What's in your head canon?

[ThaOGDreamWeaver]

In my headcanon, the Sundown event was an actual Nemesis conspiracy that worked... and like the Blip, characters have a vague memory of a life before, of people and heroes they met, though they are somehow different now...

 

They can't quite remember the event itself, or what happened next, or why life resumed. Just that somewhere, there are heroes that made it happen.

 

But some of the originals vanished to other dimensions, especially those who were in and around Portal Corp at the time. The original Emily Watson/Dreamweaver is now 50 - she's kind of getting used to the idea of aging at all, if disgracefully - and runs an occult shop / cat café in Earth-616 Apponaug, Rhode Island. Some people still grumble, but they can't deny the neighbourhood's improved since she moved in. As if criminals just turn round and walk away without knowing why...

Edited October 13, 2023 by ThaOGDreamWeaver

[Sakura Tenshi]

To confess right now, a lot of my headcanons are a side effect of my character Gaia Redeemer having been a reincarnating soul across the ages, so much of this ties to his own off-handed comments

1. Romulus is NOT that specific Romulus Augustulus (the last Western Roman Emperor) but rather the naming is largely coincidence. Cimerora itself occurs around 60 AD during the reign of Nero with the island in question having originally been a Greecian citystate that was later settled by Romans as their empire expanded, and largely it's seen as kind of a quirky place and while Imperious, by all rights, should not call himself king, he does pay his dues to the Empire and thus Rome itself hardly cares.
2. The military arm of Oranbega was the Circle of Bronze (as for all their advancements in magic, they didn't do much with metallurgy) and had proposed simply deploying mass War Golems to literally crush the Mu uprising though the Circle of Thorns had little respect for the Bronze (seeing them as dull and unintellectual) and thus opted for demon pacts.
3. Relatedly, the Mu-Oranbegan war was not the first time Oranbega had practiced demon summoning. As a society of magically gifted nerds and geeks without social skills, succubi and incubi were popular summons and filled redlight districts.
4. Nemesis' tech might look primitive but all of it is relatively up to date. The backpacks on the Fake Nemesis suits are actually micro nuclear reactors (which, in reality, are giant steam engines), the reason the fake citizens are always so wonky is a mix of improper maintenance (notice Nemesis Army lacks engineers) and Nemesis' AI coding is just kind of crap in general.
5. Part of the Etoile's maintained legitimacy as a nation is maintained by Recluse having a network of Nightwidow sleeper agents holding many world leaders under knife point as well as lots of psionically collected blackmail. That said, even with these threats Recluse knows he can't push his luck too too far. especially since the end of Who Will Die basically confirms Recluse only allowed Marshall Blitz to hold onto Warburg for plausible deniability and it's now known Etoile is a nuclear power.

And here's a few relating to the greater world:

• While the Rikti invasion was devatating, the Rikti still were operating on limited numbers due to mixed support for the Legacy of War, even in light of the attack, and thus the Rikti focused much of their efforts on larger population centers such as LA, New York, Paragon, etc. and thus a number of more rural regions ended up getting off with only a few bombing runs that were more to disable military bases than anything.
• Japan in the City of Heroes' verse is, on the surface, animeland. A country full of brightly colored and bombastic superheroes in mechs with martial arts and ancient magics. The truth though is that it's a facade for much deeper issues. The Imperial Japanese government was one of the first to create a super hero registration act, though once much closer to the later Might for Right act requiring metahumans to be in service of the Imperial Japanese government and ultimately the state Super Group "Imperial Wind", all this was due to a tight control over these people for concern of the issues they could cause in society, resulting in 'ronin' becoming a word synonymous with vigilantism and criminal metahumans. When Japan surrendered at the end of WWII, one of the agreements was a restriction on how many registered active metahumans there could be, and it was something the government was all too eager to agree to and enforced well past when other restrictions were lifted. This bit them hard in the Rikti War when the Rikti cut through much of the registered heroes, and new ones who rose up to protect their country lacked training or proper support to use their powers to their full potential and were cut down just as brutally, and school-aged 'magical girls' being melted by Rikti plasma in desperate last stands to protect their communities became a rallying cry in the post-Rikti War era to reduce metahuman registration restrictions in a fight that continues to rage through the diet to this very day.

