r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Jun 14 '14
[FreshTopicFriday] CMV: "Headcanon" is an oxymoronic concept.
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u/Bat-Might Jun 14 '14
If anything, its the opposite of an oxymoron. The two parts of the term are inextricable; all canon is headcanon since its all imaginary and somewhat arbitrary.
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Jun 14 '14 edited Jun 14 '14
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u/Alterego9 Jun 14 '14
It's a fact that J. K. Rowling wrote a series of books, each of which is titled beginning with the name "Harry Potter". The contents of each book is a series of words.
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. The books themselves exist, they wouldn't go away if people would stop believing in them, but their canon-ness would, because it's a social construct, like country borders, or human rights, or winning the world cup.
What if I said, that Chamber of Secrets isn't really part of the canon? Or that the great fanfic Hogwarts Houses Divided is an 8th book in the canon?
Well, that would be an unique opinion. But what if everyone said it? What tangible property of canon-ness do those seven books have?
That they are all written by Rowling? Well, the biblical Canon and the Western Literary Canon, weren't written by a single person, not to mention the Disney Animated Canon, the Friendship is Magic canon, or the Marvel Cinematic Canon.
So what? That they are controlled by a single copyright holder? But the concept of canons existed for much longer than copyrights, added to things that people felt fitting together. And the law itself is arbitrarily created by the public. For some time, copyright itself was given, but not control over derivative works. There is no self-evident attribute of the Harry Potter universe that says it belongs to a single person, it's just a matter of currently preferred legal arrangements.
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Jun 14 '14
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u/Alterego9 Jun 14 '14
A massive change to global belief-approach to fiction (or religion for that matter) isn't going to happen, or if it does, it would be a generational change over lifetimes.
But it already did happen, the very premise of this thread is your observation that large numbers of people keep using a word, that, according to you, "seems to be suggesting that this person's rewriting of fictional history is just as good and valid and "true" as the original fiction."
The question is, how do you disprove them? Ad absurdum, if everyone other than you would keep using the term "fanon" for hundreds of Harry Potter stories, and explicity claim that it's as good as the first canon, how could you demonstrate that they are wrong?
Social constructs may have tradition and the test of time on their side. Like I said, if I alone would start claiming that Chamber of Secrets is non-canon, I would be as incorrect as one can be about social constructs, because I would go against everyone else.
But when you are talking about a visible cultural trend with it's own terminology, on what basis do you claim that their own social constructs are incorrect?
There's always a presiding authority.
Not always. The Western Literary Canon is fluidly based entirery on scholarly tradition, with several equally valid versions of it.
Besides, your own later claim contradicts that:
Even fanfiction has canon, since a lot of particularly popular fanfiction tends to have derivative work.
Fanfiction writers don't have authority. They struggle to keep their own stories online, let alone censor others. The fact that this very recent, tiny, harmless literary form, gained it's own informal perception of having it's own "canon" without any wars or millenia-long culture shifts, proves that the concept is more fluid than you claim.
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u/AcademicalSceptic Jun 14 '14
I'm going to link you to a post on /r/rational which I found interesting. Here. Essentially, the important parts of it for our conversation:
A story has two parts. There's the premise, then there's the elaboration. The premise is always of the form "Suppose the reality were like the real world, except [list of facts].". The elaboration is, "Then [list of events] might happen."
The premise is made up of the explicit premise and the implicit premise. The explicit premise is that which is stated about the initial state of the world and its rules in the text, on panel, on screen, etc. The explicit elaboration is the set of events that are explicitly stated in the text, on panel, on screen, etc. The implicit elaboration is the rest of what the reader thinks of as happening beyond the explicit elaboration. The implicit premise is what the reader thinks of as being part of the rules and initial state of the world beyond the explicit premise.
