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Your Headcanons?

If we grant that Twilight took place from January 2005 to December 2006 (the generally accepted timeline)

Then by the modern day, Bella has disappeared from the Cullen coven with her daughter (to escape Jacob, who has been assigned paedophile at imprint) and one or both of Rosalie and Alice.

This inspired by 1) the fact that Kristen Stewart is cool and gay and 2) by like, literally every description Bella ever gives of pretty much every female vampire and/or werewolf she ever meets. she's down appalling.
 
More recently, i've been going with a headcanon I never really liked but i've come to largely appreciate now.

It gives Star Trek a slightly darker tone, although not over the top.

In my headcanon, by and large, the Federation keeps a vast majority of the population distracted with "bread and circuses" and has a hearty propaganda machine to keep everyone fed with the "we work to better ourselves" narrative. It's NOT a complete lie... the Federation is mostly a benevolent organization, but like every government, they have their own interests too and they don't want Average Joe knowing too much. They go out of their way to make sure there's a ton of artists and scientists running around, not concerned about what's going on "out there". And if you're in Starfleet but show signs of being potential trouble, it's like a win-lose... you'll get shuffled to a long-range explorer, so you're busy dealing with Aliens-of-the-Week and far away from the "Hard Men Doing Hard Things" types.

Not that Starfleet doesn't also earnestly believe in their mission of exploration but... the upper echelon is more "wink wink, nod nod, we aren't a military sure."

Even some of their more prestigious people sometimes get deflected into other things. The Starfleet Admiralty knows Picard is a "true believer" of sorts, but is also a pain in the ass when it comes to doing some of the things they need done. So Dominion War? Picard and the E-E aren't out on the frontlines where things get messy. Picard is out scooping up barely warp-capable worlds to fold into the Federation. He can't cause too much trouble there, they let the Sisko-types deal with war stuff.

They feed the Picard-types more of the "peaceful exploration! We aren't a military!" line, while kind of quietly pushing the Jellico-types military orders.

Separate thought but on the same topic, something i've spoken about at length only because it does get overlooked, having to do with the Khitomer Accords. Too many people kind of... forget they happened.

On that, I think there's a reason beyond "real world budget" that we see so many older ship designs through the TNG era still in use. Those ships, while being old, are actually quite in demand. Pre-Khitomer vessels were designed with a more militaristic viewpoint. They're warships that can also perform exploration and science roles. Post-Khitomer vessels are science ships that can also be used for battle if necessary.

Ships like Miranda's, and ESPECIALLY Excelsior's, are actually prized commodities. Think about how many Admiral's roll around in Excelsior's... and then also recall the USS Lakota absolutely 100% held it's own against the Defiant... despite the Defiant being a purpose built, modern ship for battle.

(Constitution's tend to be still in use, also for my headcanon that they really weren't great ships. They were designed as modular, tech test-beds and got the ever loving shit beat out of them over their service period. If you got one up and running, the maintenance would be killer. They were practically held together by duct tape when they were new. They're also probably a good clip older than Miranda's and definitely Excelsiors. Connies launched in the 2240's... we don't know about Miranda's but my conjecture is they were more 2270's and Excelsior was 2285.)
 
A Song of Ice and Fire headcanon: one of the reasons for the incoming Long Night is an natural imbalance that has been going for centuries, the "long summer".

In ASOIAF fandom talk, in the world of Westeros where seasons can last years, the "long summer" usually means the years of Robert's reign, which had an unusually decade-long summer, which had characters in-universe fear an equally long winter. But I do not mean that.

See, in the world of ASOIAF, as seen in the title itself, fire and ice are opposite concepts, but not just physically (summer vs. winter) or narratively (Starks of the north vs. Lannister of the south), but also metaphysically, cosmologically, or, to be simpler, magically. The Others and the dragons appear to be conceptual opposite: the first book starts with the return of the Others after millenia, but also ends with the return of the dragons. The Others, creatures of ice, can bring the dead back to life as wight, but so too can the fire-centered religion of R'hllor, creating "fire wights". The known world is even nicknamed "this world of ice and fire" by a maester in-universe.

