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"You may not know who Bowser Jr. is, but you may recognize him by another name. Introducing, Baby Ludwig! That's right, it's Bowser's first kid in baby form. Nintendo used a different name and appearance in this game so as not to offend fans of the other six Koopalings."
The ''other'' reason you should use protection when reading Fanfic.
Fanfic comes in many varieties, but many stories fall into the major categories of "more of the Same" (also called " Original Flavour"), which attempts to tell a new story using the setup and style of its source material, and "Mythos Building", which tries to cement the writer's personal theories into the pseudocanon of the source and usually getting a Sue laid in the process. The latter tend to be more memorable, but at a price.
Many of the fan theories which make their way into Fanfic seek to "fix" something the writer believes to be wrong with the source. The fans usually put a lot more thought into this than the show's writers ever did (though show writers have gotten a lot more attentive in recent years, primarily because of the growth of this kind of fan activity). They often come up with answers to questions that either make not a whit of difference in the end, or are more fun without an answer than with.
Naturally, these theories often venture way out into fantasyland. When the theory makes you say, "Oh come on!", the fanfic author has stepped over the line into Fan Wank.
When the show itself canonizes such a theory, it's a Ret Con or a Re Vision or one of the two varieties of Continuity Porn. When a fan does, it's Fanwank. Note, however, that Ret Con is a value-neutral word, while Fanwank definitely carries a connotation of crap. On the other hand, theories that get popular can become Fanon.
The etymology of 'wank' shows that it means 'indulgence', particularly any kind of major self-indulgence. Not surprisingly, this leads to it being British slang for masturbation, though it's mostly just their own egos that such writers are stroking. Mostly. The term was coined by Doctor Who fan and writer Craig Hinton, who was no stranger to it himself, and applied it to his own work.
Compare with Epileptic Trees, Continuity Porn (the Canon variety of this) and of course, the TV Tropes Wild Mass Guessing. Shrug Of God and (even more so) Sure Why Not will, at least in theory, validate Fan Wank theories.
See also Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny, an entire trope driven by Fan Wank.
Some of the most popular Fan Wanks revolve around:
- The Klingon Forehead Problem in Star Trek — which finally got a retcon in Star Trek Enterprise.
- This editor is firmly of the belief that Worf's "It's a long story, but we don't like to talk about it!" (from DS 9's Trials and Tribble-ations) was the only explanation needed.
- This is an odd example because before that line the official explanation was that TOS Klingons and Next Gen Klingons don't look different. The problem was that, obviously, there was no way to mention this in the show and as a result a lot of people didn't know about it.
- Linking stories to justify an unexplained Retool.
- What various bits of Technobabble really mean (eg. in Star Trek.
- The backstory of the main character in Doctor Who, specifically:
- Retconning away the revelation of the Doctor's half-human lineage from the 1996 Made For TV Movie.
- Explaining how the Doctor has a granddaughter in light of the unjustified insistence by the fans that no character on the show (and most especially not the Doctor) can ever, ever, do the thing one needs to do in order to produce a parent for one's granddaughter.
- Season 6B
- To be fair: the very page linked here lists Season 6B as a type of fanon, and its origins come from one of the writers of the series, not so much the fans: Robert Holmes himself believed that the Time Lords did not immediately exile the Doctor to Earth, which is why he and Jamie can freely discuss them in "The Two Doctors".
- One Doctor Who website actually features "Plugging the Holes: Fan-Wank Explanations for Continuity Errors" in the novels.
- Amongst Whovians, "Fan Wank" can also refer to any piece of work that pointlessly reuses old monsters or characters in an attempt to "excite" fanboys.
- The romantic and sexual relationships between various characters, especially those for whom there is little to no evidence in the canon, and the resolution of Love Triangles (or Love Dodecahedrons) in a way other than the canon provides. This often goes as far as rewriting canon relationships to make preferred pairings more plausible. eg. Two characters shown in love in series canon portrayed as hating each other in the story.
- In Sailor Moon fanfiction, this often takes a strange twist due to the fact that Sailors Uranus and Neptune are lesbian lovers. 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 being 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. In their eyes, that removed the homosexuality of the pair.
- Sailor Moon fanwank has an Epileptic Trees theory which 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. Note that 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.
- What exactly happened after the Too Good To Last show ended (see Firefly and My So Called Life).
- Events in The Matrix sequels. The plot 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 Legend of Zelda series is inspiring quite a bit of timeline wankery. Also, the Shipping Industry is quite profitable in that area. There's a huge debate about Link/Zelda or Link/Midna.
- The many, many, many efforts to make a coherent timeline out of the series, despite Word Of God claiming there is none besides a few explicit cases.
