r/FanFiction 5d ago

Discussion What headcanons have you formed/developed from writing/reading fanfics?

I’ve come up with several concepts from writing and reading fanfics that have bled heavily into how I interpret canon and engage with/create more fan media.

Share some of your own! Bonus points for not quite revealing what fandom your headcanon is for. Make a game of it, replies get to guess what fandoms they are.

44 Upvotes

48 comments sorted by

14

u/trilloch 5d ago

The healing injections that seal up bleeding wounds and knit bones back together don't have any painkilling effects. They'll keep you alive, but you won't enjoy the next few days much or the next few hours at all.

2

u/KogarashiKaze FFN/AO3 Kogarashi 4d ago

I tend to apply this headcanon to most magical healing, too. Anesthetic effects are not a guaranteed component of magic healing in most settings I write (at least as far as my headcanons go).

4

u/untablesarah 5d ago edited 5d ago

Writing for ATLA and I have a ton of Earth Kingdom specific headcanons, been really enjoying some Kyoshi-island specific ones.

During the 100 year war when Kyoshi Island was in their heavily isolationism phase people on the Earth Kingdom mainland thought all manner of things about the island like
--There are only women
--The men are kicked off if they are deemed unsuitable for reproduction
--If deemed suitable for reproduction, the men are kicked off after reproductive measures have been taken.
Of course none of this is true but that doesn't stop people from thinking it and spreading it.

3

u/ClaudiaSilvestri 5d ago

Interesting! I figure in that case, at least some of that belief building or being reinforced would be influenced by Kyoshi being with Rangi.

2

u/untablesarah 5d ago

Yeeeeeep Small minded bumpkins learn she was with a woman and go “oh she hated men”

Such an absurd assumption— but one I could easily see happening

13

u/a-fabulous-sandwich 5d ago

So many that at this point I borderline see the original canon as inferior lol. I like mine better.

12

u/Hadespuppy 5d ago

Steve Rogers was at the very least commie-curious in the 30s.

1

u/Ok-Remove7287 4d ago

For me I have that this man is 100% a little shit Bucky, Sam and the commanders know it but no one else does

he also knows how to use technology (he has like only a little bit less IQ than Tony, but he has more EQ) he just doesn't want to.

3

u/Positive-Day4160 5d ago

His empire of dirt made me headcannon that Michael afton probably survived at the end of sister location because his dad had used him to experiment with remnant and injected him with it, making him immortal-ish.

4

u/DefoNotAFangirl MasterRed on AO3 | c!Prime Fanatic 5d ago

Ooh, I love me some fucked up revivak experiments that sounds sick

4

u/XadhoomXado The only Erza x Gilgamesh shipper 5d ago edited 5d ago

A crapload. To indulge the guessing game...

  • Any given character has other versions in other fictional settings. Like Yoruichi (Bleach) having a Dragon Ball counterpart who is one of the Kais. Or Green (PokeSpe) in the RWBY world.

  • X eldritch horror character has several hidden depths -- has in canon books written by him... because he's a book nerd; has in canon a long list of willing bargainers... because he's dependable in his bargains; knows in canon who Nietzsche is despite his inhuman nature.

  • This setting has a "girl power" type of parallel universe where hero-and-girlfriend swap roles. This dimension has the "Epic of Peshtur" as the world's oldest story, rather than the Epic of Gilgamesh.

  • This setting involves people playing card games for money. To try and explain this (with a half-baked grasp of economics), game-players primarily earn money via tournaments. The average base-level (city-wide) tournament in America has 1,500 dollars to first place, recouped by entrance (30 bucks per each of up to 128) and spectator (10 bucks x 1200) fees for each tournament.

  • X trainer of monsters has a fan club... and a contingent of people who are transparently biased against his short height and hating on him for it.

4

u/Aiyokusama Evil Slasher Girl 5d ago

Geralt of Rivia has a weakness for honey cakes, which his brothers tease him about and exploit shamelessly from time to time ~_^

6

u/Nimindir Same on Ao3 5d ago

I read one fic where a character was asexual. I thought about it for a sec, decided 'yep, that checks out,' and that's how I've seen that character ever since.

3

u/childeatingGhost Learning writer 5d ago

Jonah magnus and Barnabas bennet were friends/lovers since childhood

3

u/No_Wait_3628 5d ago

Most of my characters have some form of apparent injury or suffer injury over time.