What I mean is, ice and fire are natural magical force that are two sides of the same coin, opposite yet in balance. Ice "does" something (in a manner of speaking), fire can react in kind. But my headcanon is, since the Long Night was vanquished 8,000 years ago, the world has leaned towards the "fire" for the past millenia, with Planetos steadily growing warmer and warmer over the centuries. It's this imbalance of the elements, this destabilizing Long Summer, that brought about the return of the Long Night.

My evidence is as follow:
  • The most obvious is, of course, the rise and fall of Valyria, the empire of dragon riders, their mounts being "fire incarnate". While dragons are speculated in-universe to have existed all over the world since the dawn of time, only the Valyrians can be conclusively proven to have tamed then, and some theories think they created tameable dragons by making hybrids of wyverns and firewyrms. The manner of Valyria's fall, the Doom looking like a mix of volcanic eruption and nuclear destruction, all in fire, seems like a culmination of the theorized warming of the planet. And you could make the argument that the extinction of the embodiments of fire, the dragons, more than 170 years before the story starts, is part of what stirred the Others and made them move south.
  • The second is Hardhome's destruction, very similar to the Doom of Valyria, though probably less magical and just normal volcanic eruption.
  • The Dry Times, a period of extreme desertification which caused the fall of the Patrimony of Hyrkoon, turning it into the Great Sand Sea.
  • Part of the Dothraki Sea was once an actual inland sea but now it's plains:
    TWOIAF Beyond the Free Cities: The Grasslands said:
    From such we know of the Fisher Queens, who ruled the lands adjoining the Silver Sea—the great inland sea at the heart of the grasslands—from a floating palace that made its way endlessly around its shores.

    Sufficient tales survive to convince most maesters of the past existence of the Silver Sea, though because of diminishing rainfall over the centuries, it has shrunk so severely that today only three great lakes remain where once its waters glistened in the sun.
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  • The Red Waste was once green and fertile but became drier and more barren by the year:
    TWOIAF Beyond the Free Cities: The Grasslands said:
    In the south, other khals led their hordes into the Red Waste, destroying the Qaathi towns and cities that once dotted that desert, until only the great city of Qarth remained, protected by its towering triple wall.

    Despite their long history, little can be said with any certainty of the Qaathi—a people now gone from the world save for a remnant in Qarth.

    What can be said is that the Qaathi arose in the grasslands and established towns there, coming into contact and occasional conflict with the Sarnori. They would oft have the worse of these wars, and so began to drift farther south, creating new city-states. One such, Qarth, was founded on the coast of the Summer Sea. Yet the lands in the south of Essos proved more inhospitable than those the Qaathi had vacated, turning to desert even as they established their foothold there. The Qaathi people were already well on their way to collapse when the Doom struck, and any hopes of using the chaos in the Summer Sea to their advantage vanished when the Dothraki attacked, destroying all the remaining Qaathi cities save for Qarth itself.
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  • This one is a bit tangential, but TWOIAF mentions Song of the Sea: How the Lands Were Severed, a book by Archamaester Cassander. According to his theory, the Arm of Dorne was not submerged by the Hammer of the Waters summoned by the Children of the Forest, but instead due to a natural process of long hot summers resulting in ice melting in the far north of the Shivering Sea, which led to rise in sea levels. This part is obviously one of those attempts by masters to ignore magic, which is seen elsewhere in the book (they notably speculate the Others were actually a tribe of ordinary humans), because the Children of the Forest using magic to flood the Arm of Dorne sounds ridiculus to the Citadel. But I felt I should note it since it fits well with the above.
So that's my headcanon.
 
Iron Lung:

Reality in this universe was a figment of the resident cosmic horror entity's dreams. When it awoke from its long slumber, reality rewrote itself accordingly to its desires. The 1000 remaining humans scattered across rusting space stations are now merely doomed playthings of an eldritch being, never allowed to be forgotten or rest in peace. The blood ocean moons are just one of the ways the entity chooses to fuck with humanity.
 
Star Trek:

The real reason why the Mirror Universe is still alive is that Mirror-Khan is very, very busy in the background making sure it doesn't implode on itself for the sake of the many, many innocents trapped within it.
 
