#headcanon musing

[deadkraker]

something i feel your argument fails to address is the fact that, ultimately, watcher lore is kind of whatever you make of it. it’s far out of the hands of true undeniable canon or themes or story because you the viewer (and one might even say….You, the Watcher) are the one making the canon and the themes and the story. You decide what it means. you string together a narrative that makes sense to you. and while obviously there is direct storytelling to draw from present in evo, a vast majority of watcher lore fans are fans of it purely from a fandom perspective and have never engaged with the source material; while this itself could be argued about and against, all of this is to say that, like, yeah, to some people it’s going to mean other things. to some people, it’s going to mean a little bit of fun and not much more. to some people, it means exactly what you believe it to mean, but they also want to see grian recover and thrive in spite of his hardship, however they might want to portray that. just something to chew on. the versatility of this stuff makes me crazy. IDK ur post got me thinking I Love your watcher thoughts they deeply fascinate and inspire me!!!

YEA VERY TRUE!

ik my post was kinda complaining about it but beyond personal pettiness i do very much like how versatile the meaning of 'watcher' is in the greater fandom. I'm always going to be a horror fanatic and crave to see things taken to the extreme, but that is just my own obsession, just like the more hopeful narratives are someone else's. i DO wish there was more proper horror about watchers, but that doesnt mean i want the other takes on them to not exist or get created. honestly while i dont really enjoy them i do find them very interesting from a meta standpoint.

like SO much of watcher fanon stuff is just trans allegories. and thats because a lot of the people who like fanon watchers are young trans people! to them watcher Grian is a way to put their own hardships into a form that is easier for them to grabble with. feeling alien in your body is confusing, and having your biology betray you is horrifying, and those feelings are so much easier to manage when you give those changes a form, something that is the cause instead of just abstract factors way outside of your control like puberty. and having that fictionalised version of your own pain, be told that THIS PAIN DOES NOT MAKE HIM EVIL, it doesnt mean he is broken or bad and that it will not be this painful forever is so valuable. having someone or something tell you that you will fucking get through this as a scared young person dealing with things that you have very little control over is genuinely life saving. I was one of those teens not too long ago, still am and I will never truly look down on these types of stories because of it. because frankly the comfort they can bring to people outweighs the literary critique i have with the stories themselves sometimes.

I have a habit of talking like my point is the only right one, and its something i do wish to work on because it just isn't what I mean when I write my long winded rants, but other people obviously do not know what goes on in my head lol. I kinda just vomit my thoughts out there and dont really think too hard about how it might seem like im judging when mostly i just tend to talk kinda aggresively when im excited. still! youre very right! i know i didnt adress too much of your points in this as i got once again side tracked, but I genuinely appriciate your input because it is good to kinda check how i adress stuff as my own posts do not in fact live in a vacuum just like anything else in the world lmao.

TY FOR THE ASK! I love talking with people about this stuff so I value every person who takes time out of their day to engage with my thoughts! evidently I do not run out of shit to talk about!

[maraudererasmut]

not the same anon but i hc sirius, personally, as having a posh accent bc of his family and aristocracy etc.. but he starts picking up the other's different ways of speaking---so hes just a very confusing mix of accents lmao. His voice would be deep and smooth but Remus's would be lower that his' (which sirius loves) that's my take on it!

Ooooooh! I love that headcanon!

That's actually something I love to include in all of my fics, whenever I can: Sirius with a posh accent that fades over time. Sometimes it's an accent that he puts on that fades a bit when he's drunk, or sometimes he slips into the posh accent that he grew up with when he's not paying attention. Either way, I love the idea of Sirius' accent changing depending on who he's around, how in-control he is at the time, or how much time he's spent around the boys.