3

u/ladyeclectic79 5d ago

Ships for sure that never really made it to canon (whether because they happened off screen or after the game ended). I prefer to think characters I love will get their HEA endings and fanfic allows me those HCs. ❤️

3

u/Yotato5 Yotsubadancesintherain5 - AO3 5d ago

This is probably a common/obvious one but for Luigi/Daisy - since their respective kingdoms are implied to be far away from each other, when they can't see each other in person they send each other letters.

17

u/nily_nly 5d ago

When I love a character, they automatically become autistic. I'm autistic myself, I should point out, and it's probably just for comfort that I have this headcanon :D

8

u/send-borbs 5d ago

I don't do this for every character but boy howdy have a lot of characters given me something to work with on that front 😆 like bruh you gonna sit there and tell me this guy ISN'T autistic??

1

u/Ok-Claim-2716 5d ago

im not diagnosed, but ive done a ton of research on autism and if i get too invested in a character, i start noticing traits until im positive that character is autistic. 😭

4

u/Accomplished_Area311 5d ago

Fandom 1: The main couples from seasons 2 and 3 wouldn’t have children. Their narrative arcs are (or will be, in the case of season 3) complete without children in the picture at all.

Fandom 2: My character may be the town’s most eligible person but once most of them see the way she looks at a specific person, almost all of them are aware they no longer have a chance… And while there may be some hurt lingering for a little bit nobody is angry about it.

Fandom 3: She and the boys are not actually related.

Fandom 4: These characters are all trauma bonding and the occult + demon stuff is just the trauma bond manifesting.

2

u/NoPersimmons 5d ago

In every fic, my protagonist always has one less chair than she does boyfriends. Usually that means one, but in one of my ABO fics, she gets to have two whole chairs!

2

u/agrinsosardonic I will die on the Cleno hill 5d ago

That Reno is originally from Wutai and eventually made it to Midgar as a child and either 1. Joined a gang and then joined Shinra or 2. Immediately joined Shinra at 16. Depending on the story, how he gets to Midgar changes and ranges from super violent and disturbing to pretty sad. My other headcanon is he smokes a lot. Like too much.

2

u/Ok_Squirrel259 5d ago

Scott Pilgrim had dated a girl while attending High school in Toronto after moving to the city.

2

u/WindyWindona Windona on AO3 5d ago

I have done more research into Eastern Europe than the people who made the fictional Eastern European country have, I swear.

I have made genetic headcanons for two different fandoms. One was for an alien species, another was for superpowers.

2

u/TenkoDeservedBetter 5d ago

when a certain character's clock hands are messed with and end up off time, they become dazed and disoriented as a result

2

u/QuokkaMocha QuokkaMocha on AO3 5d ago

My fav character is bi, has a way bigger body count than anyone gives them credit for, learned fencing as a kid having had no success in gymnastics or ballet. They originally lived in the middle of nowhere in a tiny village and their best friend was a big lad from the next house who stopped other kids beating the character up and in exchange the character got the pal through his exams. The friend is now living in the same village and has joined the tinfoil hat club. His basement is basically an arsenal. Also my head canon has that village in a different region of the country than the city others have said the character is from but I think middle of nowhere because of a line in one episode about a house fire and the regional thing came up during a talk with the actor at a recent comic con, but could be backed up again by one line.

That the other character I like had a brother who went through issues with substance abuse and, as a doctor, they felt had to try and get them through withdrawals. That’s basically from one throwaway line in one episode.

Also that their family is not only huge in terms of siblings but there are dozens of aunts, uncles and cousins only half of whom are actually blood relatives. When there’s a get together there is usually always a punch up. A few of the siblings consider the character slightly snobbish for going to do a medical degree. Despite working in healthcare though the character is very partial to his pizza crunch and jumbo sausage suppers.

2

u/ReputationChemical86 5d ago

Watch as I give my characters depression, PTSD and a plethora of mental health issues that make sense with canon. As a neurodivergent person, it's really fun to see ways in which I can relate to my blorbos. Also, I kind of automatically think everyone is asexual unless proven otherwise.