Speaking of the Mirror Universe, it's been my headcanon for a long time that first, there's a subtle and pervasive connection between the universes, which is why they stay mirrors in so many ways despite the wildly different history. And second, that this mirroring effect is responsible for many otherwise inexplicable events.

Which leads directly to my my third headcanon: That the reason Ceti Alpha VI exploded for no explained reason in the backstory of The Wrath of Khan (not something planets normally do), is because in the mirror universe somebody blew up their version of Ceti Alpha VI. And the mirroring effect of such a large even was strong enough to cause the regular universe's version of Ceti Alpha VI to detonate with no apparent cause.
 
DestinyPlayer said:
Star Trek:

The real reason why the Mirror Universe is still alive is that Mirror-Khan is very, very busy in the background making sure it doesn't implode on itself for the sake of the many, many innocents trapped within it.
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Someone did this story, sort of. "One Good Man", with Khan as the greatest hero of the mirror verse, rescuing the victims of the Terran Empire from death camps, etc… before getting randomly
Tossed into TOS where he winds up interfering on behalf of Bajor
 
Avernus said:
Speaking of the Mirror Universe, it's been my headcanon for a long time that first, there's a subtle and pervasive connection between the universes, which is why they stay mirrors in so many ways despite the wildly different history. And second, that this mirroring effect is responsible for many otherwise inexplicable events.

Which leads directly to my my third headcanon: That the reason Ceti Alpha VI exploded for no explained reason in the backstory of The Wrath of Khan (not something planets normally do), is because in the mirror universe somebody blew up their version of Ceti Alpha VI. And the mirroring effect of such a large even was strong enough to cause the regular universe's version of Ceti Alpha VI to detonate with no apparent cause.
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I don't think it's outlandish, especially when the Tholians are taken into consideration and some non-canon stuff about them essentially existing in both universes and find it confusing that there is a differenation between them.

However I don't Mirror Khan is good... Mirror Universe doesn't really work that way, usually. It's an evil universe... good is bad, bad is worse.
 
DC Animated Universe — Joker has died many times, the trick he used with the microchip in Return of the Joker wasn't the first time he encoded himself into one of his hapless victims, it was just the most delayed version of the same trick he used to dodge inescapable death many times in the past.

Every time Joker returns in the DCAU from near-certain death, he actually died; he's just transferring his consciousness into a new body to try-try again.
 
Star Wars: The Jedi order has accidentally created thousands of local force-using fertility cults all across the galaxy. Think about it. You're a young jedi who didn't quite make the cut as an apprentice, and got sent of to some recovering war-torn planet to help them grow food as part of the Agricorps. You're no longer living in a temple with a bunch of monks, you're set up in some farmer's spare room, spending your days laboring in the fields normally and then meditating at the plants to make them grow faster. Unlike in the temple you wear the local clothes, eat the local food, and hang out with the local people, none of whom are ascetic monks but some of whom are cute farmgirls. After a few years the order calls in and asks you to move on to help another world, and you have a choice: leave, and go be a dirt farmer somewhere else, or hand in your resignation from the order and stay a dirt farmer where you're already dirt farming, marry into a local family, and pass down the tradition of meditating at plants to make them grow faster in your family until it becomes part of the local culture.

It makes sense that masters who have spent their entire lives dedicated to the ways of the jedi almost never leave, and knights probably don't do it often either. But for service corp members leaving isn't upending their lifestyle and abandoning everything they've ever worked for, just a simple change in employers.
 
Evilchumlee said:
I don't think it's outlandish, especially when the Tholians are taken into consideration and some non-canon stuff about them essentially existing in both universes and find it confusing that there is a differenation between them.

However I don't Mirror Khan is good... Mirror Universe doesn't really work that way, usually. It's an evil universe... good is bad, bad is worse.
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OG Mirror, Mirror was "some good is bad, some good is worse, some good is still good" (and no view on what bad would be). Khan being flipped mightn't fit, but it's certainly not a case that if you are good on one side you have to be evil on the other.
 
Having finally gotten around to and just finished watching Gravity Falls, I've also learned about its fandom AU Transcendence which (among other things) goes a lot into reincarnations.

