feynites:

Fiction isn’t fact. That seems obvious, but what I mean is, if a piece of fiction presents you with a piece of information, then it’s entirely possible for all interpretations of that information to be equally valid. There’s no ‘truth’, there’s just whatever information is contained within the writing.

For example, take a news story that describes a criminal suspect as being between 5’11” and 6’2” in height. In reality, the suspect has a definitive physical height, that exists whether we know it or not. So if he’s, say, 6’1”, that’s a fact that’s not in the story’s description. That’s a true thing that could be definitively uncovered. Suspect exists beyond the story and has an existence with facts not contained in the story. 

But in fiction, if a story describes a character as being between 5’11” and 6’2”, and never specifies a height beyond that, then any height within that range is equally true. Because no factual height exists for the character. There’s no way to be ‘wrong’, outside of saying, like, ‘oh he’s 6’3”’, since the character’s existence does not extend beyond the conceptual. Unlike a real person, a fictional character can have multiple conflicting things be equally true about them at the same time (Schrodinger’s Fictional Cat, pretty much). This character’s height is 5’11”, and 6’0”, and 6’1”, and 6’2”, all at once, which would be impossible for a real person.

This is where headcanons come in. A headcanon is when someone looks at an aspect of a character that is not set in the story, and decides that they are going to pick an answer themselves and let it be their own truth about this piece of fiction. So, a person going ‘I’m going to make this character 6’1” every time I draw them’, is headcanoning this character’s height.

Now, where this actually gets complicated is when people disagree with one another’s headcanons. Like, for example, if someone really wants this character to be 5’11”, and then gets annoyed with seeing this other person consistently depict them as 6’1”. So, they decide they’re going to argue about it. Usually starting out by citing something like ‘okay, so in Book One: Crimology Time, Chapter Six – The Singing Trees, Character is described as tilting their head up to look at Rival, who is canonically 6’1”, so they are almost certainly shorter than that’. Which will often receive a retaliation along the lines of ‘Character and Rival were standing outside on a forest trail for that conversation, though, so there’s every chance that the ground was sloping – they’d even been walking uphill a couple of paragraphs ago, and Rival was ahead of character, which means they would be on higher ground’. Which could lead to more ‘evidence’ being cited, and refuted, and if the people arguing don’t either change their opinion or agree to disagree, they will eventually find themselves embroiled in a heated debate that is actually impossible to win.

This is where fandom runs into a sort of notorious pattern of interaction.

Because if you can’t win an argument on the basis of facts (because those facts don’t exist), then the next option to turn to is the arena of values. For anyone who’s ever wondered why fandom arguments seem to evolve into moral discussions with surprising frequency, this is why – fiction can lack objective truths, but morality is something people feel strongly right or wrong about and that they can apply to conceptual subjects. So after a certain point ‘winning’ an argument becomes more viable if you can go ‘my concept is more noble’ or ‘your concept is less noble’, because then the actual discussion has moved from attempting to prove/disprove something that has no true answer, to proving which option is more/less commendable or righteous. 

Which isn’t to say that having ethical reasons for preferring certain concepts in fiction is in any way bad. Or even that these discussions have no merit. In fact, they’re often really interesting and well thought-out. But, a lot of the time, when they happen they also aren’t actually motivated by a genuine desire to discuss the moral implications of fiction – they’re motivated by a desire to win.

But even if you do establish some headcanon or another as being morally superior, that still doesn’t make it more true. No matter what grounds you argue on or what approach you take, that character’s height is still 5’11”, and 6’0”, and 6’1”, and 6’2”, all at once. Because that’s how fiction works. And if you’re not careful, you will exhaust yourself trying to prove non-existent points to people who are never going to concede them on grounds that are irrelevant to the conversation, like Sisyphus trying to roll an argument boulder up a never-ending hill.