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Fan Wank

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The eternal temptation...

"These two methods clearly do not agree with one another, which means one of two things: either I'm terribly over-analyzing the content of the illustrations of a beloved children's book, or the bunny's bedroom is moving at extremely high velocity relative to the Earth, so that relativistic time dilation makes the six-minute rise of the moon appear to take an hour and ten minutes. Calculating the necessary velocity is left as an exercise for the interested reader."note 

Fan Wank refers to a fan's personal theory about a work, designed to resolve inconsistencies or help make sense of the work, but tending only to reveal that the fan is putting way too much thought into the exercise. It's the other reason you should use protection when reading fanfic.

Fanfic writers like "mythos building" fics, partly because they tend to be more memorable, but also because they allow them to cement their personal theories into the source material's pseudo-canon; if the fans like the idea, they can collectively adopt it as Fanon. Fans may also try a Fix Fic, where the author identifies something "wrong" with the source material and tries to make it better. The problem with this sort of thing is that these fans tend to put much more thought into the work than the authors themselves did, and it results in theories that make no sense, don't make the original work any more enjoyable, or perhaps even resolve a question that was better left a mystery.

Particularly common elements of a fan wank include:

If the canon author tries to do this to his own work, it's called a Retcon, Revision, or otherwise some form of Continuity Porn. In general, fans treat "retcon" as a value-neutral term, whereas "fan wank" carries a connotation of being crap. That said, fan wank can still be enjoyable, especially if the author is clearly aware of how ridiculous the theory is, and some fan theories can even be adopted by the original work in the form of Ascended Fanon (or a Shrug of God, which means no canon commitment either way and gives the fans room to work with).

"Wank" originates in British slang as a term for masturbation. Thus, "fan wank" refers to writers stroking their own egos by writing at length about things only they care about. The term was coined by Doctor Who fan and Doctor Who Expanded Universe writer Craig Hinton, who was no stranger to fan wank himself, and applied the term to his own work. That said, some fandom circles also use "wank" to refer to a fan behaving like a wanker, such as Broken Base feuding and other gross displays of Fan Dumb.

This is YMMV for a reason however, as the sheer amount of Fan Wank in existence shows that a lot of people, at least within fandoms, really like it.

See also Epileptic Trees (the specific crazy theories the fans come up with) and Wild Mass Guessing, TV Tropes' own collection of crazy fan theories. Alternate History Wank is a similar concept, but more limited in scope.


Examples:

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    Anime and Manga 
  • Code Geass gets a lot of wanking, mostly about shipping, Character Alignment, and whether R2 even existed. The show also has an incredibly weird Alternate Timeline, and the fans consistently try to reconcile every Word of God statement with that timeline, leading to a whole "Geassverse" with multiple points of divergence. Code Geass: Akito the Exiled and Code Geass: Oz the Reflection both being canon adds to the craziness. The remaining wanking topics derive from the show being Screwed by the Network, leaving a lot of questions unanswered, including C.C.'s real name, the true nature of Geass, the origin of Suzaku's superhuman abilities (and their suggested connection to Geass), and the true fate of Kallen's supposedly dead brother Naoto.
  • Pokémon: The Series fan wank topics include:
    • What gender the main character's Pokémon are in the anime.
    • How old starting Pokémon trainers should be.
    • The Legendary Beasts from Pokémon Generations Episode 6: The Reawakening, which were seen in silhouette form from before they became the Legendary Beasts and looked more like normal dogs than any existing Pokémon. It was meant to resolve a different fan wank question (i.e. whether the Legendary Beasts were canine or feline Pokémon), but some fans latched on to the scene to argue that they were totally different, not yet revealed Pokémon, and others thought they were Houndour.
  • Ranma ½:
    • It is notorious among the fans for having an open ending. This leads shippers to writing piles upon piles of fanfiction hooking up the main characters with each other, especially Ranma with someone who isn't Akane Tendō, despite Ranma×Akane being the series' Official Couple. The Ship-to-Ship Combat that developed between various factions was bloody — in fact, this very entry was changed to stop a Flame War from starting.
    • The exact laws and origins of the Cursed Springs of Jusenkyō — how much water is needed, what the exact temperature is, how much of your body has to be splashed, what sort of liquids would qualify, why drinking doesn't trigger it, whether the original victim drowned to death or was merely submerged (thanks to an early translation error and the Guide's insistence that the stories are all "tragic"), whether the springs confer any aspect of the original creature's personality, and whether the curses are age-specific.
    • Another common fan wank on the Jusenkyō Curses is adding the secondary effect of actively attempting to induce the transformation rather than simply making it possible. This is typically done by making the victim a water magnet and invoking a Contrived Coincidence to wet the victim if they haven't changed for too long. This idea is often used either (or both) to avoid Rule of Funny explanation of where the convenient buckets/thrown water comes from in more deconstructive works, or to explain why Ranma gaining partial control over his curse doesn't simply turn into an effective cure due to the canonical Aversion of the Second Law of Gender-Bending: even if the water trigger of his curse is removed, and replaced with a voluntary mental triggering or other far more controllable trigger, the curse still forces Ranma to spend some time in his cursed form.
    • A gag scene in the Herb saga led to one of Ranma ½'s most enduring fan wanks. In the story, Herb mentions he hates female Ranma because she resembles a monkey he threw into the Spring of Drowned Girl — a monkey, who in turn caused him to be cursed. As a result, the idea spread that anyone who falls into the Spring of Drowned Girl ends up looking like the original girl who drowned there. The creation of the Spring of Drowned Akane, introduced into the manga long after this piece of fan wank was created, just made matters even worse.
    • Psychological diagnoses of the cast's various mental issues, often interpreting them as actual illnesses or neuroses.
    • Whether Ranma could get pregnant, often followed up by what would happen if a pregnant Ranma turned back into a man. Word of God says, "I don't want to think about that, and neither should you."
    • Whether Happōsai deliberately drank the Nanniichuan water that was supposed to be Ranma's cure in the final manga chapters, as it's a bit hard to mistake spring water for sake on first taste, and Happōsai is both extremely selfish and fixated on Ranma's sexy female body.
    • Ki Manipulation gets a lot of this. Everything which isn't explained in-universe tends to be attributed to Ki manipulation. Mousse has a Hyperspace Arsenal up his sleeves? He's using Ki to compress space. The Happo Fire Burst explosives? Conjured from Ki. Akane's "signature" mallet(which she doesn't even use that often)? Obviously a Ki construct. Kuno's implausible use of his Bokken? Clearly, it's reinforced with his Ki! This probably in part comes retroactively from Naruto, as such Hand-Waving is canon in Naruto; everything out of the ordinary is done with Chakra.
  • Sailor Moon:
    • One theory suggests that Sailor Pluto is deliberately engineering a timeline where 95% of the Earth's population is killed off in a thousand-year glaciation period in order to produce Crystal Tokyo. At no point does the anime ever say anything along the lines of 95% of the population dying in a disaster. The anime notes that Usagi awoke a frozen world from slumber in the 30th century and ascended, whereas in the manga, there was no disaster at all and the utopia evolved naturally. So the entire theory is Fan Wank piled upon Fan Wank.
    • Sailors Uranus and Neptune are lesbian lovers. That's not the fanwank, that's the canon part. Fans more familiar with the censored English dub are often uncomfortable with this and have produced multiple stories that usually involve Uranus becoming a man or having been a man in a former life and getting this "corrected", usually by magic. This was not helped by the bizarre "Save Our Sailors" website promoting the idea of a male "Prince of Uranus" being accidentally reincarnated as a female Sailor Uranus as canon (which made them not homosexual anymore).
  • The Gundam franchise as a whole has the "Turn A Bang" theory, derived from a scene in ∀ Gundam that depicted a period of history made up of clips from various other Gundam shows, which were originally touted as Alternate Universes. Fans responded by building a timeline that tried to fit all those shows into a single universe. It's hard to do, and every new show only makes it harder (and a piece of official merchandisenote  said explicitly that all universes after Turn A except Gundam Build Fighters are part of the timeline, so they have to do it).
  • Naruto fanfiction is very nearly the most written anime fanfiction on FanFiction.Net, mostly due to what Kishimoto decided to wait to reveal: the name of the Fourth... Fans thought his name was "Arashi ___" with the common idea being "Arashi Uzumaki" because everyone thought he was Naruto's father. We do now know his real name, which is Minato Namikaze, but fans remain free to speculate on his actual situation (reincarnated as Naruto after sealing the Kyuubi in himself?), village laws (the idea of "Clan Restoration Act" for a dying clan), the concept of a council (sometimes split into a Shinobi Council and a Civilian Council), shipping, Naruto's mother, bloodlines, members of Akatsuki, and whether or not Madara is actually immortal. Most of these were eventually confirmed or Jossed in canon.
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion has inspired more Epileptic Trees than any other anime, which is practically inevitable when you consider how weird the story is, the sheer number of things that go unexplained, and the creators' refusal to explain anything (because it's post-modern, apparently). Fans have thus theorized that Yui Ikari was the mastermind behind everything, that Unit-00 kept going berserk because Naoko Akagi was the soul inside it, whether or not Rei is technically related to Shinji, whether or not Rei as an Angel/Human hybrid can have children, that Misato was the one who shot Kaji (though that is one of the rare examples of a fan theory that Anno himself has outright Jossed), and that only children can sync with the Eva because it's fueled by teenage Angst.
  • The Western fandom of Sgt. Frog has a particularly weird hang-up regarding whether the kerons, who are alien frogs, have real hair. It started on DeviantArt and spread to Tumblr. Although the work has shown all kinds of head hair and facial hair, and even a mutant mole hair on Keroro's forehead which grows to extreme length, some fans insist that all that hair is fake (because they're technically "frogs" and thus hairless).
  • In the earlier days of Zoids when it still had more of a foothold in the west, this was extremely common among English-speaking fans in regards to two particular Zoids:
    • The Dark Spiner was a Spinosaurus Zoid with a very distinct seafoam and purple design, often discussed (and written into fanfiction) as an extremely powerful Zoid outclassing other top tier Zoids like the Geno Breaker. It was said to be able to fire a charged particle cannon indefinitely without cooldown and all sorts of other outlandish feats of power. While it is a powerful Zoid, it was never depicted as having any of these powers in canon, instead using its spines to jam enemy radars and comms from a distance.
    • The König Wolf was, as the name implied, a Wolf-type Zoid equipped with twin sniper rifles and a set of head-mounted "goggles" to enhance its vision. For a long time, its only depiction in any official media was a very short, dubiously canon teaser video from Tomy showing it taking on a Liger Zero X with ease. The fandom took this and ran with it, putting the König Wolf on the same level as Ultimate X Zoids and implying it could only be piloted by the best of warriors. This was such a common belief that when Fuzors, an already reviled series within the fandom, depicted the König Wolf as a total pushover, piloted by the relatively forgettable character of Amy. Paragraphs of hatred for Amy and her Wolf were not uncommon back then, only hurting Fuzors' reputation even more. Luckily, the video games did portray the Wolf as quite powerful with its dual snipers coming in handy, but never on-par with the story breaker powers the fandom bestowed upon it.
  • Nyaruko: Crawling with Love! obliquely references the concept in one of the Nyaruani shorts: In a Fourth-Wall Mail Slot segment, a reader asks for an explanation for why the order of Mahiro and Nyarko's classes is different between the novel series and a short story. Nyarko's response is to angrily tear the letter into confetti.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
    • At several points in Stardust Crusaders, Jotaro's Stand, Star Platinum, demonstrates New Powers as the Plot Demands: it suddenly becomes able to extend its fingers to hit Dark Blue Moon and Strength's users, gains a Vacuum Mouth to inhale Enya's Justice, and most glaringly of all, suddenly becomes able to stop time just like DIO's The World during the final battle with no foreshadowing. Some fans theorize that Star Platinum actually has an Adaptive Ability and can gain any power it needs to protect Jotaro.
    • In an early fight in Golden Wind, Giorno's Stand, Gold Experience, is pierced by a Stand arrow used by Polpo's Black Sabbath. This turns into a Plot Hole later on, where it's revealed that if a Stand is pierced by an arrow, it evolves into its Requiem form, gaining new abilities. One common explanation is that since the arrow used to turn Silver Chariot and Gold Experience into their Requiem form has a unique, scarab-shaped design, that specific arrow is somehow special, and the only one which can unlock a Stand's Requiem form.
  • Dr. STONE:
    • The story starts with the main characters Senku and Taiju being petrified for over 3700 years and remaining conscious the whole time, but they seem perfectly fine after they revive. Since it's shown that being petrified and revived heals all physical injuries, some fans tried to justify this by claiming that petrification and revival also heals mental issues, meaning Senku and Taiju did Go Mad from the Isolation, but their sanity was restored after they revived. This is unlikely, however, since some flashback scenes from Senku's perspective while he was petrified show that he was perfectly calm and rational even after counting billions of seconds.
    • Shortly after the petrification event, a group of 6 astronauts returned to Earth. 3700 years later, their descendants form a village with a population of around 40. If you ask fans how they didn't die out from inbreeding-related problems generations ago, be prepared for much arguing about how genetics work, if enough generations would result in some people no longer counting as related, or if the villagers are inbred, with some of the girls' strange-looking faces being used as proof.