Ergo, Soos is Jesus. Given an apocalypse (Weirdmageddon) happens in the show, Jesus would've reincarnated in Gravity Falls in time for it as the Second Coming. Plus y'know, Soos is in the show itself short for Jesus, specifically the Spanish variant. And he certainly suffers for others' sins a lot.

Also puts his notoriously neglectful father in a whole other light
 
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LordInsane said:
OG Mirror, Mirror was "some good is bad, some good is worse, some good is still good" (and no view on what bad would be).
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I'm not really sure about that. Mirror Spock was only "good" in the sense that he was still Vulcan and logical, and knew that the Empire was doomed to fall. Any reforms he was trying to enact weren't really for the cause of good... they were to preserve the Empire.

My general issue with the mirror universe is all of the later entries into it are so much different from the Prime universe... OG Mirror, Mirror was incredibly similar down to the spot where McCoy spilled acid and the mission they were on.
 
Evilchumlee said:
I'm not really sure about that. Mirror Spock was only "good" in the sense that he was still Vulcan and logical, and knew that the Empire was doomed to fall. Any reforms he was trying to enact weren't really for the cause of good... they were to preserve the Empire.

My general issue with the mirror universe is all of the later entries into it are so much different from the Prime universe... OG Mirror, Mirror was incredibly similar down to the spot where McCoy spilled acid and the mission they were on.
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I'm sure about it, at least insofar as one defines strict personal pacifism as good. The Halkans were precisely the same in either reality, it's just that in the Empire they were going to exterminated for it while in the Federation they were going to be left alone.
 
LordInsane said:
I'm sure about it, at least insofar as one defines strict personal pacifism as good. The Halkans were precisely the same in either reality, it's just that in the Empire they were going to exterminated for it while in the Federation they were going to be left alone.
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We never got to learn much of anything about the Halkans aside from they were pacifists in both universes. There could easily have been some dark undertone to them that we just never learned about. It's probably not unfair to suggest some people or groups are essentially the same in both universe, good or bad.

Although maybe a more philosophical question... if the leadership of a planet will allow its people to be exterminated to maintain their fanatic ideology, are they "good" or "evil"?
 
Vinegrape said:
Fallout

In the ruins of Memphis, Tennessee, there's a major faction inspired by stories of Ancient Egypt.
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It tracks with Fallout.

My little slice of Fallout was a bit of an offshoot of New Vegas, sort of. More "inspired by", but i'm zooming over to the East Coast to home state of New Jersey. There was a vault situated in Atlantic City (past it's prime, but once a huge casino/beach tourist destination), that didn't go as planned. When the call came in for the residents to get in... most never made it. Instead, the mob made its move and took over the Vault. It wouldn't act like other Vaults... whatever Vault-Tec's mission for it was obviously ignored, and it wouldn't remain sealed. The mob just used it as their safe hub.

Atlantic City remained largely untouched by the bombs. It was far enough away from NYC, and just far enough way from Philadelphia that it wasn't much of a target. The city became something of on oasis in the wasteland... but under the thumb of mob rule.

It's kind of the "Star Trek Mafia Planet" of Fallout... it's a large city with a fairly large population in relation to Fallout, whose entire society is based around the Mafia. The Don is the leader, and a feudalistic-style government emerged... everyone has a boss, and everyone wants to BE the boss. The city is a web of gangster intrigue and plots, everyone is part of a "Family".

EDIT - Atlantic City is also close enough the Pine Barrens to utilize the Jersey Devil in some way, kinda like the Mothman in 76.

I was also going to go with being a somewhat intact Atlantic Coastal city/region, beachy stuff would play a role in the themes of it all with a heaping helping of old-timey 30's-40's style things, as well as a burgeoning shipping industry... the very beginnings of trade/contact with Europe, Africa and South America.
 
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Star Trek headcanon:
Starfleet and the rest of the Federation have a massive split in overall mindset and ideology, but not in the way most people think.

Starfleet isn't particularly militaristic, beyond being a military. What is is, however, is a haven for workaholics, people who cannot imagine living without a career ladder to climb, without strict hours to work and rest on, without menial labor that you are forced to do, working the day to exhaustion and then falling asleep so you can work the next day again.

