Ultimately, official canon is much smaller than the people who throw the term around like to think it is. Canonicity is limited to that which has actually been described in the source material. Especially in groups of writers, it boils down to what the writers specifically need to worry about for the purposes of the ongoing plot. Now don’t interpret this as me saying you must like or even read all of the EU. I absolutely detest Barbra Hambly’s writing style and the Invasion comics were a legitimate pain for me to get through.
On one level, the difference is one of evidence and perceived legitimacy. There are a lot of people out there who, to put it charitably, invest a great deal of their personal identity in the fandoms they’re a part of. To these people, the works of fiction they’re focused on are often very few in number, and constitute entire worlds in themselves that exist beyond the bounds of the text, just as our own world exists. It’s only natural to develop intense headcanons with little basis in the text if you inhabit this environment, because you lack other works within which to find the traits you’re attributing to characters in the works you’re reading. It seems utterly reasonable to me to say that if someone assumes a character is, say, from Canada, when there’s basically zero evidence within the text to support this, that it’s not in any meaningful sense a reading of the text. Yet, if they need Canadian representation for whatever reason, and they only really care about five works of fiction, it’s easy to see why they’d expand the worlds they’re concerned with such that Canadians are present.
I want to SERIOUSLY emphasize this because the moderators take this EXTREMELY seriously. While they aren't puritans, they aren't going to look kindly on open breaches of the ToS violation in public spaces and might even consider action on actions taken in private while in game. Even if your character description links to an external site, moderators might very well be willing to take that into consideration based on what they are investigating. Remember, no matter how old the game might be, we should respect that kids might be playing.
What no one will appreciate, however, is you proclaiming that you won the presidency with a 90% majority. They also probably wouldn’t appreciate you claiming that your ragtag group of mercenaries have successfully toppled the Australian government. Utilizing Canon Characters and Locations While using locations and characters that are easily recognizable to other players might be a tool, they should be approached carefully and with a great deal of tact. More importantly for our uses, canon, retconned or otherwise, is extremely important because it’s something we can all agree has or is happening. There is no debate as to who the Rikti are, where they come from, that they have staged two full scale invasions, and still have a presence on Earth.
I swear some people need to stop taking a popular person liking/shipping a ship they hate (or not liking/shipping a ship they like) as a personal attack. • Connie goes to informal parties wearing one of those horse head canon generator masks and still has the audacity to call Jean horseface. • We've all seen the iconic sweat-drop on characters' faces but we never have for Levi despite how active he is in the show, however, in the AoT sidestories, he wakes up in a cold sweat because of a nightmare. In conclusion, he never sweats as a result of being hot, which could lead to overheating. [4] Feel free to fight me; I’m not backing down on this point.
I very gently cut things together so that both canon and non-canon are true, and then whistle and look away whenever it comes up. People usually go for it, since I’m not breaking their suspension of disbelief. Make sure when you do this, you don’t mess up anyone else’s timeline. Give them reason to not remember it happening or for it not to have happened to them explicitly.
In discussing headcanons, let’s start by getting incredibly jokey ones out of the way. Plenty of the time, when people say they have ‘x’ headcanon, they’re not really saying that they interpret a character in the text to be, say, a furry, but that it’s funny to imagine them as such. This is clearly not a reading and is primarily done for humor’s sake, so I’ll be excluding it in this discussion because it’s not particularly relevant. What we’re interested in here are headcanons which indicate a given person’s actual understanding of the world, the story, or the characters within it, even if that understanding isn’t actually based on the text to any significant extent. For instance, if someone says that they headcanon generator a character as trans, they usually genuinely believe that the character is trans to at least some extent. These days authors and creators take a large portion of their inspiration from religious precedents.