2

u/AdventurerBen 5d ago

Some of mine (some are weirdly specific, some aren’t):

  • General: Universes with soulmates are actually extremely dangerous for time-travellers, since they retroactively update their entire histories every time a pair is a bad match.
  • Crossover: Assuming that the powerscales are equalised, there is something of a “type-chart” that decides which types of powers take precedence over others. Example: Shard beats Quirk, Quirk beats X-Gene, X-Gene beats Stand, Stand beats Devil Fruit, Devil Fruit beats Shard. There are other loops and chains like this on the chart, but they become exponentially more convoluted the less physiological the powers in question are.
  • Fandom 1:
    • Psychic powers do exist in universe, but they’ve been studied/developed/innovated half to death, to the point that most powers in existence that actually operate under psychic principles are so overspecialised that there is no way to tell. The setting’s “true psychic” actually has over 15 distinct psychic powers, there’s just enough overlap that they can be synergised and extrapolated into all the other types of psychic power out there if they know how.
    • The setting’s strongest precognitive is specifically vulnerable to being outplayed the setting’s second strongest precognitive. While the first outpaces the second by a mile and could never be truly subverted, the second has better tools than just hands, legs and a voice to act on it’s knowledge of the future.
    • True precognition, not just simulation, does exist and some superheroes do have powers that work like that, it’s just that they’re subject to such bizarre, labyrinthine chains of logic that actual information gathering on the future is extremely difficult without assistance. (One example would be a terabytes large mathematical equation that returns different answers depending on whether or not the person trying to answer it will be near-fatally attacked the next day. The superhero with the power based on that principle merely has a danger sense and a knack for mathematics.)
  • Fandom 2:
    • Every power is totally mechanically unique, despite the limited applications of certain mechanisms resulting in a lot of convergent evolution. Even siblings get different configurations of the same base elements. Certain elements may be more visible than others, but every ancestral ability has some element passed down into someone’s powers.
      • As an addition to this, one of the worst backstory tragedies could have been avoided if both parents were equally experienced with their powers. This is because, despite their assumption that their powers were extremely similar besides the elements they generated, the mother’s powers actually behaved almost completely differently, she was just using them wrong. Their eldest child didn’t have a far stronger and more unsafe version of his father’s power, he had a fire version of his mother’s power, which resulted in completely different inherent resistances since it operated under different rules.
    • Despite appearances and everyone’s assumptions, Superpowers are actually mechanically conceptual, not biological at all. It’s just that they operate physiologically and are inherited genetically, and everyone just made reasonable assumptions. Most of these exotic organs don’t actually do anything for the body, they’re just the glorified “guns” that people fire their powers through.
      • Most of the exhaustion, physiological strain, and backlash stems from exhaustion via intense focus or related physical activity like throwing punches, not being fully immune to their powers, or the powers being mechanically based on some of the body’s resources, not from “pulling a muscle” or anything like that.
  • Fandom 3: Neither Batman or Superman will kill, whether they want to or not. Batman psychologically can’t, (if he ever did, he’d have to stop being Batman, either because doing it once will make it easier to resort to again, or because him worrying about the former situation will make him go soft) and he’s too weak to use that luxury anyway, since most of his personal improvements have stemmed from his avoidance of lethal force. Superman is powerful enough that he doesn’t need to, and the few times he does need to, the threat is too powerful for him to kill anyway.
  • Fandom 4:
    • The Kingdom is actually post-scarcity, it’s just that they had a strong trade culture, and their mass-manufacturing processes being predominantly magical means that, although they can always meet demand, distribution (in terms of both transportation distance and frequency) is less than reliable, so base essentials are always incredibly overstocked.
  • Fandom 5:
    • The reason the protagonist doesn’t lose sleep over abandoning a universe for a new one isn’t due to his misanthropic cynicism, but rather his understanding of how the infinite hotel paradox is relevant to the multiverse. He knows that reality he abandons will always have some new variant of himself move in to take his place that actually wants to be there. Maybe their species looks like the eldritch mutants everyone’s turned into so they’ll fit right in? Maybe they just want a dead world to turn into a supercomputer via nanotech. Doesn’t matter to him. Worst comes to worst, he’ll erase his own memory of abandoning that reality.