    Comic Books 
  • Batman: Following the New 52 reboot, it took a while for Stephanie Brown and Cassandra Cain to show up (not until Batman Eternal and Batman and Robin Eternal, respectively). Fans have wanked in the interim that they either didn't exist in this continuity, or if they did, that they were either in Hong Kong or some beach resort just hanging out and probably doing a variety of recreational drugs. When they finally showed up, they had more or less the same backstories as before, though neither had ever been Batgirl and Steph had never been Robin.
  • V for Vendetta gives us the fan wank of V's gender. In both the graphic novel and film, V is consistently referred to as "he" and "the man from room five", but V is speculated to be Valerie, a female character we only see in flashback, presumably after some serious surgery.
  • The Disney Ducks Comic Universe is legendary for its Continuity Snarl, especially because stories were published in several different countries with no regard for what was happening elsewhere in the continuity. This leads to hundreds of different stories where the characters initially don't believe in Santa Claus only for him to turn out to be Real After All, multiple stories where they discover mythical places like Atlantis and Stonehenge (all with mutually exclusive explanations), and so many new relatives that it led to a Tangled Family Tree which a dozen different characters claiming to be Scrooge McDuck's paternal grandfather. Author Don Rosa was into this sort of thing himself and valiantly tried to resolve everything into a single continuity, but it's far too much for one man, so the fans have to fill in the gaps.
  • Comic book superheroes lend themselves well to Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny-style battles, and crossover wanks between Marvel and DC characters are common. Marvel Versus DC tried to take advantage of this by pitting Marvel and DC characters against each other and determining the winner by fan vote. The most controversial here was Wolverine against Lobo; although Wolverine unsurprisingly got more votes, this was back when Wolverine wasn't yet functionally immortal, but Lobo was and had fought Superman to a standstill. Even the comic book artists couldn't figure that one out, so they had the fight take place offscreen. Fans wanked that Wolverine bribed Lobo to take a dive; a later Lobo comic claimed it was Professor X who paid Lobo to take the dive (to spare Wolverine's ego and reputation).

    Films — Live-Action 
  • The ending of Inception was intended to be completely open, with the viewer left to decide if it was a dream or real. This has not stopped fans from finding "evidence" that suggests the director intended it to be one or the other.
  • Due to its rather simplistic storyline, Enchanted fans have been left with the task of interpreting several plot threads left at the end, including the rhyme and reason behind Edward and Nancy's last-minute hookup, and how someone as naive as Giselle would react when she learns about sex.
  • Used In-Universe in Galaxy Quest; fans of the show have constructed a whole map of the ship and worked out explanations for everything on it — which pays off when the actors need that kind of knowledge aboard the real ship. They even have their own bizarre explanation for what the Omega-13 device does which deviates from the show's conventional wisdom; it's not a bomb, but a time machine (with a 13-second range) — and they turn out to be right there, too! It's also some subtle Fridge Brilliance, as the aliens who built the ship must have done the same wanking from watching the same "Historical Documents".
  • The plot of The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions is so impenetrable that it has actually spawned a cottage industry of books seeking to explain it. The content of these books ranges from cutting-edge philosophy to some nonsense about space lizards, suggesting that Lovecraftian madness awaits any mortal who should happen to solve the mystery.
  • The Star Wars franchise is rife with fan explanations and justifications:
    • The "Kessel Run" is one of the biggest fan wank topics in fiction. In A New Hope, Han claims the Millennium Falcon is so fast, it "made the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs", which sounds cool — except a parsec is a unit of distance, not time. There are three ways to go about this:
      • Retcon it to an actual unit of time, as was done in the film's novelization (credited to George Lucas but written by Alan Dean Foster), which has it as "12 standard time units".
      • Claim the mistake is deliberate. This could mean either that Han is a blowhard who doesn't know what he's talking about and happens to have a really fast ship, or it could mean that Han is testing Luke and Ben to see if they know anything about space travel (presumably, Luke didn't catch on, while Ben did but was fine with Han thinking they were rubes). The last revision of the original script even had Han making inaccurate boasts, with the line "Ben reacts to Solo's stupid attempt to impress them with obvious misinformation."
      • Claim that the Kessel Run can be made shorter through dangerous shortcuts that only a really fast ship can survive. That's why it would be impressive for a ship to make the run in so short a distance. This can be ferrying goods between two ships traveling away from each other, to maneuvering through an Asteroid Thicket, to skirting dangerously close to a black hole. The latter theory was popular enough to be established officially in The Han Solo Trilogy, and later made it into the films (and the new canon) in Solo: A Star Wars Story.
    • Luke uses the Force to choke a Gammorean in Return of the Jedi — but isn't that using The Dark Side? Fans have wanked this away by claiming that it's only simple telekinesis rather than a specific "power" and any Force user can do it (the Dark Side just likes it a lot more, and there's no Bad Powers, Bad People at play here), to there being no intent to kill (thus not the Dark Side), to Luke using the Jedi Mind Trick to make the Gammorean think he was choking but not put him in any real danger.
    • The Phantom Menace introduced the concept of "midichlorians", which supposedly indicate Force ability. Fans are divided on whether midichlorians cause force ability or are just an indicator thereof. If the latter is the case, there are further fan wanks on whether they're naturally attracted to high concentrations of the Force, whether they can only live in a being with a connection to the Force, or whether they're a by-product of the genetic kink which really causes Force sensitivity (which also resolves the issue of why there are so few Jedi even at the height of the Old Republic).
    • Anakin was prophesized to "bring balance to the Force", but what exactly does that mean? George Lucas and others insist that the existence of The Dark Side is an inherent imbalance and that Anakin killing the Emperor at the end of Return of the Jedi corrected that imbalance. But others point out that in Revenge of the Sith, Anakin killed all the Jedi but two, leaving two Jedi and two Sith — that's balance, right? Huh? And still others suggest that Anakin's creation was the imbalance (thanks to Darth Plagueis' manipulation of midichlorians to create life) and that his Heroic Sacrifice at the end of Jedi brought back balance to the Force.
    • At the end of A New Hope, everybody got a medal except for Chewbacca. Not wanting their heroes to look insensitive, fans have wanked that Wookiees don't believe in medals and awards, and that Chewie was offered a medal offscreen and declined the honor. One comic book continuation, however, cheekily suggested that Leia was just too short to actually put the medal around Chewie's neck, and it would have been undignified to give her a Scully Box during the ceremony.note 
    • The AT-AT, cool as it looked, doesn't seem like a practical weapon to use as a Military Mashup Machine. A fan wank that started on StarDestroyer.net suggested that it was originally intended to be an artillery piece used under heavy escort, but then Executive Meddling ensued (in much the same way as Adolf Hitler in Real Life changed the use of the Me-262).
    • The Last Jedi has been receiving this by its defenders due to the polarizing reception to it. For example; why would Luke ever try to kill Ben Solo when it seemed out of character for him? Many just claim he "was older and thus developed off-screen", and thus made a mistake since he is "human". Why didn't Hux shoot the Resistance ship when they arrived at the Resistance base at the start of the film? Many say because he was arrogant and wanted to make them suffer. Why didn't Holdo reveal her plans to the crew? Fans claim she suspected a spy or wanted to teach Poe a lesson in being too gung-ho, or that they were following real world military protocols and thus had no reason to tell him. Your mileage may vary if these are seen as legitimate explanations.
  • Enemy has many theories about "what it all means." Here's one take from Slate.
  • The Scarecrow's "isosceles triangle" spiel near the end of The Wizard of Oz is wrong three different ways. Some fans argue that it was not a error by the writers, but an allegorical touch meant to warn against trusting the hollow promises of politicians (such as the Wizard, ruler of the Emerald City) or a Take That! to Ivory-Tower academia (as simply having the degree didn't necessarily make Scarecrow any smarter).