[lemming]

I always think of Sally being invulnerable, just doesn't want to deal with people.

[WumpusRat]

2 hours ago, lemming said:

I always think of Sally being invulnerable, just doesn't want to deal with people.

She is. When you 'defeat' her, she doesn't crumple or pass out, she just ducks back underwater. 

Everyone just keeps interrupting her peaceful swim.

 

 

[Greycat]

16 hours ago, Scarlet Shocker said:

Mine is the Well of the Furies.

 

I junk that shit. The Menders are just hippies on some trip. The real power is from within the character, not some external thing that "lends" you its power because you're already tough.

 

I truly loathe that episode and it came close to ruining the game for me because it's so poorly told and such a feeble plot line so in my own head it's irrelevant and I do my own thang

 

Yeah. As I recall the original "well" was in some way related to Pandora's box, hidden, absorbing the latent power/creativity/belief of humanity and occasionally overflowing and releasing it all into (basically) what we think of as "Ages of gods" and "Ages of heroes."

 

The whole sentient-well-you-get-your-power-from-me is just... rgh.

[tidge]

15 hours ago, Skyhawke said:

Eochi and Jack in Irons are part of a giant monster fight club and we keep interrupting their sessions. 

 

In the Grim Vale, they certainly don't have Rules 4 or 5, but some of the rest checks out.

[Saiyajinzoningen]

That AE was created by a hive AI to trap all the heroes in a simulation to make a world takeover easy breezy. 

avoid AE heroes!

its a trap

[lemming]

None of my bases have plants in them.  Darn DE spies.

[laudwic]

12 minutes ago, lemming said:

None of my bases have plants in them.  Darn DE spies.

 

Office plants generally drive me nuts in DE missions.  I keep expecting a them to jump out of their pots and come after me.

[Saiyajinzoningen]

13 minutes ago, laudwic said:

 

Office plants generally drive me nuts in DE missions.  I keep expecting a them to jump out of their pots and come after me.

not gonna lie, that would be cool as heck

[srmalloy]

20 minutes ago, Saiyajinzoningen said:

not gonna lie, that would be cool as heck

Along with "unhiding" animations for the gem and rock DE mobs, unfolding from a rock or crystal formation on the ground or embedded in a cave wall. Throw in 'static' versions of hidden DE, and you could up the suspense factor a fair bit.

[Scarlet Shocker]

On 10/12/2023 at 4:36 PM, Go0gleplex said:

Nova Praetoria cities are all built just above sea level....yet you have tunnels that extend way WAY below sea level with a slew of electrical and communications conduits, transformers, relays, etc. along with the barges and water ways. Storm and Sewage certainly aren't going anywhere without a LOT of pump stations....assuming you ever find the treatment plants. 

 

 

You may wish to visit St Petersburg in Russia sometime. They will tell you at length, in great detail, how theirs is the deepest subway system on the planet, passing as it does under the Neva river. 

 

There are plenty of flood doors and escape routes but it is one of the smartest subway systems I've ever travelled.

 

Depth is not insuperable.

[Go0gleplex]

Subway is a lot different than sewer and storm drainage Scarlet. It doesn't depend on gravity to run. 😉 lol  City I was the engineering inspector for has the most pump stations in Oregon...and I've designed several hundred such systems over the last four decades. Doesn't mean I don't see it as a weak point in the infrastructure, especially when in a civil war situation.  As to traveling...who the heck can afford to do that on a single income? 

[Sakura Tenshi]

7 hours ago, Saiyajinzoningen said:

That AE was created by a hive AI to trap all the heroes in a simulation to make a world takeover easy breezy. 

avoid AE heroes!

its a trap

but my farmer Nuclear Flare really should be trapped in AE! The dude is a hardline Marcarthyism Jingoistic “patriot” who has been around since the 1950s and responded to anti-might for right act and Vietnam war protests with just nuking people! Thinking about it, he’s basically an even worse Homelander. Which says something.

