Fanon Discontinuity - Things You Hated & Disregard

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According to TV Tropes, fanon discontinuity is when a fanbase ignores something that factually happened within a fiction's universe. A significant group of fans can collectively agree on it or just something you individually cannot tolerate. Fanon discontinuity can create plot holes by ignoring important events or it can solve plot holes by ignoring stupid events.

It can range from "only counting the first film" to acknowledging the overall narrative whilst excluding only certain scenes. Examples:

The Simpsons

It is almost universally true that The Simpsons episode Principal & The Pauper, the one with the real Seymour Skinner, "doesn't count" and its events are considered non-canon. Even show creator Matt Groening thinks this.

Star Wars

Lots.

Some thing the prequels never happened, the Ewoks never existed, fans of the original expanded universe don't accept the new sequels and of course... Han shot first.

The Terminator

Nothing happened after Terminator 2. Nothing.

Scrubs

The last season with all the new interns? What are you talking about?

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What examples are there for you in films, TV or even video game narratives?
 
Liquid
What is it about these two that has made you exorcise them from your memories?
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In Airwolf, they wrote out the original cast, didn't have access to Airwolf itself (all action shots were reused from previous series) and all sorts of other issues.

In DoH, Bo and Luke went off to NASCAR (actors had a contract dispute) and were replaced by yet more cousins, Vance and Coy (who were pretty much facsimiles of Bo and Luke.) After the ratings plummeted the network renegotiated with Bo and Luke and they appeared back near the end of the series.
 
daan
In Airwolf, they wrote out the original cast, didn't have access to Airwolf itself (all action shots were reused from previous series) and all sorts of other issues.

In DoH, Bo and Luke went off to NASCAR (actors had a contract dispute) and were replaced by yet more cousins, Vance and Coy (who were pretty much facsimiles of Bo and Luke.) After the ratings plummeted the network renegotiated with Bo and Luke and they appeared back near the end of the series.
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Sounds a bit like what happened with Scrubs; replace the core cast that made the show popular and watch the ratings plummet.
 
I like how things like this have a word. So often our language struggles to convey a specific feeling about a thing like is so well known in German or French. I'm gonna assume fanon is a portmanteau of "fan" and "canon"? Like, the fan's own head canon becoming the popular cultural opinion instead of what factually happened. That's great. Power to the people.
 
A good example of fanon discontinuity from this xkcd comic about The Matrix:

fanon-discontinuity_xkcd4_9883.png
 
Alien 3 and 4 didn't happen. There is only one Predator movie.

The "Legends" canon of Star Wars was for the most part, still more interesting and better written than what the sequels ended up being.

Han didn't just shoot first, Greedo didn't even have a chance to shoot, as he was dead! :lol:

 
Not one I personally hate, in fact I thought it was incredible, but when David Lynch and Mark Frost brought Twin Peaks back after 20-odd years for a third season there was a significant backlash on social media because "fans" basically just wanted a series of reheated tropes to help them recapture what they enjoyed in the 90's. Around two thirds of the posts I saw on the Facebook page were people hating on it for taking things a big, big step away from where they were, and many only gave it a couple of episodes before deciding they'd just leave it with seasons 1 and 2. To me this is just so incredibly short-sighted it's unbelievable... sure we all wanted to see Cooper in the Double R with a slice of cherry pie and some damn fine coffee, but what we got was very, very different, and all the better for it IMHO.

I mean, if people don't like how something has been developed, I don't mind that, but I think in a lot of these cases where there's been a big time gap (Gap between Star Wars trilogies for example), people have had too long to polish their memories into nostalgia. It's easy for us to accept stuff we're well used to, but when something new comes along we interrogate it with a vigor that we don't expose our memories to. This can be very powerful if tapped into properly, it'd been about 30-35 years since we last saw Luke, Leia, Han and Chewie on screen together, and that made some moments in TFA and TLJ immensely powerful, even if the rest of the films were lacking. Trainspotting 2 might be another example, for me, the film didn't have what the first film had, but still, revisiting the characters 20ish years later I thought was great.

