compendium of laughable fan theories you come across in the wild

Theory: In the Terminator, the T-800 asks the gun shop owner for a plasma rifle with 40 watt range, only for the shop owner to say "just what you see here, pal". This was because the T-800 knows this is the only weapon that can destroy him, and by him asking the shop keeper for this weapon and being met with confusion, the T-800 has learned that this weapon does not exist in this timeframe, and knows he can operate without being threatened by the weapons of the time.

Reality: It was a joke played for laughs.

My favorite was someone I knew insisting that the opening credits of Mad Men were depicting how the series would end -- Don Draper, his life in ruins, jumping from his office window.

I heard that one too

I fully expected that to be the ending.

Basically any theory floated about Twin Peaks: The Return

Or The Shining, none of which I can be bothered to track down and laugh at right now

If the universe of St. Elsewhere was a figment of Tommy Westphall’s elaborate imagination, then wouldn’t other television characters who appeared in the show’s continuity exist only within Tommy's mind, as well? The doctors had visited the bar on Cheers in one St. Elsewhere episode; Cheers spawned Frasier, a character who appeared on Wings; John Munch, the detective from Homicide, had mingled with the St. Eligius crew, and he has appeared on shows ranging from The X-Files to The Wire, effectively making him the Patient Zero of what's become known as The Tommy Westphall Universe theory.

The Room 217 doc was interesting for a few of those, particularly the “it’s about Native American genocide” as evidenced by the hotel decorations and Calumet cans.

this is going to make me go on a hunt for the weird geocities or whatever it was site some Tool-fan made around number theory and their Lateralus.

*and their Lateralus album.

Lost had a number of fan theories that were better than what the showrunners came up with

holy smokes the Tool Lateralus alternate album sequence post is just as bad as i remembered it

https://web.archive.org/web/20231026191207/http://andyhky.com/overthinking.htm?referred=true

There used to be a great two minute GoT video about how Talisa was a Lannister spy that was much more satisfying than the reality of her actual scenes on the show.

The worst part about GOT was the final season was essentially fan theories made manifest.

One non-laughable fan theory was one I read via here iirc about the Sopranos, trying to figure out what happened to Tony in the end and why.

xxxpost

dying at

I suppose it's not actually a true Fibonacci, since it does reverse itself.

my favorite is "Bringing in my Algebra 2 knowledge of the Fibonacci sequence". Look - you only need to know basic algebra to "get" Tool!

going back to GoT - it's not like the showrunners had much of a choice with the final seasons. it's still on them for how dumb the finish was at the end of the day.

a few others...

Theory: Batman actually died in The Dark Night Rises, and Alfred merely saw someone that looked like him, because he desperately wanted his lifelong friend to be alive. Batman was clearly not outside the 6 mile blast radius when the bomb exploded.

Reality: Nerds who fully accept the plausibility of a grown-up man who dresses as a bat for over a decade and routinely takes beatings severe enough to kill the average human being are now demanding VAR for the distance Batman flies pre-explosion

Theory: Ferris Bueller doesn't exist, he was a hallucination of Cameron as a trauma response to his intense father, a byproduct of being ill

Reality: People who watch movies really need to touch grass.

Anything I wrote on ILX about Line of Duty

There was a period after Breaking Bad when every other fan/critic theory was a variation on of the end of Terry Gilliam's Brazil (e.g. "everything that happens after [scene x] is a hallucination").

it's always the best when someone tries to affix these surrealist interpretations into series/films that are very conventional in their narrative devices. like Sopranos makes sense because it uses dream sequences in its story-telling a lot, as well as outright hallucination, but like finding hidden meaning in a Joel Schumacher film from 1995 requires way more LSD than I'm willing to take

xpost Some of those theories came from Norm MacDonald and Joyce Carol Oates teaming up on Twitter

I listened to a podcast episode about the people who were convinced that Watson and Sherlock on the Moffatt Sherlock were absolutely going to become lovers, which had remarkable similarities to Qanon mindset - finding tiny breadcrumbs that confirmed their beliefs, and becoming wildly aggressive towards anyone who suggested that this might not be happening.

i had a fan theory myself about the inherent right-winginess (maybe more reactionary than right-wing?) of fandom but am too lazy to flesh it out the way a true fan would.

People have been shipping Watson and Holmes probably for a century.