    Literature 
  • Discworld fandom's big issues:
    • Havelock Vetinari's sexuality — which way does he bend? And which recurring characters (whether male or female) would he get off with? From canon, it's pretty easy to extrapolate that he's naturally self-sufficient, austere, and celibate, but that's just too boring for some fans (although later books do refer to a rumored past relationship with Lady Margolotta).
    • Are the girls in the Monstrous Regiment's Last Detail lesbians? (Well, we almost certainly know Tonker and Lofty are.) And who in this troupe of military lesbians is doing what to whom, and with what implements?
    • Susan Sto Helit and Jonathan Teatime. Given time, or an alternative universe, would they have gotten it on?
    • On a more intellectual level, Discworld has a very mangled and twisted timeline which fans have long tried to explain. It was eventually explained In-Universe as some idiot human breaking the timeline and forcing the History Monks to repair it, a meta-wank from Terry Pratchett to explain away continuity errors.
  • The big issues in The Lord of the Rings fandom:
    • The question of whether or not the Balrog in Moria had wings is a contender for the fan wank debate to rule them all. The wording in the original book and elsewhere in Tolkien's Legendarium is ambiguous; Balrogs are described as "arising" and "passing over" a country very quickly in The Silmarillion, but like the "wings of shadow" that the one in Moria has, that could easily be metaphorical. Fans argue over whether or not the Balrog in Moria falling off the collapsing bridge into the abyss means anything note . The film version (as well the Amazon's version which takes after the movies) has wings, but mostly because Peter Jackson's own fan wank says it does, and this says nothing about J. R. R. Tolkien's original version. Some people make fun of the debate by jokingly wanking about whether the Balrog had fuzzy bunny slippers (as it appeared to have in Ralph Bakshi's Animated Adaptation).
    • Tom Bombadil is a divisive character (divisive enough to not be featured in nearly any adaptation) with a ton of debate over his true nature — was he a random nature spirit, an avatar of the world as a whole, or one of the Valar or Ilúvatar in disguise? note  Perhaps the best Doylist explanation is that he is a holdover from an early version of the story with more tonal similarity to The Hobbit. His inclusion in the eventually more adult and complex narrative was by then an anachronism, but one which suited Professor Tolkien's meta-concept that there should always be things in the world that defy explanation.
    • Since the Eagles saved Frodo and Sam at the end, why didn't they simply fly the Ring to Mount Doom in the first place? It's very explicit in the original book that the Fellowship required stealth and secrecy; destroying the Ring was their best hope precisely because Sauron wouldn't expect anyone who has that kind of power to want to destroy it, and it was decided that the best way to do that was to send a small party to sneak into Mordor unnoticed. But no one explicitly brings up the Eagles as an option, even just to dismiss it. So readers are left to connect the dots that a Giant Flyer heading straight into the heart of enemy territory isn't exactly stealthy (and Sauron had his own flying units which could match up against them). Once the deed was done, then the Eagles could fly in and save Frodo and Sam (which they weren't even expecting, thinking that they were basically on a Suicide Mission). Tolkien reiterated this in a letter, saying that the Eagles were "not taxis", that the mission depended on stealth, and that he deliberately put the Eagles in to represent the hand of providence (though admittedly a "dangerous" device already used to "the absolute limits of... credibility"). Aside from this, fans have thought of other reasons why not:
      • The Eagles were at risk of corruption from the Ring like everyone else; they wouldn't be able to resist the temptation to just kill Frodo and steal the Ring.
      • Besides Sauron's flying beasts, the Eagles are also vulnerable to missiles and in the previous book The Hobbit they fear the bows of mere shepherds.
      • The Eagles are Chaotic Good and don't answer to orders or are otherwise bound not to intervene (perhaps because it would have ended the books much earlier).
      • They would presumably have to drop the Ring into the volcano, but according to the text, it had to be thrown into the Crack of Doom itself, which is inside a long, narrow tunnel and impractical for an Eagle to fit into.
      • The Eagles, like the Wizards, are servants of the Valar and bound by the same restriction to not directly intervene in the War of the Ring by setting themselves against Sauron "strength for strength"; they are able to inspire and assist, and also rescue Frodo and Sam at Mount Doom because the War of the Ring had just ended.
  • Sherlock Holmes has a lot of inconsistencies and a corresponding volume of fan wanking, to the point that an organization called the Baker Street Irregulars has been doing this since the 1930s. Some of the essays they've written have been published in the book 17 Steps to Baker Street. Some of the problems they've addressed are:
    • Where exactly was Watson's old war wound? It was in the shoulder in A Study in Scarlet, but in the leg in The Sign of Four. Fan wank varies from his being shot on separate occasions to his being Shot in the Ass and too embarrassed to admit it. In Sherlock, Watson was shot in the shoulder but starts the series with a psychosomatic limp that suggests he was shot in the leg, and A Study in Emerald gives Watson an impostor, with each one shot in different locations. (The real one was shot in the leg; the shoulder-wounded narrator is in fact Sebastian Moran).
    • Exactly where was 221B Baker Street? The location didn't exist at the time the books were published (which is exactly why Arthur Conan Doyle used that number); it does exist now, but the address is devoted specifically to Sherlock Holmes fandom and memorabilia.
    • Is Watson's first name James or John? Different books said different things. Most fans have settled on John, but Dorothy L. Sayers suggested that Watson's middle name is Hamish, a Scotch Gaelic version of James (a wank later used by Sherlock), and A Study in Emerald suggests he uses different names for his identities as a doctor and a mystery writer (and also he's a wanted assassin and terrorist). Young Sherlock Holmes also made fun of the name discrepancy.
  • This trope is Older Than Feudalism; in the last days of the Roman Republic, Stoic philosophers didn't spend their time on the mysteries of life and the nature of virtue so much as exactly how many rowers Odysseus had.
  • Harry Potter has a very prolific fanfic collection with its share of fan wanking; one of the most prolific is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which tries to explain as much of the mythos as it can. The biggest question facing the fandom, though, is how exactly magical inheritance works; no matter how you do it, it cannot be explained simply by a single gene: if magic is recessive, Squibs can't exist, but if it's dominant, Muggle-borns can't, and neither case explains the observation that every muggle/mage pair depicted has 100% magical offspring. (Incidentally, Methods of Rationality's author gave up on this question and made it a single recessive gene, explicitly ignoring the canon.)

