"Oh no! My headcanon!" · 4:06am Oct 28th, 2016
So, in my blog post about the season 6 finale, I joked about needing the scrap all my headcanon about changelings. That prompted some thoughtful comments about why sticking to canon isn't necessary. I started writing a reply, and as I gathered my thoughts together I realized there was enough for another blog post, and here we are.
The question of when to follow canon and when to disregard it, is a really tricky balance, I think. Slavish adherence to canon can produce good stories, but it isn't really necessary, especially since half the point of fanfiction is to tell stories that can't be told in the original series, for whatever reason.
Not to mention the fact that some folks can't even agree on what even counts as canon: do the IDW comics count? those chapter books by G.M. Berrow? those totally rufus vector art comics from Germany? Even in the one thing everyone agrees is canon—the show itself—we don't actually agree. Where do we draw the line between animation glitches, one-off gags, and stuff that "actually happened" in the show? When Pinkie Pie pops her head out of a flower pot to shout "Forever!", is that just a joke that we shouldn't take seriously, or proof that Pinkie can teleport? [1] People are willing to dismiss random background alicorns as glitches—yet Derpy's misaligned eyes were originally an animation error [2], and people pounced on that so hard that DHX decided to canonize it. Some people insist that "Slice of Life" isn't really canon because being "a love letter to the bronies" somehow means that none of those events actually happened. Whatever.
1. The obvious answer is that Pinkie is part Toon (à la Who Framed Roger Rabbit) and as a result she can do offscreen teleportation and other cartoon hijinks... but only when it's funny.
2. Or at least, the fact that her misaligned eyes were visible to the audience was a mistake. In that very first episode, Derpy's eyes were supposed to be an inside joke that no one besides the animators would ever see.
Point is, "complying with canon" isn't as simple as it appears at first glance, and I totally rufus agree that it's possible—sometimes necessary, even—to write a great story while telling canon to stick it where Celestia doesn't shine.
That said, I still don't entirely agree with how glibly (for lack of a better word) some people dismiss an episode five minutes after watching, solely because it doesn't fit their headcanon. To steal a phrase from Pepe Deluxé: all else being equal, the harder you work on a story, the happier you'll be with the finished product. [3] And one way to work harder on a story is to make it canon-compliant.
3. Until your effort yields diminishing returns, at which point another rule goes into effect: real authors publish.
It's like a sonnet, or any other rigidly defined form of poetry. You don't need to fit an abstract concept into a strict meter and rhyme scheme—but if you can, then the results are that much more impressive. In the same way, your epic story about Mr. and Mrs. Cake's past life as secret agents doesn't need to match up perfectly with every detail of their portrayal in the show, but if it does, then that's the cherry on top.
Even if you do go full Alternate Universe, there still needs to be rhyme and reason to your divergences from canon. You can make a universe where Pinkie Pie becomes Princess Celestia's personal student instead of Twilight Sparkle. Or you can make a universe where the Sonic Rainboom inspires Pinkie Pie to become an extreme skateboarder instead of a party planner. But if you make a universe where Pinkie becomes Celestia's personal student, and she's an extreme skateboarder when she isn't studying, readers are going to wonder who this OC is and why she's named "Pinkie Pie". (Unless you can demonstrate in-story that one of those divergences is the logical result of the other.)
And sometimes, obsessing over canon—or exploring that friction between canon and your headcanon—can produce really interesting stories. Of Cottages and Cloud Houses (featured on RCL) literally came from Bookplayer reconciling her headcanon (about Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash's parents) with those ponies' homes in the show itself. And a good portion of my Ditzy Doo stories come about because I seize on a random gag from an episode, interpret it completely literally, and then create a sinister explanation for it.
In conclusion:
"It's so much more complicated than it looks." —Discord
As for my changeling headcanon... it's for a story that's still firmly in the planning stages at the moment, so if I do scrap my headcanon, it's not like I'll lose any real, tangible work. I might keep it anyway. We'll see.
2.bp.blogspot.com/-Ptj0LBSh10Y/VUUZkAzbpfI/AAAAAAAAEak/ugazZQC_kyM/s1600/Female%2BChangeling.jpg
She's of the opinion that the Finale is offensive. Totes triggered.
IDW Publishing. I cant really find an IDM Comics.
And I have nothing else to add. Everything else is spot on.
I’ve spent most of a year looking for clear authorial intent in the show that would drive its themes and inform its worldbuilding. So I am pretty confident when I say there isn’t one. :)
To me, all those canon studies are about investigating what did all those people accidentally end up saying. Because they haven’t really meant it when they did, and they themselves certainly don’t know.
With changelings in particular, adding more factoids into the mix like they did results in a more contradictory picture, not less. :)
I do try to keep everything as compliant as possible. There are times when the show's sloppy chronology makes that impossible—especially the slippery flow of time between the human and pony worlds—but the weirdness is better used as inspiration than obstacle.
In short, I totally agree.
Do I even need to put out where I fall on that? If you are not staying true to the facts of a given setting... why the hell are you even writing a story in that setting? AU's should be "What if?" type deals where the question being asked, the one thing changed, should be it, and all else stems from the one change. And the more important the fact is to canon, the worse off you are altering or ignoring it. Minor one off glitches, meh, important lore and hard, defined facts..... kind of need to stay that way.
So is "totally rufus" a pet phrase you're trying to push into popular parlance, or am I just that far removed from the young/foreign people slang these days? <.<
4274738 Dude. Google.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=rufus
The comic is about Rarity not understanding what Sweetie's use of slang means.
4274752
"The latter" would have sufficed. :B
4274786 it's it young people slang though. The phrase was coined in a movie from the 90s.
4274738 It’s worse than you think. I'm using it ironically.
There's ... a typo in the title?
Skater legend Celestia has taken on an apprentice and is going to teach Pinkie Pie all the ways to be radical. But her sister, using the skater name Nightmare Moon wants to allow anyone to spray graffiti over the walls of the local skate park. So now while Celestia is at a local town council meeting Pinkie Pie has to find five teenagers with attitude to save Equestria! (the name of the local skate park)
4274533 Fixed.
4275505 Also fixed.
4275553
I would read that.
4275696
The sequel, of course, is the newly reunited Celestia and Luna and their students have to work together to ruin the plans of the evil skaters (the evil skate team named Changeling) from the other coast from getting the deed to the skate park and tearing it down!
Considering the bullshit I tend to write, I don't care too much about what canon is doing anyways.