Fans often have demands that feel very anti-art, like that bad people must receive punishment and that viewpoint characters can’t break certain taboos.

And creators are far too happy to indulge them

I do renember a friend coming into uni with just the weirdest fan theory stuff because he couldn't handle the idea of Tony Soprano not making it.

Re: Sherlock, my wife was in the fandom and apparently almost every plot twist in that show had been anticipated by fan theories - putting together puzzle pieces was v much part of the fandom's appeal and also encouraged by the creators. Very hard for me to relate to, guess I want my writers to be smarter than me.

Fans often have demands that feel very anti-art, like that bad people must receive punishment and that viewpoint characters can’t break certain taboos.

― A So-Called Pulitzer price winner (President Keyes), Tuesday, May 28, 2024 1:28 PM bookmarkflaglink

well that and the neo-Puritan movement of American politics are a Venn diagram that overlap significantly

Very hard for me to relate to, guess I want my writers to be smarter than me.

otm. my brain will try to work out every twist/story branch in advance no matter how hard I stifle that urge, so I try and tell myself no that can't be it, this writer is more creative than me, this is just them toying w/ me, only to find out...meh, I did get it right.

Were the Sherlock shows not based on the published stories?

updated, modernized versions of them

Modern day shippers do seem to have an insistence on their ships being reality rather than interpretation. I don't know enough to say that this was never the case in early fandom, but it's definitely weirdly prevalent now. There's also a moralising tone to some of it, where if the creators don't make a ship real then they're queerbaiting and bad and wrong (queerbaiting is a thing but honestly it's not a thing as often as some might believe), or if a fan supports one ship over another they're vile subhuman scum.

I should try to find some of the wildest Gaylor fandom meltdowns - fan theories about actual people are genuinely pretty disturbing.

My kid reads the Warrior cats books and there are communities that claim certain cats are queer and ship cat characters. Very weird.

xp the Swiftie tweet saying “you’re gay and that’s final!” was all-time

updated, modernized versions of them

― Iacocca Cola (Neanderthal)

so ok what's the difference between a "fan theory" and something like sherlock? sherlock, for instance, writes irene adler as a dominatrix bisexual, which just happens to be how he writes every single other female character he writes - since the characters of the sherlock holmes stories are in the public domain, what elevates this (or, say, the idea that moriarty was a cocaine-induced delusion sherlock holmes invented before he was cured of his cocaine addiction by sigmund freud) over a "laughable fan theory"?

i love fan theories. i love the idea of fictional texts as palimpsests to be written over. they're like conspiracy theories but without the real-world implications. i'd much rather people make up ridiculous theories about sherlock holmes than about, say, george soros.

which just happens to be how he

should probably put moffat's name in the post somewhere

going only by my definition of laughable fan theory, it's the type of thing that looks at something that has an obvious, simple meaning and they deliberately miss this by picking up things that weren't meant as bread crumbs.

like in my OG post, basically taking what was obviously meant as a joke one-liner about the Terminator not knowing how to blend into 1980s America, and forming this huge "omg it was really a brilliant plot point" extrapolation. often accompanied w/ "I'm enjoying this on a much higher level than everyone else" smugness.

I don't have strong opinions on the Holmes items. I'm not really a HOlmes expert, have only seen Moffat series.

whereas fans guessing that Snoke might have been Darth Plagueis after Ep 7, like there were good reasons for people to speculate that based on the knowledge of the universe, and that was a fun bit of speculation even if it didn't pan out. (also way more entertaining than "the Emperor actually isn't dead and made Snoke in a vat")

it's always the best when someone tries to affix these surrealist interpretations into series/films that are very conventional in their narrative devices. like Sopranos makes sense because it uses dream sequences in its story-telling a lot, as well as outright hallucination, but like finding hidden meaning in a Joel Schumacher film from 1995 requires way more LSD than I'm willing to take

