About
Headcanon is an idea, belief, or aspect present in a piece of fanwork that does not correspondent with the information present in the canonical material, because it’s not present the canonical story or explained differently. Fans and authors often add their headcanon to their works. In certain cases, a specific headcanon can evolve into fanon, which is when a specific fandom belief gets accepted to a point it turns into a widely accepted concept.
Origin
In fiction, canon refers to the conceptual material accepted the work is based on, being the overall set of storyline, premises, settings, and characters offered by the source work, and the specific incidents, relationships, or story arcs that take place within the overall canon. The canon is often used as a base layout in fanworks based on the fictional work. These fanworks are however considered non-canon because they add elements not present in the canon. English writer Ronald Knox first used the term in the context of fiction to differ the orginal Sherlock Holmes novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with others in a 1911 essay “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes”.
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Headcanon Blogs
Fanon
Fanon is a portmanteau of fan and canon. The term is considered an elevated form of the concept of headcanon. Although headcanons are mostly only accepted as plausible by a small group of people and are almost never never regarded as canonical, certain ideas may receive enough attention or popularity that they become influential or widely accepted within the fandom. At this point fandoms refer to the idea as fanon, looking at them as fan-produced canon. To appeal to the fans, the authors of those works at times use fanon as a source for ideas and can reference them in the canonical work.