Canon Vs. Headcanon · 7:57pm Oct 9th, 2017
So I noticed that the rest of the season of MLP has leaked. I haven’t watched them but I’ve seen bits and pieces and I…… I just…….
I’m tired my dudes. I’m done. I have an entire world of headcanons set up in an ongoing continuity of stories and a lot of characters OCs and half OCs(my interpretation of a minor/background character) I’m attached to, but this just kind of tosses it all down the crapper. Like, the only thing I can say it helped was my conspiracy theory about Hearth’s Warming, since Starswirl was supposedly dead/out of this dimension by the time the Hearth’s Warming story happened yet we see him here with a group of friends that aren’t Unicorns. Side note: If they kept to Hearth’s Warming existing, Starswirl probably would’ve been very racist. Like, very very racist. Everything else just killed it.
So, no, I’m not even going to try and merge my headcanons here. They literally cannot be merged. So, while I’ve always said that @cornerverse-mlp is ‘Canon Divergent’, this is the biggest split. It’s more than just adjusting small things like actually utilizing the Elements of Harmony, or adjusting half-given and subject to change lore to say that Flurry isn’t the first naturally born Alicorn because Cadence wasn’t Ascended, or even taking the emptiness of Sombra’s backstory and creating the tragedy of Obsidian, Emerald and Autumn. It’s ‘I have already established a lot of this stuff in stories and/or headcanon posts and it’s vastly different than what the show is now putting out’.
And I like my versions better, for many reasons including attachment to characters and stories. So I’m going to keep them and toss the rest. Because you know what? There’s multiple Universes where things are different, so this is just another one. Even the show has multiple universes. I mean, not only in the whole EQG thing and Starlight’s fuckery with the Timelines, but the fact that the Comics have different events. So I’m just going to make my own Universe officially its own Universe. And like, things that don’t conflict will be the same, but this is just…… ugh. I never thought I’d have to deal with anything solid on Starswirl the Bearded, so I was cool with making headcanons about him.
Okay, to recap: I have my own continuity of stories and headcanons that now exist in their ownUniverse that is Canon Divergent from the show, but as it’s part of it’s own Continuity established before some episodes and not a complete AU that could be summed up in one sentence, it does not need the ‘AU Tag’. That said, I will try to enjoy the show on it’s own terms, but not in terms of trying to merge it with my headcanons, because that’s the only way to do this without feeling like I’ve wasted a fuckton of time and driving me insane trying to fit one of those jumbo kids’ toy puzzle pieces into my 1,000 piece jigsaw.
I read a story a while back where the author tried to retroactively update their stuff to stay true to canon. It didn't go well. Kudos to you- stick to your stories, and keep writing!
4692702
Thanks! I've tried to merge Canon and Headcanon before, and some parts worked. Like, the OC I had created to be Diamond Tiara's mom is now her aunt/future stepmom, and even though I'd already written Fluttershy's parents I did say she was adopted so the Canon family are her Biological parents and I retroactively killed them off.
But yeah, one of the things I went wholeheartedly into was the lore of the world, the magical stuff that's mysterious and not supposed to be explained. I've been working on that since Season 2, back when I had my typical 'self-insert red and black Alicorn OC' story. And while I've refined it a bit since then, it's still a whole world of lore with it's own timeline I can map out fairly well.
It's going to be hard to try and merge this stuff, so I've opted to not. Honestly, if I reconnected every fic that had to do with the lore, then 9/26 of my stories would have some drastic changes, and might even have to be tossed completely. And that says nothing about the unfinished drafts on my laptop.
Again, thanks for the encouragement!
4692751
Okay, maybe you can clarify for me, since I'm fairly new to the fandom- what the heck was up with the whole "Red/Black" Alicorn OC? Is it like the modern displaced stories- everyone wants to do one?
4692802
Oh, it's not a thing related only to MLP. Well, the 'Alicorn' part is. But it's part of the standard Fanfic Culture. Not sure what you know or not about this stuff, so I'll go over the Basics:
A lot of people beginning to write fanfic, usually young teens, will make an OC that is basically an idealized version of themselves and write stories about their OC going on adventures with the main cast. These are 100% wish-fulfillment and made to entertain the writer more than an audience, and therefore, the OC will be a 'Mary Sue', a 'perfect' character with overpowered abilities, no character flaws, no character development, and again, close ties with the Main Characters. Sometimes they will often have a romance with their favorite character. In the MLP fandom, the OC must be a pony. So, to add to the 'perfection and overpowered' part of the character, they are written as an Alicorn due to how 'perfect and overpowered' they are, but sometimes they'll be a 'Seventh Element of Harmony'.
Of course, since these stories are written by young teens beginning their fics, the writing isn't the best. It can range from 'has potential and could be good in time' to 'wall of text and grammar errors with dialog that might've been written by Tommy Wiseau'. And since a lot of the teens writing this stuff are also going through their 'edgy' phase, the colors red and black are popular since red and black characters are either villains or anti-heroes.
The bad writing, overused tropes, and the 'edgy phase' combine to be something to 'cringe' at and ridicule. It's not so much that 'everyone wants to write one', it's more that a lot of people go through this phase when they start writing, so these pop up a lot and get old really fast. Usually the ones that get popular are the really bad ones like the Harry Potter Fandom's 'My Immortal'.
I've been on both ends of the 'guilty of having the OC' and 'realizing how terrible it was from a story perspective', so I kind of make self-depreciating jokes about it, but if I met someone else with said OC I'd tell them to work on it because tbh it's their fantasy and it could lead to better stories in the future. And I'd be lying if I said I wasn't sometimes nostalgic for that story and wanted to rewrite it with my current skill.
4692904
Ah, thank you. I too, have an overpowered OC lurking in the back of my mind. Thankfully, I never tried to publish him.
Seems like quite a few "Displaced" fics fall into the same sort of wish fulfillment, though. Ah, well.
4693071
To be fair, Fanfiction itself is wish fulfillment.