― Iacocca Cola (Neanderthal)

see i guess what i'm interested in is the _emergent properties of art_, particularly when it involves people excluded from representation finding a place for representation in that work. there's this kind of... remix culture mixed up with conspiracy theory mixed up with fanfic element to it. slash is easy to ridicule, but to me, historically it's great. it came into being from a science fiction show that structurally _excluded women_ and women's concerns. k/s took a show that had strong, distinct male characters but lacked strong, distinct female characters and put them into a narrative that made room for their interests. say you're a science fiction fan and you want to write a love story that doesn't involve the woman tragically dying at the end of the episode, an ongoing narrative. you can make up a new character who is deeply in love with kirk, call her, i don't know, "mary sue", or you can 'ship' two of the male characters, put them in a queer romance. and then get made fun of because "you're not even a man". it's certainly... easy to write subtextual narratives that are varying degrees of laughable, gross, and creepy, but i think all such narratives deserve to be taken as... having sincere intent, that the people who write these stories mean what they say. those stories may not reflect flatteringly on their tellers, but they _do_ reflect on their tellers, the world they live in, and the tools they have to tell the stories

so for instance, a few weeks ago i saw the movie "the people's joker", which draws from the cinematic batman mythos to built a counter-narrative that is queer, trans, and anti-batman. it's not primarily drawn from schumacher's batman films, but it _does_ draw to some extent from them. it's particularly important because schumacher's batman films are _exceptionally_ capable of being viewed as "camp" narratives. that made them unpopular among bat-fandom of the day, which was working _very hard_ to fight against the "camp" narrative that had defined batman since at least the '60s. they are exceptionally queer films made by an exceptionally queer person, and that was not what frank miller fans _wanted_ batman to be. also, they were unpopular because they were terrible films. a lot of camp is stuff that has to be read in this way because it _fails_ on a textual level, and can only be enjoyed through the context of recontextualization. if you look at these fan edits...

"the people's joker" started as a fan edit of the _joker_ film, similar to a fan edit called "groucho marxist" which makes the joker film an explicitly leftist film about class struggle, except that "the people's joker" tells a narrative where anticapitalism is part of its larger transgender narrative. which makes it a really interesting case.

when i talk about the "emergent properties" of fan theories, one example of that for me would be _the matrix_, which at some point (i don't know when) started to be perceived as a trans narrative. now, it wasn't explicitly intended by its creators as a trans narrative. however, to me, one of the fascinating things about art is the way it can express our subconscious selves in ways we're not capable of. subsequently, one of the creators has acknowledged that the matrix does serve as a trans narrative. one sees this also, for instance, in the video game celeste, where there was a fan theory that the main character, madeline, was a trans woman. again, this fan theory, which originally had no overt support in the text, was made explicit by the creator, maddy thorson, who is herself a trans woman who came out as trans after the original release of celeste.

from there you get to a film like _i saw the tv glow_, which is _not_ a "trans narrative" within the _text itself_, but which is directed by someone who is openly gender non-conforming, who is by all accounts overtly and intentionally working to tell a trans narrative first and foremost. and they're doing that by coming up with a fictional show-within-a-show that's inspired by a lot of things, but one particular show in particular, _buffy the vampire slayer_, where the film hinges upon a subtextual queer interpretation of a show which, as shown in the movie, is _not overtly queer_.

in other words, i'd argue that fan narratives, whether they be constructed as "camp" or through some other means, are a critical and essential part in queer self-actualization.

I like the theories about Kevin's father's profession in Home Alone

if we're talking about star wars i think one of the reasons _the last jedi_ was so unpopular was because it was to some extent an _anti-fan_ narrative, in the sense of... a lot of star wars fandom is built simply and uncomplicatedly on joseph campbell, on "the hero's journey", and johnson's film worked methodically to interrupted and disrupt the fan narrative. rey is _not_ the "chosen one" with a royal bloodline, she doesn't have midichlorians or whatever. she's just a random lady who happens to have force powers. kylo ren, in fact, is shown as a tragic figure _because_ of his royal bloodline, because he's trapped in a narrative he wants to break free from, but can't. the mystery of "who is snoke"? doesn't fucking matter, he's dead now. fans' favorite ship between finn and rey? hey let's introduce this new character, rose tico, and ship her with finn. poe, the dashing rogue, going against his commander's order to save the reistance? backfires spectacularly, because his commanding officer was _right_. it backfires particularly because he connects with another dashing rogue with ambiguous loyalties who, when push comes to shove, sides with the first order. that's not how the story is _supposed to go_. luke skywalker, the hero of the force? a burned-out, embittered hermit who lives as a _farmer_, who doesn't want to teach rey anything, and whose climactic confrontation with kylo ren involves him _not doing anything at all_. this is mirrored by poe, whose character arc ends with him _not_ being a hero, by _not_ attacking kylo ren's forces, and being vindicated for this. rey's great heroic act of the film? _moving rocks_, an act which is lampshaded as being, well, a stupid use of the force.