Taking the Star Wars 'Legends' issue as a case, I didn't read any of the old EU stuff until after Disney had stuck it all in Legends, so much of it was as new to me as the Disney stuff, and I have to say, from what I read it was nothing special, at least not really any better than what Disney are putting out... but that aside, this is an interesting case because essentially it's the franchise itself that doesn't count stuff as canon... rather than the simply the fans.

As for some of the stuff that's already been mentioned in this thread...
Alien ... m'eh, I never enjoyed any of these enough to care, I don't think I've ever intentionally revisited anything after Aliens
Predator ... 1 & 2 were great. 2 might be one of the best executed sequels in the action genre that I can think of.
... AvP sub franchise ... I'd be fine with this never existing.
Terminator ... 1 & 2 were great, I don't mind what we've had since, even Genisys had it's merits - just terrible casting... thing is with films that feature Time travel, you can basically smash the Canon around as much as you want, and it still makes 'sense'.
Matrix first one was already an action classic by the time the credits rolled. If Reloaded and Revolutions are what the story was destined for then so be it, Reloaded had some decent sequences but by the time the last film came out I just didn't care about any of it.

I'll chuck out Die Hard, as being another one that should have stopped before it did, maybe Indiana Jones too. Some of the worst examples I can think of ... Texas Blood money and The Hangman's Daughter are sequels/prequels to From Dusk till Dawn... both straight to video, and for good reason. Tremors had a similar fate -- a series of **** direct to video sequels -- although Tremors 4 (a distant prequel) wasn't too bad IIRC. TV's Red Dwarf went massively downhill after the early original seasons, and I definitely don't think it's stood a 30 year test of time, but I know fans who do still really like it...

... and of course, we can't ignore the Fast & Furious franchise... roughly half of which I could really do without.
 
MatskiMonk
TV's Red Dwarf went massively downhill after the early original seasons, and I definitely don't think it's stood a 30 year test of time, but I know fans who do still really like it...
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Original Red Dwarf is great and the later ones on Dave are still good, but Back to Earth didn't happen.
 
Going to throw one of my own in here:

The Bill

Love this show to death, watched it for years and years. But for all the big twists that happened, Inspector Monroe and Chief Inspector Conway did not die in firebombs. They were promoted and transferred to different stations and lived happily ever after.

The. End.
 
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I don't blame anyone else for trying to forget GoT after its dumbing down in the past two seasons.
 
DK
I don't blame anyone else for trying to forget GoT after its dumbing down in the past two seasons.
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I don't blame them either.

In my head, Game of Thrones ended
with the White Walkers scoring a dominant victory at Winterfell and everything in the second half of Season 8 besides Cleganebowl (GET HYPE) being a death dream by the losers. Explains so much.
 
That one episode of Star Trek: Voyager where Tom Paris and Captain Janeway become lizards and have lizard children.

It never happened.

I think the show itself later acknowledged that that never happened; going to warp 10 was latterly still touted as a thing not to have been done even though Paris had done it in the lizard episode.
 
Liquid
The Simpsons

It is almost universally true that The Simpsons episode Principal & The Pauper, the one with the real Seymour Skinner, "doesn't count" and its events are considered non-canon. Even show creator Matt Groening thinks this.
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Oddly, the incident was referred to six seasons later.

When Lisa's cat, Snowball II, is killed, she gets two more cats which also die in extremely short order. Crazy Cat Lady throws a new cat at her while she's moping about not really being suited to looking after cats, and she calls this cat - which looks identical to Snowball II - Snowball V, then decides to call it Snowball II because she still has the original cat's bowl.

Skinner says "Isn't that a cheat?", and Lisa says "I guess it is, Principal Tamzarian."

Of course it can be considered both canon and non-canon, because it happened but no-one in Springfield is allowed to talk about it, so it didn't.
 
I know what happens in Dragon Ball Super but I've never watched it and I'm happy living with the head canon I have for the end of Dragon Ball Z.
 

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