Thanks for letting us know about your headcanon, Anon! 💙

[deadkraker]

Tell me some of your head canons for any dsmp character:3

dug out this from the bottom of a file cabinet, sorry cupid im here two years later answering your questions

HC: cphil is a deer hyprid turned weird fucking harpy monster in my heart.

ive somewhat talked abt this but i wanna talk about it again SO. as always i have to compare cphil to ghibli, while i take a little inspiration from all of Miyazaki's work its probably pretty obvious that this 'turned into a bird monster by magic' is taken from Howl's Whole Deal in HMC.

(like literally tell me this isnt cphil. that is just him chat.)

im not great at drawing birds, or feathers, but everytime i do draw cphil i try my best to channel the soul of the animators that worked on this movie because it does such a good job of switching between and also mixing howls beauty and also his monstrosity. THAT is the shit i wanna channel into my cphil, but have yet to quite get right in my own art. (partially cus i dont really wanna make cphil a twink like howl is, but that "youthful innocent beauty" (eugh.) is a big part of why the contrast works. so im still brainstorming. cphils not 20 and i dont wanna make him 20 just for the sake of a good visual.)

more coments i always use as inspo. howl's insistence on smiling when agitaded or in pain is especially a big inspo when drawing 'normal-ish cphil' like that kinda mean look he gets is SO good for cphil who outwardly is and wants to come off as easy going and friendly but who is also VERY mean when he wants to, usually doing vicious shit WHILE he is playing it off with chill vibes. its a very big part of my view on cphil.

also the kinda whimsical but also horrifying-if-you-think-about-it body horror/loss of autonomy aspect is something i also kinda yoink from this story and glue onto cphil's. theres so much inspo from howls moving castle idk how much of it i can really call my own headcanoning honestly LMAO..

[derangedhyena-zoids]

currently thinking about older!Vega and future bullshit which is dumb because I’m not working on any of that right now, but whatever. (also decided I’m just gonna resume wordbarfing in here about the headcanon stuff in general then clean it up for the website, because I get super “NNNGH PERFECTION??” when I’m writing that sort of shit in an actual text editor apparently. while when I’m writing in here, even though it tends to be grammatically trash - it’s words. and that’s what I need to... you know, edit) it’ll all be behind a cut. like this is, so nobody has to deal with my bullshit unless they inflict it upon themselves idk lol) cw injury (? technically?)

  anyways  Vega’s hair isn’t covering half his face for edgy purposes, it’s because he’s a bit Fucked Up and I suspect Sara might have made him self-conscious about it.

not as in “he cares terribly much” but as in “it bothers Sara and he just doesn’t want to deal with that”. sara doesn’t like to be reminded she fucked her kid up really badly ayyyyy    that is part of why nightmare-mode seems likely though if he’s literally already deferring to his mom about how he looks/presents himself, well... while this is technically an injury (I guess??), it’s really not hurting him (any more than being bound to One is). it’s more an outward manifestation of the damage One is doing just by... existing. it doesn’t bother HIM.  whole topic brings up a lot of other questions to me that I’m still pondering the answers to, but the tl;dr is that this is the benign version of what led to the Dark Kaiser

[derangedhyena-zoids]

re: Ambient

I really hope that people are getting the takeaways that: a) he’s his own person, and w/Hiltz that person is gleefully horrible. and while he’s more than confident in/capable of stirring up his own shit, he’d much rather do so With Friends(tm) b) he is actually fucking exasperated with Hiltz a lot of the time, eg

he loves him like nothing else but he’s really tired of Negative Nancy over there being all doom and gloom. Hiltz, to Ambient ONLY, was incredibly depressed and kinda whiny, up until post-Pantheon. After which he starts an exponential slide into Nope. c) Organoids have a more present-focused mindset overall. they absolutely can consider the past and future, they just don’t see much point in it (please see: the evolution of their group dynamic and how it differs from humans’/zoidians.)  c) he leaves the long-term planning and whatnot to Hiltz; his is why he was so shocked when everything went to shit because he just figured Hiltz had everything under control (by that point.)

d) this means: he blames himself for whatever went wrong, because he can’t deal with the cognitive dissonance of blaming Hiltz. d2) as I think I’ve mentioned before, he also sort-of blames One, because he indeed noticed that Hiltz got a little weird after Pantheon. This is partially correct, but he himself became the actual implement of destruction, which - again - if he ever figures that out it’s gonna be bad and honestly I don’t what will happen w/that, yet. 

e) ........ tl;dr this is effectively what’s happening in echo

[positroniic-blog]

would data be considered aromantic? would he be pansexual? what even is my boy who can’t feel until he has that darn chip in his head?

