fictional_fans | Inspiration for AUs and Headcanons

Where do you find inspiration for an AU or a headcanon?

Maybe it could be from an elaborate plot of a book, movie, or even tv? Or maybe the inspiration comes from a youtube video of someone eating an entire menu in a moving truck?

I'm just curious to find out, because sometimes inspiration can be found somewhere unexpected.

Threaded | Flat

From:

senmut

Random minor scenes that could have been expanded and taken characters in different directions. Those have a tendency to make me "What If" and develop them... to the point of making new headcanons as the characters interact.

From:

kalloway

taichara, mostly.

Other than that-- occasional shower thoughts, fridge moments, and tearing canon to shreds with my bare hands.

From:

megpie71

For something I'm working on at present: I wanted a reason for a character to be isolated from their family for a year, yet still have a reasonably good relationship with their parents. So I decided on making this character the youngest of four... with an eighteen-year gap between himself and his next-eldest sibling (the story is: he was conceived during their parents celebration of his sib's high school graduation). This had some interesting knock-on effects, given I wound up turning another character into that next-eldest sibling simply because of the canonical relationship between the two characters (which works well as a "loving-siblings-with-a-large-gap" dynamic, less well as a "complete strangers" dynamic).

The other thing I'm doing with this particular piece of work is writing it as a platonic soul-bond AU between two of the characters (the protagonist and the first-introduced female supporting character) of the "telepathic bond" type, mainly because firstly I wanted to see what happens if you throw that in there, and secondly, I wanted to see a bit more writing about male and female people in friendly, platonic relationships with each other, rather than romantic ones.

A lot of head-canon is very much extrapolating from what's given - there are very few head-canons I have which outright contradict the canon stuff. As another example, from the same source as both of the above, I'm choosing to interpret one of the characters (a girl who is a shut-in, gets extremely anxious in crowds, wears large earmuff-style headphones constantly, and who has a lot of quirky and occasionally socially inappropriate behaviours) as being autistic. Actually, autistic head-canons are pretty common for me (I'm autistic myself, I want representation, damn it!) - two of the more notable ones are Squall Leonhart from Final Fantasy VIII, and Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII (this one because Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core proved pretty comprehensively that high levels of Jenova cells in one's system does NOT mean one becomes socially incompetent - which means there has to be another reason behind Sephiroth's weirdness).

(Oh, and I constantly head-canon the Warrior of Light in the Dissidia stories to be the same one who shows up in Mobius Final Fantasy, because the MFF Warrior of Light is a cranky, cross-grained bastard, and I like the idea of having him grumping his way around with all the other Final Fantasy heroes.)

From:

fred_mouse

Attempting to work out the logic for in canon weirdnesses, mostly.

From:

pensnest

I've written quite a few AUs, and they come from various inspirations.

Personal experience: I worked in an advertising-adjacent industry many years ago, and it was enough (I think!) to allow me to fit my boys into an ad agency AU. Also wrote a very late pinch-hit drawing extensively from my own experience at geek conventions.

Canon-adjacent-icity(?): Translating the actual-world existences into something similar, possibly parallel. I was very pleased with my AU in which NSYNC became the cast of 'Synchronicity', a teens TV show, and Adam Lambert became an aspirant actor who could sing, rather than an aspirant singer with acting experience

Dragons! I've done quite a few stories involving dragons. Dragons are never wrong. I ran a dragon challenge for several years. When you start with a dragon, the rest of the world will come along.

Stole a plot:

- The Full Monty - though in this case it was more the stage musical than the film.

- Shakespeare: I've always loved Much Ado About Nothing the most, and it was in essence the plot of one of my more recent stories. I also threw in a location that I'd seen in a different context. And chefs, possibly because watching so much of The Great British Bake-Off made me think Food.

- fairy stories (Cinderella has a great basic plot)

Also, canon. A Backstreet Boys video, in which the Boys are a 1980s hair metal band *and* fans of same, was just begging to have an AU written about it.

From:

silveradept

Often times, there's a bit where I go "Oh, WTF?" in canon. Or, I realize that I'm going to have to answer that question without ever actually getting the official one. And, occasionally, because I have ideas that crash together and refuse to go away.

More often than not, though, you'll see the headcanons and AUs start appearing because the secondary characters are off-screen enough that you can start speculating about what they're doing and what they're interested in. And that causes all sorts of fun.

From:

cadenzamuse

Trying to make the plot holes make sense. Real life experiences/jobs/events I've had. Smashing things together (current personal AU I try on basically every fandom I'm in involved "what if we combined GATTACA with Star Trek Reboot with soul bonds with disability activism?")

From:

doranwen

My AU fics are all either canon divergence or apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic - sometimes even both (as in the case of one series I started for Alphas). Mostly I notice specific places where they had things turn out really well by coincidence, and it feels too perfect or neatly tied up, or I think someone made a stupid decision and I want to see what would've happened had they done the logical thing, or I'm just simply curious about the path not taken. In one case (a Rookie Blue WIP that's on hold), I think the scenes as depicted would involve the character in question dying from their wounds, but they have them being still alive when found, surviving surgery, etc., and I just don't think that's plausible - so my WIP is fixing the implausibility.

From:

doranwen

Ha, I forgot to answer the headcanon bit - now that's a bit different.

I have a few ace headcanons because I'm ace myself and I don't find it nearly so easy to see UST as everyone else claims (I think a lot of it is in what one experiences - the stuff on the screen can go either way depending on who's actually experiencing it).

I also have one character that I headcanon as Asperger's - canon has her not understanding idioms, being a bit socially awkward, like she can handle high society stuff with all its rules but finds more relaxed down-to-earth stuff very difficult. They started out with showing it pretty strong but then it got watered down by the last season (I suspect they figured she'd picked up stuff from her best friend who was always teaching her what was really going on with phrases and situations), and they never actually said that she was on the spectrum or anything like that, but it feels like she is to me, so.

I don't know that I have a lot of other headcanons… *thinks* Mostly just emotional behind-the-scenes stuff, like what's going on in someone's head and why, for very specific characters and canons (Nina Theroux in Alphas, for one). Unless I write a ton of fics in a single canon (the most I've done is about 10 in a single fandom - I do more exchange writing than writing for myself), I don't develop much headcanon, particularly not anything that carries over into more than one fic or series. I'll write something for that specific fic, but it exists all in its own universe and often times the raison d'être for the detail is because of the fic's plot or something like that.

From:

mythicmistress

Most of my AU ideas come from wishing the characters had done something differently in a situation (especially if I think their canon actions were really stupid). Some of my headcanons come from expanding on little things I notice in the source material.

From:

fabrisse

Prompts, mostly.

My "Rebuilding the Table" stories in the Kingsman fandom were based on the end of the first movie and extrapolating, so while I consider them an AU, it's at least partially due to the second movie jossing my very logical assumptions. ;-)

"The Great War" on the other hand was an AU in the same fandom from the beginning. There was a prompt at Dressing Room Three and it sparked a little "Hmmm" and everything went from there. I love getting random prompts and occasionally hang around the fringes of prompt communities to pick up ideas (which I credit). It's one of the reasons I adore writing for Yuletide. Prompts let me latch onto something and then swing free in my imagination.