I keep seeing things about “that was/wasn’t canon”, “…head canon…” and everything else of the like and I for the life of me can’t figure out what it means other than that it was something that was supposed to happen. And like how would you use it in a sentence?
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In medieval times, a “canon” meant a rule or decree, especially a religious one (it still can mean this in some contexts). There are longstanding disputes about which texts should be included in the Bible, and people started referring to the ones that were officially included according to some authority as “canon” or “canonical”. This then got extended to other kinds of texts; for example, “the literary canon” means the set of famous works of literature that anyone who is into literature should be familiar with. In the 1930s, people started talking about “the Sherlock Holmes canon”, meaning the stories about Sherlock Holmes written by Arthur Conan Doyle as opposed to later stories written by other authors. It eventually became commonplace to use the same language to refer to any connected series of fictional works, and to specific ideas in those works as opposed to works themselves. For example, someone might claim that a specific Star Trek spin-off novel “is canon”, but they might also say that a specific statement made in that novel about a particular alien species “is canon”. Sometimes there are disputes about what should be considered “canon” because even the “official” works in a series contradict each other or because the series has a messy publication history (e.g. the authors have specifically disowned certain works or it’s not clear who wrote all of them). “Headcanon” is mostly only used on social media. People use it to refer playfully to their own interpretations of a work. For example, “my headcanon is that Romeo and Juliet magically came back to life and lived happily ever after”.
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