermione got onto the Internet and began complaining bitterly that Columbus had “whitewashed” Hermione.
It gets even more ridiculous when someone complains, in the other direction, that Valkyrie must be white, because that’s what she is in the comics. New medium, new story, your headdogma that Valkyrie must always be white is not valid. It’s not “political correctness run amok,” it’s a casting choice that allows the storyteller to do interesting stuff. Even if that is simply reminding people that Asgard is FICTIONAL and thus, might be abundantly multiracial. Or maybe people are born there with skin color determined by the phase of the moon when they were conceived, not their parent’s skin color.
Nor for that matter is a complaint that a character is exactly what they WERE in the source material despite the fact that it would be really COOL if Captain America was a woman (which would be a bold, but interesting move)…and then bitch that Chris Evans got cast. Can you be disappointed that the director (and let’s face it, the people coughing up millions to make the movie) didn’t do this cool thing? Yes. Is it “patriarchy ruining everything?” Not as such, no.
Creator choices are creator choices. They don’t owe your headdogma anything. They may or may not conform, but it’s not their job to personally cater to you. Their job is to create art without too many demands on the willing suspension of disbelief for a reasonably large number of people. That’s it. At that point, consume or do not consume. Because in the end, not only does everyone not agree, everyone doesn’t HAVE to agree.
@2 I remember being about halfway through Lock In and it suddenly hit me, that Chris could be a man or a woman, and that for purposes of the plot, it didn’t matter. I’d spent about half the book thinking of him as male, and after that epiphany thinking of her as female.
On further reflection, I realized further, that is didn’t matter WHAT they were, because Threeps had no gender, and Haydens in the Agora could program their body presentation to whatever they wanted and in theory could be something different every time. Maybe the Agora has centaurs roaming through it for all we know.
Uhh J.K. Rowling DOES describe Hermoine’s skin. She mentions her face paling and, in the beginning of PoA, describes her as looking very tan after her summer vacation.
Which reminds me of a question I’ve never dared ask, do people of color tan?
@6 – Depends on what people of color you are referring to. Latinos can definitely get darker and paler. I’m not sure if Indians do. I work with a lot and haven’t noticed any darkening or paling. As far as black people, I haven’t heard of their skin getting darker.
And obviously, if you are black, you aren’t going to have a “tan” in any case.
So it sounds like light browns can get darker but dark browns don’t because their melanin is already at top production? Meaning a light brown Hermione could get a visible tan like in the book.
@@@@@6: Yes, exposure to the sun will darken the skin of people of color. Some of the people of color I knew didn’t go to the beach — they felt no need to tan — but one woman of color I know not only would get tan lines, she also got sunburned on a vacation to Mexico. She was not particularly light-skinned.
@@@@@5: Well, if she’s not very dark, she could certainly grow pale with fear, as a significant part of her skin color would be due to blood. Remember, “person of color” includes quite a broad spectrum of skin tones, as it’s as much a social description as a physical one (I worked with two women, one of whom would be considered “white,” and one “black,” both because of their ancestry. The white woman was of Southern Italian ancestry, and her normal skin color was darker than that of the black woman. It was at about that time I decided that race was socially defined nonsense to facilitate discrimination).
@@@@@3, Yep. I do the same thing: I’ll accept all sorts of handwavium, but then some trivial thing will just jump out and set my teeth on edge. The better written the fiction, the less this happens, regardless of the amount of handwavium.
@@@@@ Ms Asher-Perrin, doesn’t everybody sometimes slot themselves into fiction, especially well-written fiction?
Ahem, pardon me if I shout a bit: Yes, people of colour do tan, they do blush, they do go pale.
It’s relative. There’s a huge amount of variation, especially since people of colour come in many, many different shades of skin tone and hair colour. You’d be hard put to spot an embarrassed blush on a full-blooded Nigerian. On the other end of the spectrum, the Puerto Rican guy I dated blushed very nicely, as well as going pale or tan as circumstances changed.
I recall that Rowling asserted, when there was a stage play in which Hermione was played by a black actress, that Hermione’s ethnic background absolutely could be non-Caucasian. Also that she loved the casting choice.
I raised an eyebrow but it’s no skin off my nose if some fans picture Hermione as brown. I personally will always see her as a person of pallor probably because I identify with her and I am pallid.
Something I only found out recently is that even if you have really dark skin, you can still get sun burnt, even in the UK!