[twozerofoxtrot]

Headcanon from the game lore:

 

Excelsior's regenerative abilities could allow Fixadine abusers from Praetoria to survive the eventual organ failure from the withdrawals. This is part of a character concept I've had forever to roll a Destroyer-turned-Freakshow, but I'm holding out for actual Freakshow costume parts to be added to the CC. Trying to evoke something similar with the parts we have now feels lame to me.

 

My own Headcanon:

 

A handful of my characters that I don't have solid concepts hail from a distant gladiatorial planet called FIGHTWORLD. It's an obvious homage to Mojoverse and always written in all caps. I've had a lot of fun writing wacky bios for character that are otherwise unanchored to game lore.

Edited October 14, 2023 by twozerofoxtrot
Added Example Pics

[huang3721]

4 hours ago, Go0gleplex said:

It doesn't depend on gravity to run.

 

That's an interesting point. Praetoria sits only a few meters above the river. Yet, it has tunnels with waterways (Lethe) and barges beneath it. The underground river should flood the tunnels, IMO.

 

I can assume Lethe is an isolated artificial river, and Praetorians waterproof the whole islands. The assumption creates more questions than answers, though.

 

Nice catch!

[Sakura Tenshi]

On 10/12/2023 at 8:36 AM, Go0gleplex said:

Nova Praetoria cities are all built just above sea level....yet you have tunnels that extend way WAY below sea level with a slew of electrical and communications conduits, transformers, relays, etc. along with the barges and water ways. Storm and Sewage certainly aren't going anywhere without a LOT of pump stations....assuming you ever find the treatment plants. 

 

 

Sort of my take on this is that Praetoria is specifically actually built in Florida. In Neutropolis we see Row Houses which are common designs in the Southeastern U.S., the land around Praetoria also seems rather flat and swampy if First Ward is any indication. Though this could place it in a lot of places in that region and not necessarily just Florida. This headcanon actually comes from someone else back on live who, on top of all these things, mentioned Florida already has isolated gilded utopias with massive undergrounds: it's called Disneyworld.

[Luminara]

Janet Kellum is a double agent for the Malta Group.  She gives the FBSA false intelligence and uses its resources to divert attention away from Malta activities.  When she was almost caught working with Crey Industries, providing a steady stream of subjects for their Malta-financed Revenant Hero project, she orchestrated a frame and set the Countess up to take the fall.  Her long-term goal is for sister, Valkyrie, who she despises for being everything she wasn't, to be discredited and humiliated, or killed, if possible.

 

Nemesis is only 4'9" tall.  One too many jokes about his height and look what happened.

 

There's another Well.  It absorbs power from extraordinary individuals, rather than sharing power with them like the Well of the Furies does.  It hides in plain sight, with a front company, Blackwell, that hires the best and brightest, all of whom disappear so thoroughly that they don't appear to have ever existed.  It's waging a war against the Well of the Furies... and it's winning.

 

Countess Crey and Clamor are sisters.

 

The Banished Pantheon are a bunch of hippies who are so high that they're hallucinating.  And Mot isn't a deity, it's an alien which was poisoned by something in Earth's environment when it arrived, warping its mind and causing it to grow out of control.

[Sakura Tenshi]

one my I forgot relating to Praetoria: The Hamidon of Praetoria isn't the same as the Hamidon of Primal Earth, but they are related. This might seem like an obvious statement, but what I mean is that on Primal Earth, the Devouring Earth didn't show up until after the Rikti War in 2002, the Terra Conspiracy arc even has you run into someone who knew Hamidon Pasimala before he became a literal monster (being a launch arc, that would put it roughly in 2004). Meanwhile, the Hamidon of Praetoria showed up after its alternate conclusion of the Korean war when MacArthur nuked the peninsula in the late 1950s, That's a huge 40 year gap between the two, and so it leads me to suspect Praetorian Hamidon is actually a Hamidon Sr., possibly a father or even grandfather to who would become our Hamidon.

 

But the most likely answer is the Live Devs forgot.

[lemming]

21 hours ago, laudwic said:

Office plants generally drive me nuts in DE missions.  I keep expecting a them to jump out of their pots and come after me.