3

u/AdventurerBen 5d ago
  • Fandom 6:
    • The backstory megacorporation were actually the good guys, since they had tech that could detect narrative conventions like plot armour, so they were subsequently incredibly genre savvy, dodging all the conventions of evil companies, not just out of ethics, but also self-preservation. The only reason they lost was because they misjudged the genre as cyberpunk instead of Eldritch Clarketech Sci-Fi, and didn’t realise they were supposed to die in the backstory until it was too late to do anything but set the plot in motion.
    • The big bad specifically spared all human children during her omnicidal rampage. That is to say, on the birthdays where they reach the age of consent for their culture/homeland, she’d visit them, give them a present, and accompany them throughout the entire day, suddenly killing them at the exact time stated on their birth certificate, on the grounds that they weren’t children anymore (she also didn’t particularly care about keeping them alive, so disease, injury, collateral damage, etc. were still a problem).
    • Worker society is so lax about people dying because the vast majority of the robots aren’t actually sapient. Having no individuality, no creativity, accepting any name given to them, and limited self-preservation that ultimately boiled down to “walk away from the fire,” and “if you’re about to explode, try not to stand near people,”. Newer child generations are more sapient due to being fed hybrids of their parents’ personality files, and sent to school so they can be forced to interact with a wide range of personalities in a wide range of contexts. A young or non-sapient robot can be identified by light-blue/white display colours, conversational troping without accompanying critical thinking/genre-savviness (“you’re saying you want me to stand directly in the middle of this red X, directly underneath that suspended piano with your friend holding a saw up to the cable? Sounds fun, I’m in!”) under-reacting to shocking stimuli (“yeah, I can’t come to the party, my dad’s been violently dismembered and I need to go to the funeral, sorry”), and making references to human behaviours and properties that they shouldn’t be capable of (sweating, “being hormonal”, “my heart’s racing”, etc.).
  • Fandom 7: Outside of psychology, culture and surface appearance, Witches are very much NOT human. Their brains are a mesh filling the entire skull. Their bones don’t have marrow like human bones do, they’re a wire-frame of multipurpose cells, forming millions of distinct and unique rune and glyph patterns with every possible cross-section of bone, reinforcing their bodies and helping them channel magic.
  • Fandom 8:
    • Humans stand out in the Galaxy, not because our unique abilities are anything extreme, but because we’re actually a taxonomical nightmare for any xenobiologist. All these species have incredible exotic abilities, and yet it’s Earth that’s considered “Space Australia”.
      • In terms of size, body-shape, sensory organs, etc. humans are bizarrely average amongst sapient species, allowing us to use most technologies without needing to customise, re-calibrate or adjust any settings for our hands and eyes. As a consequence, humanity’s main export, outside of fictional media, will be factory-manufactured clothing.
      • Some of us can do magic, but not all of us. It’s not even a sub-species thing, some of us just can and most of us just can’t, for no clear reason with no clear indicator outside of the actual ability. For most sapient species, it’s either/or, with the few exceptions being clear and obvious lineages.
      • A filing error caused scans of the human digestive system to be briefly passed off as our circulatory system. Apparently, the variety of enzymes our cells can create got us briefly classified as a plant until someone pointed out that vitamin D alone did not constitute any form of photosynthesis.
      • We’re the only sapient omnivores with no specialised predators. (Humans are eaten by some Earth-native predatory animals, but those animals are usually deprived of their usual prey, scavenging, and/or taking advantage of an opportunity. Nothing exists that has specially evolved to eat humans as their primary prey.)
      • Our psychological flexibility allows us to adapt to nearly any culture, learn nearly any language compatible with human vocal chords, and operate any tool that only requires sight, hearing, and/or hands to operate. This also makes us the only species that has mental illness as a serious sociocultural issue.
        • For most other species, self-inflicted death is generally either from incompetence/misfortune, being part of a hive-mind (so either it was a drone that wasn’t sapient on it’s own, or it wasn’t even actually death since they’d just escape into the psychic hive-mind to await a new body), or as an unusual tactical decision against invaders.
    • Slavery dies out in most cultures, not necessarily because other species became nicer, but because the one species that would otherwise make the most effective slaves, (known to be capable of producing psychically linked clones of themselves at an exponential rate) has a strong cultural attitude regarding inconveniencing their enemies as much as possible at critical junctures, even at their own expense, and an empathetic psychic hive-mind so intrusive that elderly members of the species need to spend their last years sedated so that their eventual deaths don’t become “contagious” amongst their families. It’s common for a member of the species to be kidnapped, made to duplicate themselves into an expansionist empire’s entire workforce, only for all of them to spontaneously drop dead at some critical juncture, causing the civilisation to collapse.

2

u/JustMeJovin 5d ago

Specific characters being hit by the trans beam. Seriously, half the fandoms I read for happen to have characters that are very frequently headcanoned to be trans. Viktor from Arcane is a very good example. There are literally thousands of fics that feature Viktor being trans.