@6 I have a friend of Afro-Caribbean ancestry and I can assure you that yes, black people can get a tan and can go pale. Living in sunny Scotland I have noticed that she can get almost the same level of skin colour as me by the end of winter (especially if she’s had to stay in the office a lot during the middle of the day), unlike me as soon as we get a bit of sun and the days draw out her colour all comes back pretty quick. She can also blush and go very pale if she’s upset too.
@3 – “Or maybe people are born there with skin color determined by the phase of the moon when they were conceived, not their parent’s skin color.” I love this idea. I may have to play around with it.
Another head-canon problem is when you’re dealing with a living series (as opposed to one that is completed) and the author/authors start filling in details that you’d already worked out for yourself and they don’t match what you think they should be.
Head canon from books conflicting with screen canon is why, if I hear of a movie adaption before I read the book, I put off reading the book until after I see the film. I find it spoils my immersion when I keep feeling/thinking “that’s not how it is in the book”, especially if all I’ve done is headcanon stuff while I’m reading. Oddly, doesn’t seem to work the other way.
My wife prefers it the other way, so she tries to read the prose before the film, because she’ll headcanon stuff while watching the film that will spoil her immersion in the book.
<shrugs> opposites attract.
@6 I recall way back in Basic, we were all comparing our “farmer tans” from our rolled-up BDU sleeves, and one already very dark-skinned fellow joked that if he got any darker he was going to disappear at night. One of the drill sergeants teased back that since he was always smiling and laughing, we’d just see and find him by his teeth.
@3 I like the “headdogma” phrase to describe fans who take their headcanons too far and push them on other fans and even the content creators. It’s been a problem in some fan communities I sit at the periphery of on Tumblr and AO3. Headcanon of characters run the gamut of “cool” to “well, ok” for me, but it can bring that person enjoyment and lead to creativity in writing, art, etc, so they can go with it–until they try to shove it on others and consider other interpretations “wrong”. On the flip side, people who attack headcanons–especially stuff explicitly labeled as “headcanon”–because it doesn’t fit their interpretation of canon, are also subscribing to “headdogma” and shoving it at others, and can likewise back off and not send nastiness to each others’ inboxes.
I think it’s reasonable to say you enjoy a given “bad” movie or book because you’ve come up with something very vivid to fill the gaps. Our brains LOVE filling in gaps, so when presented with media that requires a more-than-reasonable suspension of disbelief, we’re inclined to come up with excuses to make that possible. Especially so if there are other things about the given media that we like. Additionally, I know if I’m reading/watching something with weakly written tragedy, this feels particularly galling. So I often find myself mentally finishing the story to give some of the characters some kind of happy ending or at least closure. For instance, I really like the film “Rosemary’s Baby” but there wasn’t enough to suggest to me Rosemary would just be fine with her life as it has turned out and I like to think she eventually left the Satanists and divorced her husband. Or at least Junior turns out to be a gentle soul that likes pottery or something. It helps me be less irritated with a movie I otherwise enjoyed.
I think it’s only human to mentally picture a character you identify with as looking similar to you (unless the person is specifically described as very different). Books are an escape and what better way to escape than to have an avatar in the story you’re reading. That’s why, when descriptions *are* given, it’s so important to have representation. Everyone deserves a chance to be the hero.
@17 I think the attitude where people demand a 30 page thesis before a person is “allowed” to have headcanon is the opposite of headdogma. I’m not sure what to call it though. At least, not anything printable.
I know I do this – I remember, for example, when Rogue One came out and there were a few reviews about how shallow all the characters were, etc, and I remember feeling totally differently about that because as I was watching the movie I was mentally filling in all sorts of possible backstories for them.
On the other hand, it’s also hard when your headcanon has had a chance to crystallize for awhile and then eventually a work goes off and takes a new direction. But eventually you realize that lots of fictional universes can co-exist in your head quite nicely – which also applies to adaptations in some ways.
@3 Speaking of things that break one’s particular suspension of disbelief, I am a fan of the web series RWBY. (Created by Rooster Teeth for those who haven’t heard of it). As crazy and unrealistic as it can get there is only two times the series broke suspension of disbelief for me. On was in Volume 2, chapter 1 where Pyrrha used her polarity semblance (control of magnetism) to control ALUMINUM cans. Given that aluminum is a NON-MAGNETIC metal this quickly broke suspension of disbelief for me. Any other metal would have had doubts about what was in there, soda cans not so much.
The second time was during volume 3, chapter 1 when a character broke a giant ice boulder by punching it. If that was all it wouldn’t have been that big a deal. Problem is they are standing on a giant ice field and they are wearing normal shoes, so how are they able to get decent grip? The lack of friction on that ice should lead to said character being unable to proper footing, and slipping when they try to punch the boulder. The fact that they didn’t always seemed as broke suspension of disbelief to me. And believe it of not I am one of the LEAST critical fans of the fights among the RWBY community.
