Fanon / Star Trek

Over the decades its been around Star Trek has inspired its fair share of fan speculation

• Fanon stated for years that Mr. Spock was the first Vulcan in Starfleet, though this isn't backed up by anything on screen. Far from it: one episode of the original series references the USS Intrepid as being entirely crewed by Vulcans, which heavily suggests at least some senior officers would be older than Spock (especially considering Vulcans' longevity). This piece of fanon reached a head with Star Trek: Enterprise, especially when the Vulcan T'Pol actually joins Starfleet later in the series. Several newsgroup members actually took it upon themselves to go through the entirety of Star Trek: The Original Series to prove that the "Spock was the first" notion was not supported by canon, finding several examples in addition to the aforementioned USS Intrepid.
• Another thing the fandom agrees on is that, because of their telepathy, Vulcans avoid physical contact like the plague, even though Vulcans on-screen have shown no qualms about touching or being touched. In fact, The Original Series established that for a long time it wasn't general knowledge among Vulcans that all Vulcans could mind-meld, and it takes training and concentration to be able to do it. Therefore, accidental touch-telepathy is not a thing.
• Spock being the first ever Vulcan-human hybrid (to live to adulthood) is not actually confirmed in canon, but you wouldn't know it from the fandom.
• On Star Trek: The Original Series, Lt. Sulu and Lt. Uhura were never given first names. Fanon at the time gave Sulu the first name "Walter"; in Uhura's case, a number of fan publications had postulated "Penda" as her given name, while others were adamant — citing apparent comments by Gene Roddenberry — that Uhura had only one name. Sulu's canon first name, Hikaru, originated from the novel The Entropy Effect by Vonda N. McIntyre and was eventually made canon in the sixth movie. Uhura's canon first name, Nyota, was originally suggested by Nichelle Nichols but took almost 40 years to finally be spoken on-screen in the 2009 movie.
• When actor George Takei publicly came out, it raised further discussion of how often Trek simply avoided the topic of homosexuality, despite having once been a risk-taking, ground-breaking show. To "fix" this, the third in the big-screen rebooted "Kelvin timeline" films, Star Trek Beyond revealed that Sulu was gay himself and that he and his husband had a daughter. This led to cries from many, including Takei himself, that this created an impression that Sulu was closeted during the entire TV show (since he's been seen seemingly in love with women, so if he was gay, they'd be beards). Simon Pegg (who aside from playing Scotty also co-wrote the film) responded to this explaining that the Sulu from the films was "different" from the Sulu of the original series and the two did not share sexualities. Still this was worded in a way that some fans interpret both Sulus as bisexual even though Pegg is adamant that his Sulu is homosexual.
• Nurse Chapel's rank is never stated in the show itself, so the fandom universally agreed to give her the rank of junior-grade lieutenant (which later shows tend to give their medical officers, such as Dr. Bashir), and that she was promoted to lieutenant commander for the first film (to reach commander for the fourth film). However, the official metadata for the franchise (which can also be found in her bio data on the official Star Trek website) reveals that her rank on board the Enterprise was brevet ensign and that she was promoted to lieutenant for the first film (reaching commander for the fourth film). Most fans don't know this, and the few that do usually ignore it in favour of the long-established fanon ranks.
• Fans often refer to Kirk's Enterprise as the flagship of the Federation. While Enterprise-D was the flagship, nothing on-screen suggests that NCC 1701 was anything other that one of a dozen Constitution-class starships. (At least not during the timeframe of the TV series. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is unambiguous that the NCC-1701-A is Starfleet's flagship by that time.)
  • And Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has undone this one, with Dr. M'Benga expressly referring to the Enterprise (the same one Kirk will later command) as "The flagship of Starfleet". It seems unlikely that it would be stripped of that title by the time Kirk takes over, but we will leave the initial entry as it stands, since it remains true that until this semi-retcon, there had been no references to Kirk's Enterprise as the flagship.
• T'Pau is very often portrayed as Sarek's mother and, by extent, Spock's grandmother, though in canon, her exact relationship outside of being a clan member isn't made clear.
• It's commonly suggested (often taken as fact) that Voyager's bio-neural gel packs, which arrange information in a similar manner to the human brain, are the reason Voyager's holograms had a tendency to become sentient (while those on the Enterprise-D did not). However, it was never stated on the show.
• Because alcohol does not affect Vulcans in the same way it does humans, fans often turn to chocolate or copious amounts of sugar when they need to get Spock drunk. This does have some deuterocanonical basis, as it shows up in the Star Trek IV novelization as an explanation for why Spock spends most of the movie acting loopy.
• A common theory about B'Leanna Torres's spirit animal (given her half-Klingon heritage and the fact that she tried to kill it) is that it was a tribble.
• Sources to base fanon on are quite popular in the Star Trek fandom. This shows from how they've erected two big wikipedia-clones: "Memory Alpha" for canon information and "Memory Beta" for everything licensed, but non canon. On the date of this writing, Memory Beta has well over 41,000 articles, 6,000 more than Alpha.