[dimensionhoppinghybrids]

Small headcanon I have had in mind with Kirins or rather the halfling offspring of a pony  and dragon.

When getting married, they have the choice of making something or having something made for their mates.

Be it either a necklace or a ring, or some sort of jewelry, they make it as a sign of a request to have that individual as a mate. One being made for themselves of course.

But it’s a small tradition that is optional, but is something that is taken into consideration. What do you guys think?

[hornkerling]

Braids and decency: Ista Trevelyan, 1,426 words

The work is hard. Her hands slip. How does the folding work? Is it folding? One bit of hair going over another, and around another still, all while keeping other hair out of the way. You need both hands. At the same time. Ista scowls at herself in the mirror, but she shouldn’t, because mirrors mean looking, and looking means moving, and then all she sees is that she’s gone red with trying and her hair has knotted up.

Dark hands fall to her shoulders, and she watches her aunt drop a kiss to the frizzy top of her head.

“I’m stupid,” she mutters, while Prudence reaches down and takes the brush. “I’m ten.”

“Only one of these things is true,” her aunt says, both of them wincing as the brush catches on knots.

“Bell can do it.” The words slip out, and she flushes, looking at her hands. One in her lap, the other pressed close across her chest, still with strands of hair stuck about fingers that have done all their opening for the day. “She’s four.”

“Well, that’s two true statements,” her aunt says. “Watch my hands.”

Ista looks up, sees the slow movement as Prudence parts and gathers her hair, dividing it into three sections that, now that Ista is no longer trying, she almost understands. Prudence smiles at her in the mirror, all warmth and crooked teeth. She drops the new braid; ties off the end.

“You’ll learn, sweet girl,” Prudence says. “Or you won’t. But it’s never the end of the world.”

***

Ista is eleven. She has dressed carefully. She looks well in blue. Everyone says so. The dress falls in pleats, hiding her legs as she walks. It’s hard not to trip on the swirl of skirt, but she likes the feel of it around her calves. Likes the contrast between dark-dyed fabric and the firelight crackle of her hair. She’s brushed it down, best she can, and she feels very grown up at the weight of it against her back. Her arms ache from the effort of reaching up and trying to get out all the knots at the back of her head, the base of her neck. But it’s a good hurt. A work hurt, and grown up is good, for this.

She stands in lord Lord Trevelyan’s study. It’s a warm place, cluttered with maps and worn carpet and the little statues of Andraste that he likes to touch when he’s angry or nervous, fingers absent over the white stone. Now, he sits at his desk, and has a glare that makes her five, the Waking Sea crashing and breathing for all to hear through an open window. “You needed something?”

“I—”

“—Go on, spit it out. Stand up straight.”

“You said I could visit my mother.”

A laugh for that. Loud, half like her aunt Ahu’s, except that Ista does not like the echoes in it. He sets his book aside. “When did I say something that foolish?”

Ista swallows. “When I asked last year.”

“Did you catch me drunk?” Trevelyan groans. “You can’t. You won’t.”

“—but she’s—”

“—she hasn’t written a word about you since she left,” Trevelyan snaps. “You’re old enough to know that. Ask your aunt. Ask the hedgewitch. They know.”

“—Don’t call Prudence—” her voice bubbles out. Too fast. Too hot. The words blur and burn her tongue.