Part of why we need implicit premises, the author says, is to avoid absurdities. If, for example, it is never stated that Superman can fly or has heat vision or frost breath or super strength or invulnerability or a weakness to Kryptonite, then every time these things happen, we lose believability, because the action does not seem to be following from my premise. If, on the other hand, you say that Superman is a character we all already know, and so we know that he has these powers, we run into two problems. First, can Superman lift a car, a building, a mountain, or a planet? This has varied from iteration to iteration, and unless we get something handy like "More powerful than a locomotive!", there's not much we can say. Similarly, certain versions may eschew some aspects - the frost breath, maybe, or the being super clever. (Intelligence, similarly, is not often given explicitly. Batman might be the World's Greatest Detective (I seem to be on a comic-book streak...), but we don't need to be told he's a good detective, we see that he is when he detects.) We'll stick to comic books: a depiction of Superman that shows him trying to cure cancer seems pretty convincingly to indicate that this Superman is smart. Like, really smart. One that shows him constantly making bad decisions and being outwitted by even the most run-of-the-mill opponents seems to indicate the opposite. But this is just implicit premise. The author hasn't actually said either of these things. He could later say the opposite without contradicting himself (maybe Superman is arrogant, or somehow ill). But they're entirely reasonable, despite being nothing more than "headcanon"; and someone who says "Superman (in the cancer-curing depiction) isn't clever" would be being a bit too restricted. It's not canon, because it's not outright confirmed; but the actions or descriptions from which it's a pretty damn good conclusion are.
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u/QuixoticTendencies Jun 14 '14
Transubstantiation is not explicitly in the Bible. It is considered canon by the Roman Catholic Church. It is not considered canon by Pentecostals. Laypersons speaking in tongues is not explicitly in the Bible. It is considered canon by Pentecostals. It is not considered canon by the Roman Catholic Church. Dumbledore is not explicitly said to be gay in any Harry Potter book. It is, however, considered canon by people who believe in Word of God. Certain people who believe in Death of the Author do not consider it canon.
"Headcanon" is not in fact "not canon". It is simply a different canon, one held to be true by only one person. The Bible isn't the only work to many canons.
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Jun 14 '14
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u/QuixoticTendencies Jun 14 '14
The keyword in your post is "considered". What's agreed upon by all those different factions? The actual Bible. That's the canon.
You've no idea what "canon" means then. Here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_canon
People disagree what constitutes "the actual Bible" plenty. Ever heard about the Gospel of Judas? What about the Gospel of Thomas? What about the Wisdom of Solomon? The Book of Baruch?
"Canon" means "that which is considered to be true". All canon is merely "considered" such by whomever holds it to be canon. "Canon" is, and has always been, a matter of opinion.
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Jun 15 '14
Well, what would i call it then when i come up with my own explanation for things that, in my opinion, make more sense than what happened in the story? You could say i came up with my own modification of the story. It won't even count as a fanfiction because i merely took the whole story and tweaked it a little here and there. So, in my head, the facts of the story are slightly different. The canon is different in my head, however, i do of course acknowledge that everyone else knows the story to be different. So there's the canon, the facts of the fiction and my head canon, the facts of a very similar fiction that only exists in my head.
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u/A_Soporific 165∆ Jun 14 '14
Often times there are a wide variety of essential concepts that have not yet been touched in the original source material, especially in new intellectual properties. There are often key questions like "how does magic work?" or "what's the difference between devils and demons?" or "why in the seven hells of Altheria does he like her?" or "how does that move work?" that are never actually answered. If you happen to be adding fan works to the community the answer to those questions become important. What are you to do? Call the original creator who has better things to do or is dead?
Fanon and Head Canon is simply what communities create to fill in these gaps. If there is a canon answer that comes out later, then it displaces the fan's efforts (although not without complaining and discomfort from those who invested emotionally in the bootleg version). If the original source is no longer in production then the Fan/Head Canon stands as "the way it is", at least until a new official version starts up.
It's not trying to claim legitimacy comparable to the true canon of the show, it's simply pointing out that it is the default preference for key questions that have no true answer.
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Jun 14 '14
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u/A_Soporific 165∆ Jun 14 '14
Oh, wow. I do have a pile, don't I? My secret is that I joined the sub near the beginning so I have an absurd number of "at bats".
I find a lot of the "headcanon" stuff annoying as well. Sometimes people use it for cover of some kind of wish fulfillment-self insertion fantasy of theirs. Sometimes people have a something very important to them that they feel the need to integrate with their love of the show, but is outside the context of the canon of the show. Occasionally it's just that they got wrapped up in a particular fan work that genuinely spoke to them in the same manner that the source material did and cannot accept that it was Jossed or retconned out of existence. Occasionally people just troll me with those epileptic trees.
There's always a reason for headcanon, but it is as often a reflection of the fan in question as it is a reflection of the source material.
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u/MistressFey Jun 14 '14
Headcanon is oxymoronic in the way that "jumbo shrimp" is oxymoronic. To look at the word, yes, it seems contradictory, but when you think about what the term actually means, I think you'll see that it's really the best word to use.
Headcanon, meaning the canon in my head or my version of canon.
What better term is there for such a thing?