    Live-Action TV 
  • Doctor Who is textbook Continuity Snarl, and its fandom not only coined the term "fan wank", but it wholeheartedly embraces its tendency to this. Specifically:
    • The TV Movie had the Doctor claim he was half-human. What to make of this? The revival series retconned it, but why would he say it? Many just give up and point to River Song's line, "Rule One: The Doctor lies."
    • The Doctor apparently has a granddaughter (and has since the beginning), but many fans vehemently insist that no character on the show (and most especially not the Doctor) can ever, ever be suggested to engage in a certain physical activity often responsible for producing parents of grandchildren. So they produce fan wank to explain away the Doctor's "granddaughter" as not related to him at all.
    • Season 6B refers to a hypothesised gap between Seasons 6 and 7, where the Doctor regenerates but we never see him do it. Fan wank suggests that he didn't actually immediately suffer his forced regeneration (a punishment from the Time Lords) at the end of Season 6, since on-screen the Second Doctor is seen simply spiralling off into darkness — and that instead he was living in exile on Earth under that threat for an unspecified period. Into this gap a whole swathe of stories can be fitted, before he finally stumbles out of the TARDIS in the new body of the Third Doctor at the start of Season 7. (Similar time-skips and sidetracks, though not necessarily such drastic ones, can be inserted into a few other seemingly innocuous pauses between episodes — or even between scenes — of other stories in the show's long run... which offers scope for many, many adventures in the Doctor Who Expanded Universe.)
    • How old exactly is the Doctor? He's Really 700 Years Old in trope terms, but he's notoriously terrible at keeping track of his actual age, occasionally even going backwards. It's not easy for fans to keep track of either because there are a number of Time Skips which could have lasted any number of years, as well as theorized episodes like the above-mentioned Season 6B and whole incarnations whose history we don't know (like the War Doctor). Some suggest that he honestly doesn't know himself (the Timey-Wimey Ball does strange things to one's counting ability), while others cheekily suggest that different incarnations of the Doctor are insecure about his age and will lie about it to appear younger or older than he really is.
    • Who were the faces shown to the Doctor by Morbius in "The Brain of Morbius"? Were they previous incarnations of the Doctor (as intended by the production team but retconned due to being basically impossible), or were they incarnations of Morbius? In the new show season 12 finale "The Timeless Children", the faces are confirmed as indeed belonging to previous incarnation of the Doctor that they were later made to forget about.
    • Did "Shada" actually happen, and if so, which version? The "Shada" audio drama takes the view that it was cosmically retconned out by "The Five Doctors" and shoehorns the Eighth Doctor into the story, but the novelisation presents it with the Fourth Doctor as originally intended. Then a reconstruction came out which fills in all the unfilmed scenes with animated content voiced by the original cast, and this serves as the official version of the story.
    • Due to Acceptable Breaks from Reality resulting from the actors playing the Doctor all being human mortals, the ageing of the Doctor's individual faces is inconsistent — the Doctor can take The Slow Path for 400 years and not age a day in one story, but look visibly older after only five years in another. This has received an attempted Hand Wave by River Song in "Let's Kill Hitler", where she suggests that Time Lords can control their ageing and even age backwards if they want to (possibly used by the Tenth Doctor to reverse his age between his courtship with Queen Elizabeth in "The Day of the Doctor" and his death in the Specials), but there are points where the Doctor is physically ageing, getting only drawbacks from doing so, and clearly doesn't want to.
    • How does regeneration work? How can someone regenerate with gelled hair? And what was going on with Romana having a Costume-Test Montage with bodies after regenerating apparently only for vanity?
      • Some sources suggest that if you are mortally injured and have to Regenerate, you have no choice. If you do it willingly, like novels and audio dramas imply Romana did, then you can chose and chop and change bodies as you please, like she did.
    • Anything involving the frequent use of the You Look Familiar trope. Identical Grandson? Spacio-genetic multiplicity? The Doctor Who universe just happens to have Only Six Faces? Some weird phenomenon resulting from the constant time travelling?
    • Much of the Early-Installment Weirdness:
      • In "The Edge of Destruction", Ian uses a stethoscope on the Doctor without noting anything unusual, and in "The Sensorites", the First Doctor casually mentions his "heart", singular. But during the Third Doctor's tenure, we discover the Doctor has the Bizarre Alien Biology quirk of having two hearts, easily detected by a casual stethoscope use in the Fourth Doctor story "Robot". One novel came up with the explanation that the Doctor only gained a second heart after his first regeneration, although the Second Doctor also mentions his "heart", singular. Strangely, the Doctor being Ambiguously Human in Hartnell and Troughton's eras is almost never a target for this sort of thing.
      • If the Doctor is supposed to mature over the course of the show's run, why is the First Doctor portrayed as an elderly, Seen It All patriarch? Some fans wanked that he's really a teenager with No Social Skills who feigns age and wisdom so that people will think he's important. The character does have Manchild qualities, which makes for a very entertaining alternative viewing of the Hartnell era. It eventually became Ascended Fanon in "Time Crash", where the Tenth Doctor acknowledged trying to look old and important when he was young.
      • Why does WOTAN in "The War Machines" call the Doctor "Doctor Who"? We now know that his name is a secret, and his courtesy title is simply "the Doctor"; so how does an early episode make such an easy mistake?
    • The Dalek timeline, why the Daleks in the first story were so different in personality and power level from later ones and why their precursor race is given as "Dals" at first and then (more memorably) as "Kaleds". Some novels suggest that the early Daleks were a prototypical race of Dalek sent to live in the city on their own as an experiment, who then disowned the inferior beings who created them. Others suggest that the Dals were a race wiped out by the Kaleds, and a Dalish word was used to name the race ("Dal-ek" being Dalish for "God" or "Übermensch"), leading to the early Daleks to mistakenly assume they were descended from the Dals.
    • The podcast DWO WHOcast spent one episode pondering why it was that the Doctor's boots changed into brogue shoes when he regenerated from the Fourth into the Fifth Doctor (which out-of-universe was just a straight blooper). At least one fanfiction has been written about it.
    • The "UNIT Dating Controversy" refers to figuring out just when the heck the Doctor worked for the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce. Long story short: some hints in the 1970s UNIT-involving stories suggest they are set in the near-future (the late-'70s and 1980s), even when to all intents and purposes they appear to take place in the then-present day. The problem is, the show itself forgot about this conceit by the time of an (actual) early-'80s story, which explictly dated long-running UNIT chief the Brigadier's retirement to 1976 — thereby inextricably knotting its own continuity. Unknotting it is a conundrum big enough, wanky enough, and enough of a fool's errand that the revival series makes a generous point of mocking it whenever the subject comes up.
      • In fact, this was lampshaded in the 50th Anniversary episode "The Day of the Doctor":
        Kate Lethbridge Stewart: "Malcolm, I need you to send me one of my father's incident files. Codenamed Cromer. '70s or '80s, depending on the dating protocol."
    • A whole book was written to explain the error in "Warriors of the Deep" when the Siluruan leader claims "Twice we offered the hand of friendship to these ape-descended primitives, and twice we were treacherously attacked"; while the Sea Devils were indeed depth-charged during negotiations, the Silurians killed the leader who wanted peace and then released a virus to kill all humans.