“—Speak. Properly.” Trevelyan doesn’t raise his voice, but Ista flinches. He looks disgusted, half turning away from her she swallows and grips the desk with one hand, trying not to fall. “No one understands you when you sound like a drunk.” A glare at the wall. “The woman’s in my house, I’ll call her what I wish.”

“I just…” Ista swallows. Repeats the word, trying shape it.

When Lord Trevelyan speaks, he stares off somewhere just above her head. “Just as, Lady Ista, you’ll be called my daughter as long as you’re in this house. I promised that much.” A shrug. “But if you go out of it? Well.”

The words sit between them.

***

There is a hand in her hair. Hard, holding her up by it as cold trickles down her back, through her chest. Her teeth ache. There’s smoke and grit and something wrong in her mouth as the Templar shakes her, cursing as sparks catch on his tabbards. She feels bell-struck, thoughts skittering away as more of the cold feeling seeps into her, sticking to the wrong side of her skin.

“I think you got her,” someone says, the words thin behind the humming. “Did you need a full Smite?”

“She had the Chantry on fire.” A shake. Needles in her eyes, tearing from her scalp.

***

Ista is fifteen and half awake. She’s used to it, the feeling of not quite knowing how deep the next breath is going to be, or whether her eyes are stuck together just a little, or hard enough that if she opens then she’ll leave half her eyelashes on her cheek. Her stomach clenches. Her legs are heavy, wrapped and weighted. There is sweat pooling at the back of her neck.

She groans. One hand can move. Hand to arm to shoulder, just so long as she’s slow. Her fingers brush hot skin.

Only skin.

Her eyes open. She arches back, tries to get her arm beneath her, high enough to touch her scalp. And it is her scalp, fuzzy and clipped and strange under her palm.

They didn’t say they were going to cut her head.

Her hand hurts if she splays it, but Ista tries—spanning, searching for a soft spot or a new stretch of scar. Nothing.

“Ah, you’re awake. Do calm down.”

Delyn. Smiling at her and reaching down to take hold of her arm, force it gently back to her side. “We had you under for a little longer, this time. Nothing serious.”

“D-d-d-d-d—”

“Apprentice.”

She closes her eyes. Tries to breathe. “Did you do anything. To. Did you do anything to my—my—”

“Ista.”

“My head.” The word comes out a wail, long and shaking and bewildered. “Did you do anything to—you’re laughing.”

Delyn looks delighted. He has a good laugh. Easy, kind. He catches a tear with his thumb. “We didn’t do anything to your head, apprentice,” he says. “Just cut your hair. It’ll be so much easier to look after now, don’t you think?”

*** 

Ista’s arms pull as she reaches back, swearing when her hair slips from her grasp for the tenth time. Over. Around. Under. Over. Around. Fuck. Missed that bit. Move on. She grins to herself as she grips the staircase. All the rooms in the world seem to live in Skyhold. And she still got the one with stairs.

There is a day to face. She’ll do her best to face it well.

***

They are all a mess. The dragon died loudly. Died well. A part of her aches with it, sorry and sore that something so lovely has only a finite amount of blood, that tiny people can end it the way they end everything else.

(Yes, Bull, even you. This is a metaphor.)

But the other part is still caught up in claws and teeth and heat, the feeling of her own strength drawn up and up and knowing she can win. Her throat is raw from terror and laughter. Scales cut her hands and Varric is calling them all completely insane. but Bull has two hands fisted in her hair and saying Boss with a delighted reverence that kicks at her heart.

There's blood in her hair. Blood and scorch and a whole world of mess. and he uses it to hold her head back, arch her into his mouth as he licks sweat from the base of her throat.  

The noise Cassandra makes from the other side of the dragon is half disgust and half a laugh, and Ista grins at her when she opens her eyes, even as she lets the rest of her go limp with the exhaustion and delight and ache that she is, in moments like this, happy to feel. 

Voices fade. Heartbeats slow. Bull's hands tighten her hair. The world is good.