People who need a job, not a hobby or a passion.

Starfleet is one of the last, if not the last organization in all of the Federation that is like that. And a lot of people find them weird because of that. Haven't they spent centuries trying to escape this hell? How are these people so tied down to it that they cannot imagine living without it? This contrast causes quite a bit of friction between the two, especially when things get particularly philosophical and people start conflicting about their beliefs on human nature.
 
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I was always convinced that, in DMC5, Dante would have won the fight and killed Vergil if it wasn't for Nero's interference. I just think it makes the most narrative sense, that Dante's decision to give up on Vergil and Nero's decision to stop the fighting has more weight to it if Dante was going to succeed.

Vergil's powered up and healed from his consumption of the Qlippoth's fruit, but the Devil May Cry series has always shown that sort of thing to have dubious value compared to being a demon and fully embracing your humanity.
 
Elden ring Headcannon:
There are surviving towns, settlements and even a few, small scattered port cities in the lands between, we don't get to see them because it's compressed for us compared to it in the lore, and because like most societies in civilizational collapse(see the Anasazi and bronze age collapses) people typically move to isolated places which are hard to reach to avoid hostile forces, which in Elden ring, there are a lot of. Besides, tarnished are generally seen as impure and not good news, so it we would not be welcomed in anyway. This helps give all the endings, especially the ones where we are talked out of the frenzied flame more impact, because we are actually saving people and the restoration of the elden ring and us becoming lord gives us more then a fancy chair.
 
Looking again at stuff with some evidence but not clearly worked out in the original series:
In Foundation series, in Dead Hand we learn:
Bel Riose said:
these men of the Foundation swarm like senseless bees and fight like madmen. Every planet is defended viciously, and once taken, every planet heaves so with rebellion it is as much trouble to hold as to conquer. But they are taken, and they are held.
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We later learn that Imperial forces captured "outer planets of Loris" and planet Loris itself. Plus a number of other unspecified planets.
The result as stated in the Mule:
Han Pritcher said:
But this history you mention became inevitable only after we had fought desperately for over a year. The inevitable victory we won cost us half a thousand ships and half a million men.
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Really?
The combined population of multiple planets of Loris kingdom, or multiple planets captured in Loris and elsewhere is in the magnitude of over 10 000 millions. With the situation like "fight like madmen. Every planet is defended viciously, and once taken, every planet heaves so with rebellion it is as much trouble to hold as to conquer. But they are taken, and they are held.", "500 000 men" is unrealistically small tally of losses. A realistic number would be something like 500 million men, women and children.

Is it just a case of Asimov cannot do mathematics? Plenty of examples of that...
And yet, in this case, there is an alternative explanation.

For planet Terminus itself, which had had mere 5 million households with TVs 45 years earlier, total population of 50 million or so in 200 FE and 500 000 casualties, all men, in a desperate war fought at a distance, in outer space and other planets, is a sensible order of magnitude.

So the logical explanation is that the "us" whose losses Pritcher is counting is just the men of Terminus. The men, women and children from other planets who died for Foundation were not "us" and did not count.
And remind who Han Pritcher was:

Indbur III said:
I have your record here, captain — complete. You are forty-three and have been an Officer of the Armed Forces for seventeen years. You were born in Loris, of Anacreonian parents, no serious childhood diseases, an attack of myo . . . well that's of no importance . . . education, pre-military, at the Academy of Sciences, major, hyper-engines, academic standing . . . hm-m-m, very good, you are to be congratulated . . . entered the Army as Under-Officer on the one hundred second day of the 293rd year of the Foundation Era.
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Han Pritcher was himself born of the Four Kingdoms parents, yet he got to move to Terminus. And he is sharing the attitude - that it is the Terminus people who counted, and his ancestors did not. Suggesting that this is pervasive attitude of Foundation, both for those born there and for those with luck to be able to immigrate.
 
Perhaps it is understandable - the shift was pretty gradual from the Four Kingdoms being truly separate, to puppet states, to actually formally integrated (and we don't even know exactly when that last happened, only that it was after 150 FE).
 
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