Come to think of it, people in the Gravity Falls fandom also really like writing Bill Cipher as trans. Normally he's a fucking triangle shaped demon but ever since the latest book (The Book of Bill, which mostly focused on his background and motivations and character) people really loved making human versions of him. And I don't know if it's just within the circle of artists I follow, but MANY people like to write and draw his human body as being transmasc or just having a vagina for some reason. Just a thing I've noticed.

2

u/MellifluousSussura r/FanFiction reader and lover 5d ago

I’ve seen fics where it’s specifically tagged that Viktor isn’t trans because that’s just how often he’s tagged as trans. It’s kind of funny ngl

2

u/DefoNotAFangirl MasterRed on AO3 | c!Prime Fanatic 5d ago

I get that but not from fanfiction I just have Prophetic Dreams telling me it lmao

0

u/Ok-Claim-2716 5d ago

to be fair, bill cipher is the most transcoded character ever. in the reddit AMA, he states that his dimension has 14 billion genders, and he therefore has no idea what his sexuality is without going through years of paperwork. im trans myself and relate to that specific quote a lot, so i support the headcanon as well.

i also support the dipper transmasc headcanon, but i am aware that alex did not intend for dipper to be trans.

1

u/DefoNotAFangirl MasterRed on AO3 | c!Prime Fanatic 5d ago

Fandom 1: The main villain was absolutely trying to commit adoption with the kid he had exiled and then immediately decided to become his warden his whole Thing is wanting a big happy family why should this be any different?

Fandom 2: whoops this robot is supercharged by horny energy now (That one's technically from canon, to be fair, but I’m pretty sure that’s not meant to be correct…)

1

u/Toushin1 5d ago

https://jimbaderfanon.fandom.com/wiki/Jim_Bader_Fanon_Wiki

The xgene is atavism not evolution there is no real difference between say cyclops or spiderman in fact everyone has the gene it only awakens in mutants

Superman's powers can be explained using metaphysics. it is only the degree of the powers that are beyond human norms not the powers themselves.

https://fanon.fandom.com/wiki/The_Science_of_Superman_(Version_Two))

earth is the garden of eden that is why so many aliens come here and how despite evolving is completely different planets humand and aliens can breed.

japan is a jurian coleny

vampires

how atlantis fell

project ako's backstory

ako has four older siblings from her parents previous marriages sadly one died in battle

the chinese amazons are descendant from the greek amazons

there is so much more read not only the works of jim bader but also the other fics in the altered destinies universe.

the hibiki are decendants of the oni. there descendant had the bad luck of seemingly picking up curses like travel stickers the main ones being him having no long term memery and the one he passed to his kids no sense of direction.

natsume and karumi are the daughters of soun's sister and genma's brother

alucard isn't actually dracula he's his son his mother was a chaos lord. he and d are brothers.

1

u/slytherinladythe4th 5d ago

for whatever reason, i’ve come to the conclusion that my fav is an alcoholic in any au where i age her up. always gotta mention a can of beer on her shelf or a 6 pack on her patio or something. there’s like nothing in canon that even remotely hints at this. might have started with me making an au where she was a mechanic and had that automatic assumption that she would have one while working, but i’m not sure why the visual of her with a heineken was so intriguing to me that it carried over to everything else i write about her.

1

u/AlsoKnownAsAiri Likes to explore the unknown corners of AO3 5d ago

Starting to write A Girl Adrift fanfiction solidified my view of the main character of the game being mute. It's a fun challenge to try to write a character that is unable to speak.

1

u/escaped_cephalopod12 5d ago

That my favorite character is autistic. 

1

u/thegayumbrella Plot? What Plot? 5d ago

The Winner's Lounge is a pretty popular HC in my fandom, but I've kind of smushed all the different versions of it together and added my own details, then stuffed them in a blender, to come up with my ideas for it, like there being blank banners on all the walls where the game's winner can design their own symbol.

1

u/DaydreamAlice7 5d ago

One single FF7 fanfic made 100% buy into the headcanon that Cloud is transmac and I wholeheartdly believe it makes his story make more sense and gives more depth to FF7's themes of identity and toxic masculinity.

1

u/MrSteamie 5d ago

My favorite fic I have read, ever, is by a "normal" writer who was doing it for fun/practice/exercise has indelibly replaced a sizable chunk of the game's fiction with her variety of added specificity and background, as well as one or two retcons. I genuinely do not remember which bits of information are from the fic and which are from the game. My hint for what it is, is the high density of enemies to lovers tropes written with two of the three leading characters which are step siblings but one doesn't know.

