But I know the word is also used to mean something you just decide, that isn’t at all canon compatible, and that usage isn’t wrong per se. So Lord of the Rings was one of the fandoms I had an eye on as I got into online fandom in the early aughts, and then also Silmarillion fandom. But I was pretty passive until Tumblr gave me my very own soapbox for my fandom opinions, an actual audience, and mutuals who liked to talk Tolkien from time to time. Then I started theorizing in public, and then fanfic.

Her Silmarillion Headcanon Survey now exists in several iterations and seeks to gather data on fan theories on any number of questions and ideas floating about the fandom. Scedasticity was good enough to answer my questions on the Silmarillion Headcanon Survey, hedcanon generator its origins, its current status, and its future. Well, if we play in a group and multiple people consider themselves part of the same storyline/AU then any effect on the world itself must be discussed by everyone involved. You can’t just declare that a planet never got blown up by yourself, if it’s important to everyone’s storyline. If you come up with a feasible way for an in-universe thing to work, show it off, share it with people. Get everyone agreeing with it, and if they don’t just limit it to how you play the character when no one else cares.

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.

But I would often find that I had to watch them multiple times so I was sending them the right quote to refute the argument they were making, and after all that time of sifting through the right videos they would never watch them anyway. So, I thought that I needed these quotes in text form, organized by what argument they addressed, complete with citations, who said it, dates etc. so I could just copy and paste them into whatever comment thread I was in and be done with it. Thus, the quotes document that floats around a lot of groups and graces this website (called the quotes databank) was born. So, this article is going to be a little different from my usual ones, which air to the side of military theory, and instead be more about what I hope to be some constructive criticism for things I see within our EU community. Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.

If you do change a character, make sure you explain that this is a legitimate difference and not a mistake so people don’t try to helpfully correct you for the rest of your life. People like helping, especially when they love your character and want to make sure you know absolutely everything about them to make it as realistic as possible. Throughout the 2000s, particularly from the 2020s onwards, some fans noticed an increase in people using (insert term)-coded with greater frequency, sometimes as a means of implying a greater canonical validity than just a headcanon generator[1]. For example, instead of fans headcanoning a character as autistic, they were autistic-coded, and instead of a character being head-canoned as queer, they were queer-coded. In terms of a given literary series, "canon" describes a set of works that are collectively recognized by the community as having authenticity.