What if Alfred is really Bruce Wayne’s father? Not just a father figure, but the actual father? Maybe his mother’s husband didn’t even know. That would explain the odd mix of love, affection, scolding, and respect Bruce gets from Alfred.
Calvin from Calvin & Hobbes is really the Narrator from Fight Club. Tyler Durden is Hobbes, desperately trying to remind Calvin of who he was.
Obi Wan didn’t kill his brother figure Anakin at the lava pools because he *was * a brother figure, and because Obi Wan was afraid of falling to the Dark Side…you know, “fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to the Dark Side”. Obi Wan was already past “fear” and “anger” and probably entering “hate” territory and wanted to stop himself before he went any further. Killing Anakin would thus not have been out of love or mercy; it would have been out of hate.
Sherlock really does love John, love him as thoroughly as he can love anyone, and it would almost be romantic love, but he is completely asexual so it never goes anywhere.
Those are some of mine, and I will probably have more. How about you guys?
The sword Butch uses to kill Zed and Zeke in Pulp Fiction was the one hocked by Budd in Kill Bill and that he sells to Elle. He really was telling the truth when he said he hocked it.
How he came back into possession of it is another story that happens off-camera and also a detail he omitted when talking to Bill.
Franco Nero said that in his own backstory Django Unchained his character, the old man Django meets at the bar in the fight club, was Django’s father, which is why he said “I know” when told “The d is silent”- he gave him the name.* Tarantino said this is not the case, but even though he created Django I’m going to have to say he’s wrong on this one. (Tarantino has said that Django and Brunhilda are- to him anyway- ancestors of Shaft, hence her surname.)
*The cameo is a nod to Franco’s 1960s movie role, of course, but Nero said he likes his own story better; so do I.
Another from Kill Bill-
The Yakuza guy that kills O-Ren’s father (not the boss, but the guy who actually kills him) in the anime flashback sequence is Bill. The character’s hair is that kind of gray/brown of a younger Caradine and there were a lot of close ups of the characters hands in that sequence and the only thing of bill you see in Vol 1 were his hands. I thought it was a cool testatment on the corrupting influence of Bill that O-Ren eventually works for the man that actually killed her father.
The “little blonde lab technician” referenced in “Where No Man Has Gone Before” (the second pilot episode of Star Trek), who James Kirk had almost married years before was Carol Marcus.
I came up with this independently, found out years later that it was a not-uncommon theory. Though I haven’t yet seen Into Darkness, I’m a bit put off by seeing Alice Eve’s version of Carol Marcus in a Starfleet uniform. This is somewhat contradictory to the Bibi Besch version from 1982.
Everything that happens in Godfather 3 after Michael’s diabetic stroke (essentially, the Sicily plotline) is a nightmare Michael has while in a coma.
Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering are discreetly gay. They’re not a couple, though each knows about the other. Eliza is unaware that this, not social class, is why Higgins doesn’t return her feelings for him, and what he is trying to delicately say with “Not all men are *confirmed bachelors *like me and the Colonel”.
The reason that the Federation from Star Trek keeps staggering from one near-disaster to another but never actually is destroyed is that they’re save scumming. They’ve had limited time travel since Kirk’s era after all. Every time something manages to ruin or destroy the Federation, some secret Federation agency, perhaps Section 31 or perhaps someone we’ve never heard of travels back to before the disaster and quietly makes adjustments to the timeline to prevent it.
Not an actual fanwank, but in The West End Horror author Nicholas Meyer (who we all remember for writing The Wrath of Khan and Time After Time), has Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson meet G. B. Shaw, and they inspire him to create Henry Higgins and Pickering.
I’ve been a fan of R2D2 being a secret master of the force for a long time. After all, who was riding along when the Death Star blew up? And when young Anakin did the same thing? If Chancellor Palpatine can hide being a Sith Lord in front of the whole Jedi Council, it’s not too farfetched than an unobserved Droid could get away.
and, of course, there’s Philip Jose Farmer’s take on Tarzan (he’s related to Sherlock Holmes AND Doc Savage, don’t you know?)
John H. Watson’s middle name is Hamish. Because that’s my son’s name.
It’s never given in the books, just the initial. At one point Watson’s wife calls him James. The fanwank is that she was using the anglicised version of Hamish, which must be his middle name.
Oh, one I saw on Facebook this weekend… In the Avengers universe, immediately after the fall of Captain AMerica, they tried to recreate the Super Soldier formula. They met with limited success, although it was very promising, according to General Ross in the Hulk movie. They tried it on a young volunteer, and he acquired amazing powers of recuperation and long life.
That volunteer shows up in the Captain America movie, in the montage of people cheering for Captain America: he’s a little boy, running across the street with a garbage can lid painted like Captain America’s shield.
His name: Phil Coulson. He didn’t acquire those cards as collector’s items on eBay. He bought the originals when they first came out and has had them all along.
Pulp Fiction happens in the Avengers’s/Marvel Universe.
The Tesseract was inside Marsellus Wallace briefcase.
Nick Fury in disguise infiltrated the crime group to check if Marsellus was not involved with the Red Skull or other super villians, Jules/Nick retrieves the Cosmic Cube once he finds that it was luck what allowed Marsellus to have the Cosmic Cube the first place, and Marsellus was only partially aware of what the Cube could do.
The Simpsons is set in China. It’s a mock-up American village set up to train Chinese intelligence agents in how to live in American society. The Simpson family aren’t covert agents themselves - they’re just part of the training simulation. They, like most of the people in “Springfield” were brain washed into thinking they are “typical” Americans.
This explains why you can never figure out exactly where Springfield is located in the United States. It explains why a supposed small town like Springfield has so many different locales in it. It explains why some people seem to appear and disappear. It explains the hostile attitude towards business and government authority figures. And it explains why everyone has yellow skin.
A factory worker on When the Whistle Blows developed a technology that let him travel between “fictional levels,” and he planned a two-stage escape. First, into the universe of Extras (where Extras is reality and When the Whistle Blows is a show). Then, into our universe (where Extras is a show and When the Whistle Blows is a show-within-a-show).
But something went wrong during the second stage. Instead of traveling from Extras into reality, the worker traveled a level “sideways” and ended up trapped in The Office.
