The Importance of Autistic Headcanons

Satoru who is a ‘where my hug at’ warrior. As soon as he enters the function he expects a big hug from you. And if he doesn’t get one he is at you in a heartbeat ‘baby where’s my hug?

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In a tabletop setting, while the DM might alter the established canon in the source, the owners of the property aren’t going to care and the normal players in that tabletop game are sort of at the mercy of the dungeon master. Heck, in freeform RP with a select group of friends, while there may or may not be an arbiter of truth, it’s not hard to cooperate together to create a unified understanding of the world. I estimate how canon a character is, and what they adhere to also to give people an idea of things. Sometimes a character has multiple storylines you can draw from, especially in comics. I label the timelines and histories I use, and then offer up how far from canon I’m getting. Just a few name changes, a few visual details, that’s like 90% canon.

headcanon generator (or head canon, head-canon) is a fan’s personal, idiosyncratic interpretation of canon, such as the backstory of a character, or the nature of relationships between characters. Headcanon may represent a teasing out of subtext present in the canon, or it may directly contradict canon. If other fans share this interpretation, it may become fanon.

Often they come from dreams or small ideas that pop into someone’s mind. Just the other day I was going about my usual routine when I came to the startling realization that the 13th Doctor could be Luna Lovegood’s mother and the thought simply would not go away. Sure enough, when I mentioned it to my then-fiancée the headcanon character generator was accepted as a wonderful possibility. In that moment, my UPG became a microcosm SPG. The idea of Pandora Lovegood being Thirteen in disguise has zero precedent other than the fact that I am in love with the idea and I want someone to make fanfiction about it right this instant because I am way too busy for that.

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 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.

Coming to my rescue, though, are headcanons. Headcanons are hardly the same thing as representation in the source material, but at least they’re something. So first things first, how to use headcanons in a good way. There’s some important things to keep in mind, but the first one is the most important. To keep people from getting pissed with you, the number one thing that keeps a roleplayer happy is if you keep your headcanons to what belongs to you. If it primarily affects your character, it’s pretty much your game.

Because of that, the idea of headcanon is very valuable for comic book readers. If there are multiple different versions of a comic book character, then it is completely logical that you should pick the one that you like the best, and read the comics with that in mind. As a for instance, there have been many different takes on Ted Kord over the years. If you liked his portrayal in Giffen and DeMatteis’ Justice League International, you are free to interpret the character with that in mind, and wish that he be portrayed in line with those comics.