i might go so far as argue that _the last jedi_ is an anti-star wars film. it pushed the limits of the narrative beyond where fans were willing to go. it's a brilliant movie and i love it, but i guess it's not really _star wars_.

then there was _the rise of skywalker_, which gave the fans everything they wanted, which _is_ a star wars movie, and which is terrible. not even in the way that makes it a good camp film!

god, star wars fan theories. they're great. i _love_ the reading of the prequel trilogy that claims it to be a leftist parable about fishhook theory, telling the story of why the republic was a terrible idea that deserved to fail and why the jedi were a bunch of fucking cops. now that _clearly_ wasn't the story lucas was trying to tell, but you know what, god, it's a better movie that way than whatever the fuck bullshit lucas was trying to sell.

TLJ is totally the anti-Star Wars Star Wars movie and I love it for that. it was new life into the series that it needed. of course the next film kinda ruined that.

I remember enjoying for laughs the JarJar Binks Sith Lord theory whenever that one made rounds.

I think what was a little unsettling about the Sherlock thing was that it was less a romantic reading of the characters, and more an insistence on the specific intentions of the creators and writers - they were going to give this to the fans, it absolutely had to happen, trust the plan, etc. it honestly seemed way less interesting and fun than simply viewing the show through a more open-ended queer lens.

"Who do you suspect?" I asked, suddenly.
"Macduff," she said, promptly.
"Good God!" I whispered, softly.

The Rise of Skywalker is genuinely one of the worst films, just a vacant and dead thing. silver lining, it did maybe kill J.J. Abrams' directing career, at least as far as him being given auteur-level clout.

The Rise of Skywalker is genuinely one of the worst films, just a vacant and dead thing. silver lining, it did maybe kill J.J. Abrams' directing career, at least as far as him being given auteur-level clout.

― omar little

for a couple years after _the last jedi_ came out i literally just stopped saying that i liked the movie. people just argued so passionately and relentlessly with me about it. i mean i liked the movie but it wasn't something i built my entire identity around. this might seem like a weird comparison, but i felt like they just had such relentless sex pest vibes about them. i mean, you know, not my problem, i wasn't the one who had to put out a sequel.

the good thing for me was that after that sequel came out i felt like i could start saying that i liked _the last jedi_ again. idk, that might be framed as a "critical rehabilitation" or something but from my point of view it was no such thing. i always loved it. the fans were just shouting so incessantly and relentlessly about how Objectively Terrible a film it was that i figured i might as well just keep quiet. the film wasn't gonna go anywhere.

so i guess maybe there are two lessons. one, when helming the installment of a major franchise, it's probably not a great idea to make your entire movie actively hostile to the ingrained belief system of the franchise's legion of fans, no matter _how_ much artistically and creatively accomplished that film is. two, if you don't like a film, please just come up with laughable fan theories that totally reject or ignore what the film is actually trying to say rather than demanding your laughable fan theories become canon.

a friend of mine is the 501st and was somewhere at Disney Springs shortly after Last Jedi and idk if she was dressed like Rose from that movie or just had a piece o jewelry meant to look like hers and this random employee came up to them and aggressively accosted them, saying Rose was the worst character of all time and wouldn't leave them alone for like 5 minutes. they had to file a complaint w/ managers at the location.

that movie really made people show their asses

*in the 501st

I loved The Last Jedi from the get-go too, Kate. The ending, with the downtrodden underclass stableboy who has Force powers, was such a great deflating of the “royal bloodline” crap and democratizing the Star Wars universe.

yeah it was the most intelligent of all 9 SW films tbh

And a blow for democratizing the Star Wars universe, I should say

Er, sorry, that stableboy is the great grandson of Count Dooku.

More like Count Doodoo

a fun thing about this thread is that you need a palimpsest just to figure out what most of Neando’s posts are even about

i don't know what that means, i don't know if I have the energy to figure it out.

neando means he knows what that means and has the energy to figure it out

That obscure movie, Terminator

Not sure what the 501st is. Is that a military unit?

It's a bunch of dorks fans who build and dress up in their own Stormtrooper costumes.

okay maybe only the Star Wars posts

I’ve never seen it said, but I always hoped on the Blacklist that they would reference that Robert California was one of Reddington’s various aliases.