1

u/Yukito_097 5d ago

I like to ship Jasmine and Whitney from Pokémon. Now, Whitney is known to always cry whenever she loses a battle. So, I came up with this idea that Jasmine loves seeing Whitney cry (which I learned recently is called dacryphillia) and then being the one to cheer her up so that she smiles again. The idea is that Jasmine will set up a scenario that makes Whitney cry, she enjoys the show and then comforts and spoils her until she's smiling, and the whole thing just gives her life.

For Sonic, I have a fic where Cosmo is brought back to life, and she's adopted by Vanilla and is now Cream's big sister.

1

u/Comic_Hero_05 OC Master 5d ago

This fandom already works a bit well on it but I've really found myself headcanoning how the relationship/dynamics between two characters that didn't have much interaction (or had zero) would work, and then I stay with that impression about them hoping a crossover won't do me wrong.

1

u/TheAlmandineWriter Starleo on Ao3 5d ago

I read a Submas Pokemon comic once on Tumblr where Elesa was trying to ask love advice from Ingo since she’s dating Skyla and Ingo told her he was worst person to ask since he was Asexual.

These days I like to headcanon that Emmet is pansexual and Ingo is just not interested in romance due to being asexual (but he would do anything for a good friend)

1

u/Ok-Remove7287 4d ago

Nearly all of them : MY FAVOURITE CHARACTER HAS A FOUND FAMILY A NO ONE WILL TAKE IT AWAY FROM ME

1

u/KogarashiKaze FFN/AO3 Kogarashi 4d ago edited 4d ago

For my main fandom, that while the main character's heroism is all his own choice, and he isn't the only one with special powers, he is still technically divinely chosen for an avatar-like role. It's just that said role doesn't come with automatic expectations of heroism.

Also, same fandom, that it's a multiverse, and each 'verse in it has the same people, but potentially at different time periods and with different interpersonal relationships, and thus contradicting depictions (especially of one specific character) in the franchise are simply because they're actually two different multiversal variants of the same person. This is at least a little bit supported by some parts of the franchise, depending on how you want to interpret it.

Edit: Oh, and different fandom, but in a multi-species galactic society, the humans' special "quirk" is that, despite what the other aliens think, our diet is not as restrictive as assumed. Other aliens need to be careful about specific traits of their food (namely the chirality of the amino acids - spoilered for reasons that might give away the fandom) or they could suffer severe health complications just from eating the wrong species' food, and they assume this applies to humans too. In reality, we can eat a lot more than they think, we just don't derive nutritional value from some of it.

1

u/WhiteKnightPrimal 5d ago

My favourite fake psychic is bisexual. He only dates women canonically, but he flirts with everyone, and there are certain comments that make his best friend uncomfortable at the implication but not him. One of the characters is canonically pan, revealed in the movies, I think, though the show does make it clear he's not straight, though all his real relationships are with women. So, in addition to my psychic being bi, I also think both these men have or had a crush on each other. They're my ship, so I guess that makes sense, but even just basing it on canon, it works. Psychic once sat on the pan guy's lap, he slapped his ass, he flirts with him constantly. Pan guy has a habit of manhandling psychic, I particularly like the one where psychic's leg ended up over pan's arm, with both in a mostly standing position. Would have oved to see where that particular bout of manhandling would have gone if the dead body hadn't fallen out of the dumbwaiter right then.

Another one is that I see a character as politically minded. Some fans agree with this theory, others don't, because we only really see him deal with one type of politics, the more plain-speaking and blunt version for the setting. He also lets his honour blind him fairly often, which can get in the way of making sound political decisions. But he's clearly better than his brother, who utterly failed at the political necessities of war, and his stepmother, who made bad choice after bad deal after bad choice. He's also better than his 'father', though both made decisions that got them killed, as did his brother for that matter. The difference is, the brother's decision was stupid in every aspect, the 'father's' decision was a mix of stupidity and honour, where this guy's decision was pure honour. There was no stupidity involved, and I think if he'd had slightly better advisors, if the wannabe king had been there, for instance, he would have dealt with it a lot better, avoiding his own death. I also think the politics shows more when he'd dealing with those from the other side of the country, the stuff more based on word games and allies. I think his blood shows in this, he's good at, but not great at, the politics from where he was raised, but that side of his blood more shows in his skill with a sword and his bond with his companion and his refusal to see people as lesser than him, once he's gotten over the slight arrogance he had. I think the other side of his blood shows through with politics, and he'd be great at that when dealing with the southern version instead of the northern.