anyone care to share their favorite non-traditional explanation for a fictional universe? --fully supported (or at least not contradicted) by the work’s “canon” but not the generally accepted explanation of the storyline.
an example: all the Pixar movies can be strung together in one universe in which animals gain sentience starting with “Brave.”
“Oz” is actually in Iowa somewhere. Gotta be. You can get there by balloon, and it isn’t Kansas.
There is a deal-and-play of Contract Bridge that explains Alice in Wonderland, just the way Lewis Carroll provided the chess moves that explain Through the Looking-Glass. (But I have no idea what the hands or the play might look like.)
When Lost Boys grow up, they get kicked out of Peter Pan’s club and have to go and become Pirates.
The theory that in Fight Club, the narrator is a grown-up Calvin and Tyler Durden is just an older version of his imaginary childhood buddy Hobbes is a deeply satisfying one.
R2-D2 and Chewbacca were actually some of the senior members of the Rebellion and just used C-3P0 and Han Solo as decoys so they could get some shit done.
Ferris Bueller only exists in Cameron’s head.
A theory I invented: The Simpsons’ Springfield is actually located in a remote part of China. It’s a mock town set up by the Chinese government to train spies in American culture before sending them on missions to the United States.
The Simpsons aren’t spies in training - they’re essentially props; Chinese people who have been brainwashed into thinking they’re typical Americans. They’ve also been genetically modified so they won’t age - the Chinese government wants a fixed training ground.
This explains why Springfield has so much variety - it’s designed to simulate a bunch of different environments - but doesn’t have any distinguishing characteristics that make it identifiable. It also explains why so many of the details are “off” - you have a town with no chain places like Walmart or McDonalds.
It also explains why so many aspects of American culture are portrayed as bad; you have evil capitalists like Montgomery Burns, incompetent police officers like Chief Wiggims, and corrupt officials like Mayor Quimby. These public figures are designed for propaganda purposes to prevent the trainees from becoming attached to the American lifestyle.
Wasn’t straight laced Hobbes the one usually talking sense to wild and crazy Calvin? In Fight Club, it’s kind of the other way around.
Up until it was contradicted in the most recent movie, that “James Bond” is a code name for whoever fills the role of 007, rather than a personal name, and the different actors who played him were actually different "James Bond"s.
This is pretty much canon now. The prequel trilogy estabished that Chewbacca was involved in the Clone Wars, and fought alongside Yoda. So, in A New Hope, Obi Wan Kenobe wasn’t hiring Han Solo and some huge shaggy beast. He was hiring Chewbacca and the mope he worked with. 
As for R2, even in A New Hope, it was pretty obvious he knew more than he was letting on (or could let on). The prequel trilogy estabishes that, yeah, he’s been involved since the beginning, and C3PO doesn’t know this because of a memory wipe. (Which to be fair was probably a smart move. Is there anyone – even one single person – who can imagine that 3PO woudn’t blab that secret at some point?)
Not a real theory, but one I made up one day and that pleases me for some dumb reason:
Jerry Seinfeld’s dentist got sick of living in New York and moved to California in the early aughts to start a large family and work an office job, and then got so sick of his misbehaving kids and browbeating wife and boss that he skipped town and moved to Albuquerque where he became a chemistry teacher who moonlighted as a car wash flunky. Then he got cancer, and started moonlighting as a meth cook instead…
I’ve grown reluctantly fond of the darker-than-dark theory that Friends is merely a figment of Phoebe’s meth-addled imagination.
I dunno. He did a good job of bluffing the Stormtroopers who found him and R2 locked in a closet on the Death Star.
My personal fan theory: the rats in Ratatouille are descendants of escapees from a French version of the NIMH project.
This one has always annoyed me in that it causes more problems than it solves, least of which that the agent already has a notable codenumber: 007.
And while this may make more sense for the head of the secret service (3 actors pre-reboot), it seems idiotic to extend it to the secretary (5 Moneypennys pre-reboot). And not only do we then have to say that the CIA employs this tactic for wholly unremarkable agents (8 Felix Leiters pre-reboot), but even Bond’s nemesis inexplicably got in on the idea as well (4-8 Blofelds, depending on how strict you want to be).
There were actually TWO races of Klingons. One race wound up killing the other because they wouldn’t let them ride in their fancy spaceships.
Not to mention James Bond #3 putting flowers on the grave of James Bond #2’s wife (in For Your Eyes Only).
I never liked the James Bond is a codename theory
However, Sean Connery’s character in The Rock is James Bond
It’s an alternate Earth. All positions/jobs have a codename.
So Koloth, Kang, and Kor somehow changed their race between TOS and DS9? Anyway, they answered all the smooth/bumpy stuff in an Enterprise storyline.
Mine is that the Earth That Was of Firefly wasn’t our Earth but the Cylon Earth from Battlestar Galactica. Because you can see a Firefly class ship (really just as an easter egg) in a BSG ep.
In the last movie notice that we never hear the new Moneypenny’s name until after she becomes M’s secretary - so clearly she was just given it. Her name as an agent was completely different.