- In Merchandise Driven fandoms, especially Transformers, fanfics will often single out anything that never got a turn in the official fictions as something that needs to be featured. Of course, this can be really problematic if you have a bunch of toys that never got screen time and a fanfic author who doesn't know when to say when.
- There was a fan-author named Stormcloud, who seemed 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.
- The speculation in the plot analysis for the original Silent Hill ended up astonishingly close to the official backstory from Konami that wasn't revealed until Silent Hill 3. Almost as though Konami shared the plot with the guide's author from the beginning, or simply read the plot guide, thought: "Uh... Yeah, let's just go with that," and decided to use it as canon.
- What gender the main character's Pokémon are in the anime.
- Also, how old starting Pokémon trainers ''should'' be.
- In the 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.
- Military history and tactics in the Star Wars franchise. Good God.
- And for that matter, the Star Trek franchise.
- Don't forget the detailed descriptions of the various lightsaber combat forms, which George Lucas has said don't even exist.
- 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.
- Why, exactly, we have 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, even if they are 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.
- The 2007 film Beowulf was a well-funded Fan Wank on the relationships of Grendel's mother to various characters, spawned from the creator coming up with the "only" option of who Grendel's father was.
- What might have become of characters who were left out of a new reboot or adaptation. For example, what the movieverse version of an X-Men character who wasn't in the movies might be like: is he an X-Man? A government agent? A Brotherhood member? So awesome and powerful Magneto wants to have his babies?
- Older Than Radio. Even when the first Sherlock Holmes stories were published, many learned writers were trying to figure out why Dr Watson was shot in the shoulder in A Study In Scarlet and in the leg in The Sign of Four. Answers ranged from "He was actually shot in the buttocks and was too embarrassed to say this" to "He was shot on two separate occasions".
- V from V For Vendetta 's gender. It's pure Fan Wank in both the graphic novel and film that V, a person consistently referred to in both the novel and movie as "he" and "the man from room five" is Valerie, a female character we only see in flashback, presumably after some serious surgery.
- Crossover versus arguments between two or more major sci-fi franchises. Good God, the fanwank.
- The big issue in The Lord of the Rings fandom (and quite possibly the fanwank debate to rule them all) is the question of whether or not the Balrog had wings. Other, smaller debates include whether or not Tolkien's elves have Pointed Ears and what color Legolas's hair was in the book.
- 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.
- If you go by a Star Trek (TOS) producer's explanation; every TV has a built-in Universal Translator.
- Maybe the natural evolution of all languages is English. Just don't tell the Academie Francais.
- Ranma ˝ is notorious among the fans for having an open ending. This of course leads shippers to writing piles upon piles of fanfiction hooking up the main characters with each other, usually Ranma with someone who isn't Akane, the likely pairing shown at the end of the manga. 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.
- Character relationships aren't the only thing Fan Wanked in this series. Among the more popular concepts elaborated upon by fans:
- The exact laws and origins of the Cursed Springs of Jusenkyo — how much water is needed to trigger a transformation, what the exact temperature is (and whether it's an absolute or relative measure,) 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, the origin of Akaneniichuan, as well as the Guide's insistence that the stories are all "tragic,") whether the springs confer any aspect of the original creature's personality (thanks to Filler from the anime and Rouge,) and whether the curses are age-specific (female Ranma growing up normally, but P-chan and Rakkyousai remaining as a piglet and a young child, respectively.)
- Calculations and extrapolations of the supernatural martial artists' absolute speed, power, and skills, if they were applied to the real world. For instance, the speed of Ranma's "hundreds of punches that look like a single one" attack, his resistance to damage next to the damage done to the environment, whether he has some sort of Healing Factor due to how quickly he recovers, the lower limits of Ryoga and Lime's strength based on what they could lift in the manga, Ranma's running speed by comparing to the speed of a Giant Flyer in the same distance, and so on.
- Psychological diagnoses of the cast's various mental issues, often interpreting them as actual illnesses or neuroses.
- And, of course, the biggest Fan Wank of all: whether Ranma could get pregnant. Often followed up by what would happen if a pregnant Ranma turned back into a man.
- 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.)
- Code Geass gets a lot of it even ignoring the Shipping and endless debates about whether X character is a tragic hero/heartless villain/something else entirely. A good portion comes from all the questions left unanswered by the staff as a result of being Screwed By The Network, and includes things like C.C.'s real name, the true nature of the Geass, the origin of Suzaku's superhuman abilities (and their connection to Geass), the true fate of Kallen's supposedly dead brother Naoto, and countless other topics.
- Kingdom Hearts has enough Fan Wank going about Nobodies and all associated Mind Screws that they've caused multiple spoogenamis.
- 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.
- The majority of fans abandoned that idea a long time ago.
- 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. Hell, some people have their own little universe where everything is explained.
- The Bible/Torah/Qu'ran anyone?
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