Aspects and ideas from fanfiction that are now your personal canon.

Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Ideas you found in a fanfiction that make sense, don't clash with canon, and just work even when you analyze them (or even more so when you analyze them).

For example, thanks to this Meet The Robinsons fanfic, it's now my personal canon that Wilbur kept coming back through time to hang out with Lewis, that the two grew up together, and Wilbur's time Cornelius has a best friend named Wil who is actually Wilbur from several decades in the future.

edited 7th Mar '12 3:56:26 PM by KnownUnknown

This one's from Evangelion, and I rather like it. I've never seen it outright stated in the canon but most fanfics run with it.

NERV was designed to fail. The reason it consists of about ten people where the tire meets the pavement and they're all incredibly broken is that both Gendo Ikari and SEELE need it to fail at a point of their choosing. SEELE and NERV clearly have the resources to hire more staff and deploy more units. Instead they have denied NERV sources of organizational strength, from simple organization and specialization of roles to replacements, backups, even contacts with other organizations.

This makes their entire plan an enormous gamble, a house of cards. They are hoping that nobody pulls the levers before they do, or that their people don't snap under pressure before the designated moment where they're supposed to. It is a decision that could have enormous consequences.

In a Pokemon fanfic I'm writing, Lost Silver happened in the backstory.

edited 7th Mar '12 8:54:54 PM by AcesoldierZero

In Avatar The Last Airbender, it is my personal canon that anyone can grow up to be any kind of bender as long as they were raised properly and taught right. Bending is spiritual!

Yeah, I don't do that.

Why not?

(That's not a very constructive response as-is.)

I don't buy into "personal canon" or "headcanon." I leave that to the show's writers. Fanfics are "what if" stories devised by fans.

Idea just strikes me as rather silly - "I like this story so much that I'm going to say that it's something that I think is in the show, despite it never coming up in the show."

I keep it separate from the show. It keeps me sane. Otherwise I'd turn into some kind of shipper or something.

edited 7th Mar '12 10:01:43 PM by Pannic

Warhammer 40K

The Ethereals use pheromones to control the other Tau. It's certainly implied, but only gently. The ONLY Tau fanfic basically had this as canon. It's very fitting with the setting, and adds a bit more darkness to a race originally portrayed as basically the only completely good, minus the sterilisation camps.

What is wrong with shipping? Just because you don't do it and I don't do it doesn't mean it is wrong for others to do it. To say otherwise is just being persnickety, in my opinion.

And sometimes, I just discard canon. I put it aside if I see something else set in that universe that makes more sense.

@Minister: The Tau aren't that good... it says something about the setting that they're the closest thing to good in it.

I'd say it's fair game to inject headcanon into a setting when a work is completely over and done with. I mean, if no one's gonna tell you what the fuck is up with Rashomon then you can say that actually, it was all a secret plot of George Carlin, who is a character in this story but only behind the scenes and he's been manipulating everything with his magical AIDS frog or something.

That said, with more Avatar coming up, imma have to abandon my headcanon for now. :(

edited 8th Mar '12 5:10:07 AM by Sessalisk

Never having seen Avatar I have no canon or head-canon to go on, apart from this - Pocahontas IN SPACE is always going to be Pocahontas IN SPACE as far as I am concerned.

Also, the above is referring to Avatar the cartoon, not Avatar the dumb movie.

edited 8th Mar '12 2:18:51 PM by Pannic

Ships are lame. Submarines are way cooler!

Why ship Harry and Hermione when you can ship Harry and Professor Quirrel's ashes?

Why ship Katara and Zuko when you can ship Katara and foamy mouth guy?

If you could ship Edward Cullen and a butternut squash, why would you ever ship anything else?

'nuff said.

Oh ok. Not seen any of that Avatar either. I find the whole idea distasteful somehow. Not sure why.

As a superhero comic book fan, sometimes headcanon is not only fun but somewhat necessary. The universes are so vast, the characters so numerous, and the explanations for things sometimes so contradictory that when you can find a fanfiction or something that makes things work in a rational way (when sometimes the writers are just a little more concerned with meeting the current deadline than they are about things long done and past), headcanon is a great, great place to not have head-explodey all over the place.

Plus, I mean, what with characters falling in and out of favor and disappearing for years untold before being dragged up again, headcanon can help explain what in the holy hell they've been doing in all that time.

It helps. Trust.

It is my personal canon that when the Tenth Doctor regenerated, his mind/soul did not die. Instead it was transferred into the body of his clone, bringing him back to life and reuniting him with Rose. Because that guy deserves a happy ending.

Ten-Two has a soul. He is capable of love and has the courage to express it that Ten-One never had. If what you said you would like to happen HAD happened, that soul would be annihilated by a coward. And that would be more evil than anything that Rassilon or the Master could ever have come up with.

And Rose would hate him for all the rest of her days. Because she would know. And she would never forgive him for it.

I once read a really old PG Pokemon Tripod / Geocities fanfic called Two of A Kind from a really old sweet website (Brock-O-Rama) where (Generation 1) Brock falls down a cliff and finds the 'perfect girl' called Dana and he says his name is Brock Harrison. The twist is Brock was in a coma the whole fanfic and Dana isn't real, and from an alternate dimension and she has psychic abilities, anyway she tells him that one day he WILL find someone in his future that will like him just the way he is... He proclaims that he doesn't want to leave Dana and that he's happier with her.

Of course Rule of Drama states that he must end the story without Dana's help... He eventually makes his way back to the real Pokemon world and feels sadness that Dana is now Ret-Gone and it ends on a bittersweet note with Ash and Misty joining him. Thanks to Dana's Ripple-Proof Memory, she still remembers Brock and coaxes her Oddish as the sun sets, forseeing that Brock will find someone eventually.

The whole dramatic fanfic is Better Than It Sounds. Unfortunately Brock-O-Rama was removed before I could save the fanfic to my computer

It's now my personal canon that his surname is Harrison and that Brock WILL find a girl in future who will look past his own insecurities and goofiness

edited 19th May '12 2:26:34 AM by sabrina_diamond

Yeah, I would go along with that, even though I have never read the fic. Brock and the rest of them need a Happy Ending at some point.

well my friend lets me use two of her original characters. Yuki and Ember. I have integrated Yuki into my Azula's back story.

also I got the callings in life from most Kim Possible characters from other people. Kim is a psychiatrist Bonnie is a lawyer and Ron is a comic artist. Also Betty Director is Shego's half-sister.

edited 21st May '12 4:05:31 AM by RandomChaos

One of the entries on Fridge.Final Fantasy VIII, I think it's toward the top. Yep, third entry.

edited 21st May '12 7:31:56 AM by EvaUnit01

Hmm, this is really a personal one.

Harry Potter didn't end up with the Dursleys. He instead, after losing his parents, got a new family that loved him. And yep, I am talking about Methods of Rationality. I don't know what it says about me that I prefer it to the canon books.

Here's an idea someone used for Neon Genesis Evangelion that I'm rather fond of: Gendo Ikari didn't want reunion with Yui just for himself - he wanted her back for both himself and Shinji, so that the three of them could be a family together. He really does care about his son, but has no idea how to deal with those feelings ("wouldn't know how to care for a child if a book on it smashed him in the face") and so instead of just letting his son drift further and further apart, he's trying to get back the duct tape that held the Ikari family together: Yui.

Sad thing is, can't remember where I came upon this idea....

Fernwithy has totally infested my head-canon. If it involves a Black or a Lupin, Fernwithy is probably responsible for my notions of it. Also, Muggle-born extremists who think Hermione Granger is part of the Pure-Blood Establishment start the next war.