They even put the Blood Swipe in the game via the paint feature. With characters with so many different stories over the years, they are all so much more vast than whatever your particular headcanon is for them. Headcanon is used with a couple of meanings. My preferred meaning is it’s something you’re choosing to believe which does not significantly contradict canon—often it’s answering a question canon didn’t answer or didn’t even pose.
What no one will appreciate, however, is you proclaiming that you won the presidency with a 90% majority. They also probably wouldn’t appreciate you claiming that your ragtag group of mercenaries have successfully toppled the Australian government. Utilizing Canon Characters and Locations While using locations and characters that are easily recognizable to other players might be a tool, they should be approached carefully and with a great deal of tact. More importantly for our uses, canon, retconned or otherwise, is extremely important because it’s something we can all agree has or is happening. There is no debate as to who the Rikti are, where they come from, that they have staged two full scale invasions, and still have a presence on Earth.
There's a very limited amount we could say about them based on our current understanding. A better example would probably be quantum computing. But as I said, that section was VERY opinion based.
Say, you play Zach from Final Fantasy having met Cloud by saving him from bullies. The Crisis Core comes along and goes HA HA in a Simpson’s like voice, and you’re sitting there stunned and hurt. Do you change your character, or do you change the story? If you’re persnickety about storyline and don’t have it intertwined with another RPer or close to your heart, you should change your character. Swap out your history, fix a few things, alter how you play, everything’s fine now. Or you can alter the story, call yourself an AU where that is where your Zach met him, thank you, and that finding out it’s not true for others is weird to him!
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 generator 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.
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.