  • Star Trek fan wank is exemplified by the "Klingon Forehead Problem": Klingons in the original series had smooth foreheads, whereas they have ridged foreheads in every other work. Fans have been wanking on this for decades, with theories from Klingons removing the ridges with cosmetic surgery to better disguise themselves to just not all Klingons having them. Gene Roddenberry initially claimed that they always had ridges, but the original series lacked the makeup budget to show them. In Deep Space Nine, though, the crew meets 23rd-century Klingons who have smooth foreheads; Star Trek: Enterprise explains this as the result of a genetic engineering experiment Gone Horribly Wrong that infected a significant portion of the population. One novel said much the same thing, and the non-ridged Klingon were human-Klingon hybrids shunned by the rest of the Klingon population. That could explain why they were sent off to patrol the border, were permanently pissed off at humans and lack the Klingon honour so prevalent in later shows. (The non-canon Star Trek Online shows how they were cured in the late 23rd century.) But another DS9 episode shows some original series Klingons arriving with ridged foreheads; fans wank this away by claiming they had cosmetic surgery to pass themselves off as "normal" Klingons.
  • iCarly has copious amounts of fan wanking, mostly devoted to shipping. One large pro-Seddie group will interpret any form of communication or interaction as supporting their ship, including a very ambiguous Shrug of God.
  • Power Rangers has at least two of these: one in Power Rangers Time Force during the teamup episodes with Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue and the other during Power Rangers: Dino Thunder.
    • For the first one, Dana Mitchell is a teenage paramedic during the events of Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue, but a full-fledged pediatric doctor by the next season. Even with being a paramedic training taking a chunk out of the medical courses she'd have to take, she should still be in medical school during Time Force.
    • Dino Thunder's specifically deals with Tommy's degree: a doctorate in paleontology. Tommy graduates high school in 1997 and leaves partway through Power Rangers Turbo, though I don't think it's specified when exactly, only that it happens after Justin starts at Angel Grove High School before Tommy leaves. Dino Thunder (despite what the timeline says) takes place over the 2003-2004 school year by the 'Class of 2004' banner we see in the final episode. Tommy has roughly 5 and a half years to complete every single degree he'd need to be a doctor of paleontology. To get that degree, it takes 8 years at minimum up to 11 years to complete. Tommy either straight up skipped getting his master's degree and went from undergrad to his Ph.D. studies, took no semesters off, or did some sort of combo degree (undergrad/masters or masters/Ph.D.) where he could get the degrees in less time, if not some combination thereof.
  • In Stargate fandom, one of the most obvious and yet never directly addressed questions is why all the aliens speak English. Various theories have emerged, the most popular being that the stargates themselves act as translators. Further speculation suggests that travel through a stargate somehow implants individuals with the ability to speak other languages, but it didn't originally manifest because the Earth Stargate uses a haphazard jerry-rigged control system. (McKay complains that the Earth gate ignores hundreds of important commands that normal gates use.) The producers, for their part, claim it's just a convention to make everything feel less contrived.
  • The penchant Skins has for ambiguous series endings leads to lots of this.
  • How I Met Your Mother is specifically designed to spawn this, with fans spending pages of threads on Television Without Pity and other sites guessing who the mother is, how the many events Future!Ted says are important to the story with factor into the story of the mother, and the significance and context of many orphaned, Noodle Incident-like flashforwards that Future!Ted promises to explain later and how they will fit into the future story arcs. There has also been constant wank trying to justify how one of Ted's previous girlfriends might be the mother, as well as speculation about how Ted will meet the Mother (it was finally revealed that he met her at Barney's wedding), and theories about what the goat in Ted's bathroom on his birthday was about (it was part of a multi-sided Kudzu Plot and wound up putting Ted in the hospital).
  • On Merlin, Morgana and Morgause are established as half-sisters, though it's never definitively said whether they share a mother or a father. There's evidence for either Vivienne or Gorlois as the shared parent, but in series 3 it's revealed that Morgana's father is not Gorlois at all, but Uther (making her half-sister to Arthur). Since Morgana and Morgause continue to refer to each other as "sister" after this, most fans assume that Vivienne is the shared parent. Added confusion comes out of the fact that Gaius initially called them "half-sisters" (long before he knew that Uther was Morgana's true father), a statement that doesn't make sense unless you assume that Morgause had a father who wasn't Gorlois (otherwise they would have been assumed to be full sisters).
  • Game of Thrones, being a complex, sprawling fantasy series that often leaves events off-screen, is highly prone to fan wank. There's even a fandom-specific term, "honeypotting"note , for when a theory is seen as either smarter or more complex than the showrunners actually wrote.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Dungeons & Dragons has may wankish fan theories, to the point of the creation of The Dungeonomicon, which tries to justify (among many other things) the economics, social structures and fantastic locales of D&D.
    • A common form of Fan Wank in the 4th Edition is "refluffling", or using the mechanics of a power as written but changing the explanation of how the power works to better fit a character concept. It's commonly done with characters using the Martial (non-magical, weapons and skill-based) power source, to explain how someone with no magical powers can turn invisible (you see, he's really just hiding so well he'd might as well be invisible), control an enemy's actions (you're not making them jump off a cliff, you're staggering them, and it's just dumb luck that they happen to stagger 20 feet straight toward a cliff edge), etc. The practice was eventually officially sanctioned on the D&D website; there was an Insider article both describing the practice an encouraging it.
    • Earlier than this, it was specifically mentioned as something that should be done with Warlock powers so that they fit your character's contract, and used to explain why the contract labels for powers were dropped after the Player's Handbook — the labels led people to an attitude that they could only pick appropriately-labeled powers for their warlock, when they had only been intended as a guide and if you really wanted a power that wasn't appropriately labeled, you could just change the fluff to match.
  • Farcast for Eclipse Phase is an entire year of fanwank, where the author set out to see if he could produce a year's worth of material for the setting just to see if he can.
  • In the backstory of Warhammer 40,000, there were 20 Space Marine Legions before the Horus Heresy, where 10 Legions rebelled. In order to prevent another organized revolt in the future, the remaining Legions were split into much smaller Chapters. Two of the original twenty Legions — and whether these Legions stayed loyal or rebelled — were intentionally left blank, so Space Marine (both loyalist and Chaos) players could fill in the details themselves when making their own Chapter/Legion, if none of the established lore fit the tone they were going for. The explanation for the identities and fates of these two blank Legions has caused no end of Fan Wank. Later novels set during the Horus Heresy expanded considerably on the time of the Space Marine Legions, including the "Lost Legions"; while they are never named nor are their Primarchs brought up, dialogue suggests they did, in fact, go with Horus — and were wiped out for it. However, this information directly contradicts other equally canon sources that suggest the two Legions were destroyed before the Horus Heresy for other reasons, ranging from siding with alien species to simply succumbing in battle.

