Fandom has its own rules…

What’s Fanon?

…Plus the difference between fanon, canon, and headcanon.

Photo by JOSHUA COLEMAN on Unsplash

If you’re a lover of fanfiction, or general internet-ish fan spaces, you can’t escape fanon.

It’s everywhere.

But what is fanon?

Fanon is headcanon that is so widely accepted within fandom that it is treated as canon.

Granted, if you don’t speak fandom, that statement’s gonna confuse you as much as you were before — so lemme clear up a few more terms while we’re at it.

So, what’s canon?

Canon is the official, on-page/on-screen stuff that happens as part of a book/series/whatever

So it’s the ‘official’ source material that fan-created works are based on. Anything found in the source material itself is canon.

OK, so we’ve sorted canon… but WTF is headcannon?

Headcanon (aka Headcannon, cos it blows your mind) is something an individual accepts as canon…