I've started to grow tired of the headcanon thing. It's already a bit iffy to try and declare an author's interpretation of their own work invalid because you don't want to believe it, but fans (surprise surprise, especially the ones on Tumblr) are starting to try and turn their headcanon into actual canon in their own view. They make their own interpretation, declare it official as far as they're concerned, and become upset when it's not true.
Take the Destiel fandom. Shipping Dean Winchester and Castiel is okay on its own, but a lot of Destiel shippers have been crying foul and claiming that the show is "queer baiting" for intentionally incorporating homoerotic subtext recently and not acting on it.
Guys, they're making fun of you. The writers are totally aware of the Destiel ship and how nutty its fanbase is, and are intentionally throwing in references to the ship to screw with the shippers. But the headcanon-loving fans don't get it because in their minds, Dean and Castiel are canonically in love and the writers are afraid to incorporate homosexual or bisexual protagonists.
It gets even worse when you come across essays dedicated to saying "all of your headcanons are valid because fiction isn't real, so you can't argue against something because it goes against the rules, because there are no rules". I've seen exactly this done in response to people trying to justify problematic elements in fiction using canon, so they're basically the opposite of the extreme: "Oh, you say Zelda can't be the hero ever because canon says she always has to be the damsel? Well, canon doesn't matter at all, at any point, for anything, so fuck you, purist!" And for those curious, yes, it was somebody claiming that Zelda canon dictates that Zelda can never be the hero that set off this anti-canon rant.
Yeah, I'm against people using canon to justify sexism or whatever, but I strongly disagree with "canon isn't real so it's impossible to go against it".
I'm guessing these idiots are basing that around a misinterpretation of postmodernism.
I'm reminded of the (very serious) literary argument that the reader's interpretation of a work trumps that of authorial intent. If the author says "the curtains were blue", and a reader interprets that as "The curtains were blue due to how Mrs. Jones always felt down and depressed, as if a stiff breeze could blow her aside as well", the reader is correct.
I still call bullshit on it.
I think it's a mistake to talk about "correct" or "incorrect". It's fiction. There's no fact of the matter here, there's no outside world where either the curtains are blue or they aren't. The only "world" is the one each reader builds in their head out of their interpretation of words on paper. If the reader interprets "the curtains were blue" as a metaphor for depression, then in the world they built in their head the blue curtains are a metaphor for depression. Meanwhile, in the world the writer intended to create, the curtains are blue because that's their colour. Neither of those worlds is true in any meaningful sense; the curtains don't exist.
If the reader thinks "the author meant that the curtains were blue as a metaphor for depression", then yes, you can speak about correctness or incorrectness, because
what the author meant is a fact about the world with a single right answer. But if the reader isn't trying to build the author's world, there's no sense in which it's wrong to differ from the author's interpretation.
There are many reasons why one might
want to interpret the world the same as the author. If I want to talk to other readers, or predict what will happen later in the book, then it makes sense to act as if there was a "real" world which is the author is talking about. But if I don't care about that, well, there's no right and wrong in how you read fiction. The world you build in your head is the world you build in your head, it doesn't have to be compared to anything else.