    Toys 
  • The BIONICLE fandom is very weird about this. Pretty much all forums, the most prominent being BZPower, had or have entire sub-forums dedicated to storyline-discussion and theorizing. On one hand, the amount of fanwank that built up during the toy-line's run is incredible. On the other, most of the fandom is very strict about adhering to canon, creating a sort of vicious circle that leads only the toughest fanwank to survive. This eventually led to the fans bombarding the official writer with their own ideas to canonize them. Some made it through, but after a while, he had to leave the online forums due to LEGO's policies. Even after the toys were canceled, the fanwankery just kept on going. Fans are trying to explain the ludicrous powers through real-life physics (despite the writer's insistence that they don't apply here), bringing back romance after the No Hugging, No Kissing rule, and declaring fan fictions as canonical alternate universes.

    Video Games 
  • A3 has such a case when Elegant Vacation preview drops. Although back in hAve A greAt trip Homare easily catches a thief with a hug, fans never live down Homare's Hotel Compass backstage, in which Homare struggles to carry boxes and is hit by a really bad case of sore muscles the day after training with Tasuku, and makes it as a gold standard for Homare's physical strength despite many instances of Homare displaying athleticism. Therefore, fans have a heated argument over why Homare is drawn more built in the illustration and the card of Elegant Vacation. Some reasons include Homare training with Tasuku off-screen, Homare's history of ballroom dancing helps with it, or just a case of Depending on the Artist.
    • Similarly, fans still often try to justify Homare's display of athleticism in canon, and even the fact that he has a strong core. It is usually chalked up to Homare's history of ballroom dancing, but those who refuse to let go of the Hotel Compass backstage simply reason that Homare has a strong core and is physically weak at the same time.
  • Alien: Isolation: After The Reveal of Mission 14 it has been speculated that the reason Amanda is always stalked by a xenomorph from Mission 3 to 11 is that because there are multiple xenomorphs actually patrolling the station. This is an interesting hypothesis, except for a prominent detail: from the end of Mission 10 (when you jettison the alien) to Mission 15 there is no xenomorph anywhere. Not even if you backtrack to previous areas where it was constantly roaming and you try to attract it with a lot of noise, nothing will pop out from vents. There is also no in-game discussion or record about someone ever seeing two or more aliens together (which it's unlikely to never having happened if there were really multiple unleashed xenomorphs), not even subtle hints like a character saying that there is a monster so quick that it seemed to be in two different and distant places at the same time. The story timing would also be unplausibly slow if there were more aliens wreaking havoc on the station - the crew would have been exterminated much earlier. The game always treated lore-wise and mechanically-wise the alien in the first half of the game as always the same creature. It would also make no sense for Apollo to alert the androids to protect the reactor after you jettison that alien, if it wasn't confined and thus theoretically easy to eradicate.
  • Why, exactly, have we never seen a male Mithra in Final Fantasy XI? The official explanation for a lack of male Mithra PCs was originally simply that they're unadventurous and so never leave home, to the consternation of those who are uncomfortable with the concept of the Non-Action Guy or just of not being able to play a cute catboy. With the release of the first expansion, we see our first truly wholly Mithra town and still no men (due to early fears of running into the PS2's technical limitations), the explanation was elaborated as the slightly less plausible "they never leave the Mithra homeland" without clarifying that Kazham wasn't it, and thus the Fan Wank engine got the push start it needed. The most popular fan explanation is that they're too rare for use as anything but dedicated breeding stock, and what man would complain about that job, up to and including being chained up in the shadows? Wings of the Goddess does finally show one male Mithra in a cutscene (clothed, no less), but this may be too little, too late. Similar questions existed for the "all-female" Viera race found in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Final Fantasy XII and other Ivalice-bound games, until Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker, which added male Vieras to the game.
  • Final Fantasy XIV nearly went through the same song and dance for single gender races as Final Fantasy XI did. The Miqo'te were going to be female only and the Roegadyn would be male only, but players complained about it and the developers allowed the opposite sexes to be playable.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
    • A lot of fan wank gets involved with the Link/Midna ship, thanks to writers needing to invent ways for them to actually be a couple long-term when the game ends with Midna permanently separating the Light and Twilight Realms.
    • Link and Zelda are Legacy Characters, yes, but are they descended from their predecessors, outright reincarnated, or different people altogether. Skyward Sword and Breath of the Wild basically confirm that all the Zeldas are reincarnations of the original Zelda; no word on whether the same is true for Link.
    • The many, many efforts to make a coherent timeline out of the series have led to endless Fan Wank. The most accepted resolution was to split the timeline in two in Ocarina of Time, made possible by the game's use of Time Travel. Creators Eiji Aonuma and Shigeru Miyamoto confirmed that there was a timeline but refused to show it to anyone, only occasionally saying which games come after which. That was until the 2011 release of the artbook/encyclopedia Hyrule Historia, which indeed reveals the whole timeline — and shows that Ocarina of Time split the timeline into three. Fans still aren't sure what to make of that, with some questioning why "game overs" in other Zelda games don't cause additional timelines. Other than the obvious, that is.
    • Is Sheik just Zelda crossdressing or did she actually use magic to turn herself male? That one should have been resolved through Word of God: Sheik is, officially, canonically, absolutely a Wholesome Crossdresser. But, for various reasons, some fans simply refuse to accept this as canon.
  • Kingdom Hearts:
    • The franchise has enough fan wank going about Nobodies and all associated mind screws that they've caused multiple spoogenamis.
    • The Another Side, Another Story special ending from the first game deserves a special mention. The quantity of Fan Wank that single video originated rivaled all the Lost and Zelda timeline theories.
    • "What would Rinoa be like if she was in Kingdom Hearts?", a question that resulted in a cosplay firestorm.
  • From Super Mario, a particular fan wank from the Koopaling fansite Lemmy's Land considered Bowser Jr. to be Baby Ludwig von Koopa under a different name and appearance, which was finally Jossed with New Super Mario Bros. Wii.
  • Pokémon:
    • In Pokémon Red and Blue, the researcher's journal in the mansion on Cinnabar Island notes that Mew "gave birth" to Mewtwo. This has spawned no end of fan debate over what this exactly means; while real life cloning procedures involve pregnancy and giving birth, later games show that Pokémon lay eggs, and Mewtwo's Pokédex description refers to "horrific gene splicing and DNA engineering experiments" that created it (which the anime went with by showing Mewtwo being cloned sci-fi style from Mew's hair). Interpretations vary over whether it's just Early-Installment Weirdness or merely the researcher being metaphorical.
    • In the Pokémon Gold and Silver games, whether Raikou, Entei, and Suicune are cats, dogs, or whatever. Many forums moderators decided that people are free to call them whatever, but if there's any argument they are "officially" the three legendary gerbils. Pokémon Generations - Episode 6: The Reawakening seems to suggest they are dogs, but raises more fan wank than it settles.
  • This is what happens when you base an extremely popular FPS on an Excuse Plot. Fans of Team Fortress 2 have been going mad over various details about the world of the game: the characters' background, the in-universe mechanics (respawn or replace?), etc. However, Valve is slowly giving the players breadcrumbs through comics and videos.
  • Fallout 4 states that the chem stimulant Jet existed as a Pre-War drug, which contradicts Fallout 2, where it's established that Myron invented the drug himself. While this has never been addressed in canon, fans have noted that a plausible explanation practically writes itself with no mental gymnastics needed: Myron is an amoral, drug-cooking sleazeball and staggering case of Small Name, Big Ego, so it's completely in-character for him to reverse engineer a post-apocalyptic version of Jet from available ingredients, and then lie about inventing it to puff up his own reputation.
  • The Silent Hill series by its nature encourages this in their fandom; Game FAQS is filled with exhaustive plot and character analyses. A sure way to troll any fan forum is to cut down Epileptic Trees with the insistence that it's all just deliberately invoked Mind Screw on Konami's part.
  • Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood has a popular fan theory that Cesare Borgia is the creator or inspiration for Abstergo Industries — because he said the word "cleanse" once.
  • The ending of Mass Effect 3 has inspired Fan Wank that enveloped the entire series. This is one of the reasons that Bioware released an extended ending DLC. Allegedly it was the intended effect, if the head writer really did write "LOTS OF SPECULATION FROM EVERYONE" in his notes on the ending. Most fans took this in a direction he didn't intend.
    • All the indoctrination theory was commented later on by Chris Hepler with “The Indoctrination Theory is a really interesting theory, but it's entirely created by the fans. While we made some of the ending a little trippy because Shepard is a breath away from dying and it's entirely possible there's some subconscious power to the kid's words, we never had the sort of meetings you'd need to have to properly seed it through the game. We weren't that smart. By all means, make mods and write fanfic about it, and enjoy whatever floats your boat, because it's a cool way to interpret the game. But it wasn't our intention. We didn't write that.”
  • Some fans of the Ninja Gaiden series try to fit in the events of the original arcade game (which is largely unconnected to the NES version and its later sequels, save for a few superficial similarities) into the continuity of the later console games by claiming that the two player characters (a pair of ninjas, one in blue and another one in red) are actually Ryu Hayabusa and his father Joe (or Ken, depending on the version) undergoing a mission that they went through before the events of the Xbox and NES games (despite the fact that the player characters in the arcade version were never given identities).
  • In Ōkami, you play as a goddess (Amaterasu) that has taken on the form of a white wolf. Largely due to sexism and a desire to play as a male character, some fans began undermining the gender of Amaterasu in various ways, such as by arguing that the wolf was in fact a separate male entity from Amaterasu serving as her vessel, and/or that Amaterasu was male in her previous life as Shiranui (this one was clearly not true in the first game, but the sequel retcons Shiranui into a separate male entity), and/or that being a god, Amaterasu lacks a true sex. "Evidence" for these theories includes random NPCs referring to her as male, which is very easily explained by the characters just assuming this; characters also tend to assume she is a dog, but for some reason these same fans don't argue the validity of that. They also ignore or try to argue away the much more numerous references to her as female, including a character that is able to see her true form (a beautiful human maiden), and the fact she's based off of a clearly female Japanese goddess.
  • An oft-mentioned criticism of the Resident Evil series is how Rebecca goes from an inexperienced but reasonably badass Action Girl who holds her own against hordes of infected and even takes on a Tyrant one-on-one in Resident Evil 0 to a mewling Damsel in Distress who can't even handle a hunter without pratfalling and needing Chris to save her ass in Resident Evil. A common justification is that by the time the events of Resident Evil rolled around, Rebecca had been running around for well over 24 hours straight without rest, sleep, food, or drinknote . No justification or excuse is given for how she could have lost her magnum, her shotgun, her grenade launcher, or all her ammo and healing items beyond just her handgun and a piddling amount of bullets though.