I’m a lover of sff, and a physicist, and a rock climber, so I have a hard time dealing with a lot of your run of the mill action or sci-fi movies due to, uh, physics, and all the various one-armed (or worse, single finger!) chasm-dangling that heroes and heroines seem to get up to in movies really gets my goat, too. I believe there were multiple incidents! of lenghtly precipice-dangle drama in the first Hobbit movie, which I did find too much for me to take despite a deep childhood love of the book the Hobbit. At the same time that I’ve got no problem with a single thing to rule them all or wizards and witches who still think wearing robes is grand or one power channelers or all the (more and more humourous the more science you know) technobabble of your average star trek: voyager episode. (On no, not the Borg nanoprobes again!) Cause I’ve got my own tastes that make no real sense just like all illogical fans.
I will agree that if the seeds of a story I like are there, I’m more willing to forgive and fill in flaws of execution–in other people’s work. As a wannabe writer myself though, I find myself caught by that same internal critic, of what I would create, that little voice going “your made up magical physics and real physics alike don’t work like that!” Or “that character motivation is so thin!” which criticism can be, in my experience, absolute death to the creative process. So indeed, suspension of disbelief for the sake of story is necessary for love of creating a story just as it is for enjoying one.
@3 I find both of your examples of suspension of disbelief failing at minor things perfectly reasonable.
The difference between those and the other stuff like magic rings, elfs, hobbits is that we can easily accept this – It’s a different world, they are magical beings/it’s magic, and that’s fine. They are not unrealistic, they are unreal.
When we see a horse with no further qualifiers being added, we assume it works like a horse in our world. When we see a volcano, we assume it works like in our world. And when that clashes with what happens in the story, it takes us out of it. You can add whatever unreal things you want to a story – but they they have to be realistic within their own world. Fantastical stuff is not a problem to suspension of disbelief, as long as it’s consistent with the rules of the fantasy world.
No writer, no matter how evocative their descriptions, can ever give us more than a sketch of what is happening. The reader always fills in the rest. Often, when readers compare opinions of a work, it is like they each read something different, but usually the differences are what each reader brought with them.
And no one has mentioned one of the ultimate chameleons from the written page; Jesus. In my church hall, hanging up in the front, he is in one of those classic paintings that make him like a northern European. But just about every picture makes him look a bit different; usually like the parishioners who worship there.
The mortal sin the creator(s) of a book, movie, or TV episode can commit isn’t to release something “bad” or poorly written, but rather something that is boring. Excellent ways to keep the audience engaged, and thus avoid this particular flaw, are to require the reader/viewer to infer (or invent) some of the details and to craft the characters and situations to allow any audience member the opportunity to relate. Since works exhibiting these traits are likely to be the ones that end up being worthy of further discussion, it should be no surprise that headcanon often ends up in the mix.
Where headcanon sometimes runs into trouble, I think, is when people misinterpret Death of the Author to conclude that any old idea with even a passing connection to the text is a legitimate and proper interpolation/extrapolation. Quality headcanon should instead be built up within some constraints. First and foremost, it should flesh out a work into a coherent story; it seems to me that some of the more contentious debates stem from people who insist upon an interpretation of a scene or character that may be defensible in isolation but is at odds with other parts of the work (including not just plot and dialogue, but also thematic, symbolic, and literary devices). Good headcanon also needs to make allowances for the inevitable errors made by writers, editors, and actors; while it can make for a fun parlor game, it does seem a bit silly sometimes to build elaborate theories about a small detail or turn of phrase whose execution was simply flubbed. Further allowances must be made for creators to change narrative direction in episodic works, as well as the ability to issue corrections and revisions; this aspect seems to particularly afflict discussions of works in which parts have been revised or withdrawn after release (e.g. Star Wars) or whose continuity was rather loose from the start (e.g. Star Trek).
In many ways, examining what parts of a work a person feels necessary to augment with headcanon, and why, may be as interesting as the details of the headcanon itself!
In case we need a followup to the discussion of Hermione’s complexion, I just got through re-watching American Gods. When dark-skinned Shadow is introduced to Ostara she croons, “Aw, you brought me a blusher!”
@22 Ben, did you know that beer used to come in steel cans? I’ve found old cans that were magnetic before. Perhaps on Remnant, soda cans are made from steel. It’s not our world, after all…