Your Headcanons?

[BunBun299]

There have been threads like this on other boards I've been on, figured I'd start one on here. What are your head canon's for various sci-fi/fantasy works? Pretty much anything goes, personal explanations for how things happen the way they do, what happened to a character after we last saw them, episodes you just mentally pretend never happened, etc.?

My first is for the Borg of Star Trek. The reason, I think, that the Borg will let borders wander their ships without protest is, they simply don't notice them. Individual Borg drones have absolutely no autonomy. They can only go about what ever tasks the Collective sets for them. Unlike say, a Jem'hadar soldier, who if he saw a Starfleet border could attempt to sound the alarm or shoot/stab/punch them, the drones merely see someone standing there, but they are no more noticeable than a wall they have to walk around to reach what ever they've been sent to maintenance. The sensor data is simply lost among all of those Trillions of things the Borg are seeing all at once.

Or put more simply, if you have trillions of eyes, would you notice flies buzzing in front of two of them? Probably not, unless the flies did something to draw attention to themselves.

This is a weakness I don't think the Borg really acknowledge in themselves. Unless they wanted to do something they really, really don't want to, like give drones besides the Queen a little more autonomy, at least on a limited scale. Like a Borg Princess to run individual ships, kinda like the Queen was trying to do with 7 of 9 in Dark Frontier, who could react having only tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of drones to keep track of instead of Trillions. But maybe start with drones who haven't been separated from the Collective for over a year with conflicting loyalties. But this is unlikely.

[FakeGeekGirl]

*prepares massive wall of text with more words than the first Harry Potter book I've attempted to extrapolate about Dominion culture, history, and what happens after the show ends, based on what we did find out about them in DS9*

Hey wait, where's everybody going?

[FakeGeekGirl]

OK in seriousness ... here's the TLDR version.

I'm working on three novel-length DS9 fanfics, two of which are about the Dominion, so I've had to invent or extrapolate a lot. So here goes nothing:

New Vorta are bred in tubes (similar to the Jem'Hadar) and are born as small children who then grow up in a communal "nursery" where they're conditioned to serve the Founders at all costs (hence Yelgrun saying he can't relate to the idea of family). They're also exposed to Jem'Hadar very early to condition them to not be afraid of them despite the Jem'Hadar being so fearsome. All of them are already born with a specialty (diplomacy, science, etc.) in mind, and are genetically selected with traits for that specialty, but still have to be trained in it. This is why the Founders bother with the cloning - so they can maintain expendability of the Vorta even though they take more time to be properly trained than the Jem'Hadar.

The Vorta cloning doesn't have the weird Xerox limitation that so much of science fiction seems to have, so they could be effectively immortal, but you have to prove yourself useful to keep getting cloned and the Founders, not wanting any other quasi-immortals running around, generally start looking for excuses to have someone declared unworthy around the dozenth clone.

The Vorta can generally tell when other species are lying because they hear the change in their heart rate. They also don't really see anything inherently wrong with lying or honesty as a virtue except of course with the Founders.

After Odo goes back and starts reforming things following "What You Leave Behind" the Dominion, already largely demoralized by their first defeat and of course suffering heavy losses, starts to fall apart, the Link splits in two, and there ends up being a civil war with three main factions of Vorta and several of Jem'Hadar - some of the Jem'Hadar go off to be on their own in peace, others start acting like rampaging assholes and have to be stopped, and of course some side with the Vorta factions. The Vorta split into the Odo-followers who want reforms and follow Odo and the like-minded Founders he managed to convince it was time for a change, the traditionalists who want to keep following the other half, and the atheists who want to do everything the way they've been doing but with Vorta on top now. Odo's people win and it all works out in the end but it's not easy. Because change never is.

[Rocketboy1313]

This is for the Batman franchise that has proven kind of correct in recent years' continuity.

The Joker is not one person, he is actually many many people.

In Batman Earth 1, it is revealed that Gotham city is patterned like a large spiral, as the Arkham family was big into psychic and paranormal concepts I believe the entire city is actually a psychic maze for some un knowable psychic creature, or even some kind of psychic drain point for the whole world (hence the number of crazy people walking around).

The Joker is a stand alone complex (like the anime) a mass delusion that causes people to snap from reality, dress like clowns, and start killing people.

There have been many Jokers, but they are rarely skilled enough to do much, they buy some purple clothes and face paint, attempt to rob a store and are shot dead, one more body for the sausage machine. But some discover a knack for things, pranks, gadgets, money laundering, or just serial murder they live on a while and are eventually killed in some backfiring death trap or explosion and more just keep popping up.

Much like the Judge in "Blood Meridian" the Joker will never die.

[Arkle]

The villain decay of the Borg in Voyager was caused by the Cybermen as a result of the IDW TNG/Doctor Who crossover.

On a sidenote, can we just let the whole "Series is the dream of a dying child" headcanon cliche die already? I am sick to death of it. Puns not intended.

[J!!]

no no no, all shows are the dreams of an autistic child, not a dying one.


youtu.be/VCeZbrvvDmc

[rickgriffin]

The "whole series is someone's dream/delusion/simulation/etc" explanations can SOMETIMES add to a story if there's a purpose to it (and usually if it's not limited to, like, EVERYTHING). For instance, Disney's version of Hunchback of Notre Dame is VERY close to being a perfectly done movie if it wasn't for those dang comic relief gargoyles. SOME of that problem can be mitigated by saying that the gargoyles are all a part of Quasimodo's delusion, and it fits because his character is lonely and starved for friends, so he makes some up. (also it helps that the gargoyles barely interact with anyone besides Quasimodo)

But in most fan canon that resorts to it, there doesn't really seem to be a purpose beyond recasting all the characters as some projection-of-self on a dream. The antagonist represents fear! The best friend represents doubt! The mentor represents wisdom! What you ended up doing is saying "this story is a fiction" . . . which doesn't really add anything to the story because it's ALREADY a fiction. You can analyze a story as an abstract without having to re-fictionalize it--it requires no justification to do so.

[Tanan]

When did the whole "of a dying child" thing was added to the "it was all just a dream" trope, which itself is already exceedingly hard to pull off without adding the extra melodrama?

[nebagram]

I only use the 'it was all just a dream' trope to excuse truly god-awful episodes. Threshold is the first one that comes to mind. Tom Paris caught some kind of alien STD (hey, if it's good enough for Harry...) and dreamed the whole thing in a fever. Rascals is a fevered nightmare of Picard. Sub Rosa is an erotic novel Beverly wrote in her head while recovering from some kind of flu. Genesis is Barclay having a bad reaction to the injection Crusher gave him. Vanishing Point is... My theory made canon. Shit.

[ChiggyvonRichthofen]

I take authorial intent and artistic vision pretty seriously, so I'm loathe to headcanon mistakes or things I don't happen to like. On the other hand, I do enjoy coming up with headcanon explanations of plot holes or incongruities in a script/text.

For example, why do Kirk and co. change uniforms when beaming to the Mirror Enterprise? My headcanon is that it was a mind/consciousness transfer, rather than a physical one.

I don't really buy all of the Animated Series as Star Trek canon, but I am willing to accept as canon some of the little tidbits we first learn from that series.

The Alien canon consists of Alien and Aliens as far as I'm concerned.