    Web Comics 

    Web Original 
  • RedLetterMedia mocks Fan Wank to hell and back in this video discussing the ridiculously detailed but never-mentioned-in-the-films backstory of Darth Vader's suit.
  • Shad hates this trope and sees it as a sign of bad writing, because the fans are putting more thought into the lore of a work of fiction than the writers are. He even points out the possibility that a later work will contradict the fan theory. One example of this is in his review/rant on The Rise of Skywalker, in which Shad points out that Luke did not confront Kylo in person in the previous movie even though he had his X-Wing, because according to some fans, his X-Wing was broken, leaving Luke stranded on the island. However, The Rise of Skywalker establishes that Luke's X-Wing still works, infuriating Shad.

    Western Animation 
  • Shego's plasma power in Kim Possible: if she can blast through metal, why didn't she burn up a cheerleader? (Besides the most popular answer.)
  • Transformers:
    • A fan author named Stormcloud seems bound and determined to use every Beast Wars character not in the show in his fics. The end result was fight scenes that were so step-by-step and plotted out that they resembled a pre-publishing RA Salvatore, with character names made up of bad animal puns.
    • Go to the YouTube clip about the creation of the Transformers taken directly from the G1 cartoon it came from. Behold the number of comic fans trying to explain to innocent viewers how it fits into the Transformer God Primus origin from the comics, despite the fact the G1 Transformers cartoon made no reference to Primus, and as far as the TV producers were concerned, this was the intended origin for the show. However, Primus having created Cybertron before the Quintessons' arrival was canonized by the Wreckers comic.
    • Fans have attempted to do the most complicated logic gymnastics possible to try and reconcile the various bits of backstory for the Constructicons that were revealed throughout the course of the G1 cartoon. Season 1 claims the group was created by Megatron on Earth within the timeframe covered by the cartoon. Season 2 posits that they were benign Decepticons (as in, not inherently evil) who were friends with Omega Supreme before the war, but were captured and brainwashed by Megatron to serve his cause. Season 3 shows them as being present at the creation of Megatron himself (it also shows too many Constructicons gathered around the table compared to the normal 6-bot lineup, leading to additional wankery about what happened to those missing members prior to any of their chronologically later appearances). Each of these pieces of info are generally incompatible with the others, but that hasn't stopped some fans from building incredibly elaborate theories as to how they can all co-exist while still making something that resembles sense.
  • My Life as a Teenage Robot never got a "true ending" and left a lot of things unexplained by the creators, prompting a lot of fanwank about the purpose of the villains, where they came from, why they do the things they do and what drives them. Some people have their own little universe where everything is explained.
  • Batman Beyond: Fans theorized that Terry and Matt's lack of resemblance to their father, specifically their black hair, genetically improbable given their parents' hair colors (red and brown respectively for Mary and Warren), had a role in the divorce. Flash forward to the Justice League Unlimited Fully Absorbed Finale "Epilogue," and guess what? Bruce Wayne is revealed to have been the boys' biological father, with Warren's genetic material having been, unbeknownst to anyone but CADMUS, overwritten with his. According to the series' writers, this twist was due to realizing the genetic improbability.
  • Aside from the two Care Bears movie continuities, as the Headscratchers mentioned, what happened to Dark Heart after he turned human, and for that matter, why did he attack them, why did he care about a girl that saved his life once? What was his backstory, and speaking of which, the backstory of all of the villains and the pre-Wishing Star bears and cousins?
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
    • Let's just say that the fans put a lot of thought into analyzing the physics, economics, politics, and magic of the setting. In particular, discussions of exactly how powerful Celestia and Luna are, both in the physical and political sense, crop up a lot. Entire fanfics have been written primarily for the authors to explain and justify why their particular set of Fanon makes the most sense.
    • In "Daring Don't", Twilight and Rainbow Dash briefly engage in this In-Universe concerning the Daring Do series.
  • In this video (in Portuguese) by Brazilian Youtuber Cometa Toon, he says that in Steven Universe there is a pre-Big Bang universe made of magic (which is a chemical element just like oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, et al) all around of "our" universe that is accessible by the Gems' gems, and after this magic gravitationally attracted itself until it became a sphere so dense and heavy that its only option was to explode in the Big Bang, which spread magic throughout the universe, but not in "our" universe, in a universe parallel to "ours". At the center of the Big Bang explosion, this magical universe made a dimensional rift, connecting with "our" universe and close to such a rift was a star "big enough to have gravity" and therefore attracted the magic to its orbit, but because the star could no longer absorb the elements that kept it alive, magic entered the dying star, restoring its life and giving it consciousness. One day, when the star observed that on its closest planet there was a shining stone, which was formed into the first Gem of all. After getting to know this Gem better, the star decided to use all its remaining magic to create new Gems on the planets that surrounded it. And Gems are made by injecting this magic into the earth in a concentrated state, which Injectors can access through their big crystals just like Gems can, and the Warp Pads are made from some kind of metal infused with magic, and, unlike the Gems or the star, the pads did not gain consciousness but gained teleportation powers. It all, incredibly, started as a way to explain the lack of the law of conservation of mass in the cartoon.

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