• Before Star Trek: First Contact Trek fandom at large agreed that Zephram Cochrane's vessel, which he used to test his newly-invented warp engine, was called the Bonaventure. In fact, they accused the film of violating canon due to this. This bit of fanon is based on a line from Star Trek: The Animated Series that the Bonaventure was the "first ship to have warp drive installed". Not only is the animated series of dubious canonical status at best (due to Paramount and Roddenberry refusing to consider it as canon), but the ship shown was clearly a Federation starship, not a privately constructed experimental craft. Assuming the Bonaventure is canon, she was simply the first Federation Starship to be warp-capable, not the ship Cochrane used.
• Fanon is so pervasive among Trekkies that many of the supposed "canon violations" of Star Trek: Enterprise were not canon violations at all, but merely new facts which blew away established fanon. Among them was the idea that Starfleet did not exist prior to the forming of the Federation; that Vulcans were, one and all, the noble, honorable people that Spock himself was (despite the starship-load of evidence to the contrary) and were incapable of lying or arrogance; that humans did not encounter Klingons until the early 23rd century (based on a line from McCoy about when hostilities began), and that the initial encounter with Klingons led to decades of war and the loss of much life (based on Picard's declaration that first contact with Klingons was "disastrous"); that the one-world government on Earth was formed in 2150 (based off speculation from Dr. Crusher about just one country holding out); that Andorians have four genders (based off a line that Andorian wedding ceremonies require four people); not to mention the apparently large number of fans who apparently believed that the Klingon foreheads were a mutation that happened between the original series and the movies. Rather than accept that the foreheads were natural but something caused them to go away for a while, fans were vocal that Klingons of the past had smooth foreheads, and that this was canon. Even the episodes explaining this didn't shut them up. Much of this fanon was aided by Star Trek novels, which are not canon, but it doesn't stop fans from accepting them as such.
• The Vulcan example is particularly amusing in that the fanon drowned out the canon so much that "new facts" weren't even new. In the two episodes of the Original Series where Vulcans other than Spock had any onscreen role, they were shown to carry purely emotional grudges (Spock and Sarek over their longstanding dispute regarding Spock's career), or were duplicitous and cold-bloodedly willing to allow an innocent person to die for their own personal benefit (Spock's fiance T'Pring). The Klingons had representatives who came off as more noble and genuinely honorable than the Vulcans.
• In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Yesterday's Enterprise", Guinan persuades Worf to try prune juice, and he calls it "a warrior's drink". By Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, this has become his Trademark Favorite Food. Fanon assumes that any other Klingon who tastes it will have the same reaction. In the Star Trek: The Next Generation Relaunch novel Q & A, we're told that prune juice is now the Federation's primary export to the Empire.
• When Trills were first introduced, they had ridges on their foreheads, yet in all later appearances, they have no ridges but spots down their sides. Trekkies have explained this by suggesting that the ridged Trills and the spotted Trills are different ethnicities.
• Chakotay is Native American, but his behaviour doesn't match any current real-life Native American tribes/religions. The consensus among viewers is that Native American culture got somewhat lost in history and changed.
• Because Q only shows up in one Deep Space Nine episode, fans have speculated that either he didn't find Sisko as entertaining as Picard and Janeway because Sisko hit him, or Q was scared away by the fact that the station is near the Prophets.
• While never said in the show, a lot of fans believe that Kirk's tendencies towards self loathing and self blame come from Survivor's Guilt over the Tarsus IV massacre. Less popular but still around is that he has an eating disorder (or at least a massive passion for food) that comes from the starvation on Tarsus, though this is mostly because of Shatner's real life eating disorders (obsessively working out and nearly starving himself) while playing Kirk.
• One fanon thought experiment is to speculate on what the human hat is in the Planet of Hats world, and a popular interpretation is that it's a tendency towards the Zany Scheme—and that this is why humans are so successful. Because a Cardassian wouldn't think of trapping a Borg squad in a 40's detective holonovel, turning off the safety, and destroying them with a hail of Hard Light bullets. Or, when an Insane Admiral decided to invent a Federation cloaking device, he wasn't content to just copy the Romulan and Klingon sensor shielding—he just had to add the ability to phase through solid matter. (This is somewhat supported by the fact that Federation engineers have quite a reputation for MacGyvering among their allies and rivals.)
• Another potential hat for humans is a desire to have sex with any sentient being they can. Just count how many characters are half-human.
• Star Trek (2009) caused some issues in that timeline, as Word of God was explicit that it was an alternate timeline. Fans have their own ideas as to how those timelines differ.
  • One theory is that Kirk was sent to Tarsus IV after the "car incident" and thus was present for the massacre on the colony, just as the Kirk of the "main" Star Trek timeline was. It's not unusual for this to be a profound influence on his character in fic. The notion has also crept in that nu!Kirk studied under Hoshi Sato, who was said to be on Tarsus IV at the time of the massacre. In canon, there's no evidence that Kirk ever left Earth.
  • The vast majority of reboot fanfic writers depict Kirk's stepfather as an alcoholic, ultra-abusive, and even a child molester. His mother is also often written as depressed and emotionally distant.
  • Fanon also suggests that Kirk is allergic to a large percentage of medications, basing it on both timelines; we see his allergy to eye medication in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and we also see his strange reactions to everything Bones gave him in the 2009 film.
  • Overlapping slightly with Writer-Induced Fanon and The Ship's Motor, it appears that a great many K/S shippers have adopted the pendant that Spock Prime would have shown his counterpart in the unfilmed ending scene into their own headcanons - whilst it has never been referenced in canon, we don't know for sure that it doesn't exist at all.