The 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. The latter tend to be more memorable, but at a price.
An awful lot 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 fanwank.
When the show itself canonizes such a theory, it's a
Ret Con or a
Re Vision. 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.
"Wank" is an (especially British) euphemism 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, and of course, the TV Tropes
Wild Mass Guessing.
Some of the most popular fanwanks revolve around:
- The Klingon Forehead Problem in Star Trek — which finally got a Ret Con in Star Trek Enterprise.
- This editor is of the opinion that they should've just done Michael Dorn up in original-series Klingon makeup and had no one say a word 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
- 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. i.e. 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.
- Actualy, that is more serious Fan Dumb from the writers, who for some reason believed what is widely regarded in Sailor Moon fandom as the worst ever English-language fansite (saveoursailors.com). In particular, the theory that Sailor Uranus had been a man in a past life is something that can pretty much always be directly attributed to that site.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- This troper remembers 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 arguement 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.
- 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 happens to characters after they're Put On A Bus.
- 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".
- Two Words: V's gender.