That's actually why I started that policy.   Some office mission on live, my first character, a fire blaster got ganked by some DE that was caught in the wall behind an office plant.

[tidge]

14 hours ago, Sakura Tenshi said:

Sort of my take on this is that Praetoria is specifically actually built in Florida.

 

In my head canon, the First Ward on Praetorian Earth is located where Justin Sinclair's mansion is located on Primal Earth; Primal characters never see the outside. Mother Mayhem's "hospital" is inside the Praetorian version of Manticore's mansion.

[jprewitt73]

Statesman isn't actually dead. He's just in a coma somewhere and one day he will return. 

 

I have no proof of this, but since this game is based on comics I know no one is truly dead forever. 

 

[Scarlet Shocker]

 

50 minutes ago, lemming said:

That's actually why I started that policy.   Some office mission on live, my first character, a fire blaster got ganked by some DE that was caught in the wall behind an office plant.

 

I think you'll find those were triffids

[Saeletra]

I have a couple of head cannons,

On Blueside the contacts Indigo and Crimson are job titles rather than individual people.  There are the two "public" faces, that are the contacts for Heroes. Then there are the handful of Indigo class agents that are out and about gathering all the intel and then the  handful of Crimson class agents that are using that intel for various black ops projects.

I remember coming to that conclusion a couple years ago, when I kept running into missions where I had to kidnap or kill Indigo or Crimson and I kept thinking "Hold on, Didn't I just do that yesterday? How can there be more than One?"

 

My other head cannon is that "Incarnate" also doubles as a power or threat designation. "The Well" doesn't fit into most people's origin stories or background or even where they want to take their character.

For example, Midnight Thorn didn't drink from the well, but because of her intellect, experience, and her technological prowess, she's considered an "Incarnate Class" Villain.  She has the potential for mass destruction or create a pocket realm/dimension or just cause Longbow/Malta/whoever to have really, really, really, bad day. Thankfully she has no interest in taking over  the world, nor does she leave the isles much.

[Vic Raiden]

I have a couple too.

1. Arachnos actively keeps the lives of the Rogue Isles' denizens as miserable as possible. Ever-present poverty makes people desperate to do anything to better their situation, especially enlisting in the Arachnos army, while rampant crime paired with an incompetent if not outright corrupt police force makes sure the potential conscripts not only possess at least basic skill in using weapons, but also have a good understanding of the "survival of the fittest" mindset. Despite that, Lord Recluse maintains free public schools, because what better place is there to teach kids loyalty to Arachnos' cause?
2. While a good deal of Arachnos soldiers, particularly older ones, were drafted from the common Etoile folk, the organization also produces clone troopers to beef up the ranks while ensuring the resulting Wolf Spiders all exhibit optimal physical traits. The technology was likely either bought or stolen from Crey Industries.
3. On a similar token, the vast majority of Nemesis' soldiers are automatons.
4. The original Lord Nemesis may or may not be long dead by now, having left behind a whole line of mechanical decoys who all believe they're the original. As such, it's not uncommon for Fake Nemeses to fight one another over that. Of course, this being Nemesis, he deliberately keeps it confusing.
5. The in-universe justification for the Live CoH's abrupt sunset is that the Battalion did indeed invade, and proved to be so devastating that there was no way to save the world from them short of erasing the entire war from history - which is exactly what happened.
6. Mot and Tartarus are just two of many names of a cosmic (multiversal?) entity which is the source or embodoment of all Evil in existence. It was able to taint the Well of the Furies, allowing Lord Recluse to become who he is now: the Champion of Evil, whose position as Primal Earth's chief villain is consistently protected by the entity.
7. Continuing with the pattern of alternate Statesmen being evil, Warlord Hro'Dtohz is his Rikti Dimension counterpart.
8. The Ms. Liberty Task Force still takes place in Statesman's times, but the combination of Tyrant's invasion and Rularuu's awakening resulted in it kind of "bleeding" into its future, or the current in-game present.
9. Chris Jenkins the lawyer and Jenkins the Arachnos operative are brothers.

Edited October 14, 2023 by Vic Raiden
Just remembered one more headcanon