Oh, children have (and still do) take on serious tasks, obligations, and punishments. However, I feel that all the children in ASOIAF are too young for what we’re expected to believe consistently. Hardship and growing up too soon does not necessarily bring wisdom and maturity, which is why I need to age them up in my head to take seriously their emotional and psychological states.
Star Wars: The reason why all the tech in the original trilogy is so shitty in comparison with the shiny stuff in the prequels is that before the Empire took control, the economy flourished and thus there was more money to build awesome stuff. Once the Empire started running the show, the economy tanked and everybody kept having to use the same old stuff over and over and over again (the Millennium Falcon, remember, is supposed to be a junker).
James Bond/The Avengers: Judi Dench’s M and Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury are secretly married.
And now, the cartoons…
The park featured in Regular Show is the center of the conflict that would become known in the Adventure Time canon as the Mushroom War. Regular Show itself takes place roughly a century before this war. The Adult Swim show Superjail takes place about 200 or so years after it, and Adventure Time takes place about a thousand years after that.
I wish I could take credit for any of these.
Another fan theory I’ve read is that Bill was supposed to be a complete fraud. He claimed to be a total bad-ass to keep everyone else in line but it was all bluff - he couldn’t fight at all. That’s why the Bride was able to defeat him so easily in their climactic fight (after all her other epic fights, she was able to defeat Bill in a fight that lasted about fifteen seconds).
Pontoffel Pock, Where Are You? is an allegory for the plight of 20th-Century Jewry.
Pontoffel = Jews
Pontoffel’s family’s house = Eastern European shtetls
Pickle factory = USA
Fairies = United Nations
Magical piano = travel documents / working papers
Homing Pigeon Switch = Law of Return
Groogen = Nazi Germany
Casbahmopolis = Arab states
Neefa Feefa = Palestine / Israel
There was a musical in 1979.
I love that theory - Sith-ness (Sithdom? Sithity?) as a memetic condition.
I love the Wold Newton universe tangentially mentioned earlier.
While I don’t think this ever showed up in any of the prequels, I know it was mentioned in several of the books, making it more-or-less canon.
Q: Why didn’t the aliens in Independence Day have any sort of virus protection for their computers?
A: They’re telepaths - most kinds of security are simply a foreign concept to them. They don’t have passwords or firewalls or anything like that because it’s pointless; either they don’t fight among themselves, or they’d be able to just pluck the passwords out of their opponent’s mind anyway. Or see the thoughts whomever sent the virus and just shoot them. Sneaky, underhanded tactics don’t work when everyone knows what you are thinking.
IIRC, it’s semi-canon that the computer was able to interface with theirs because Apple’s OS is actually derived from the alien scout vessel.
Some fanwanks I’ve posted about before:
Robocop and Max Headroom take place in the same universe.
R2D2 was able to hack the Death Star’s systems because he had the completely plans and specs.
The Borg are descended from humanoids who took being jacked into their Internet to the nth degree.
All the weird cybernetic people in He-Man are former prisoners of Skeletor, who underwent cruel medical experimentation in his bid to create an army of supersoldiers.
Dunno if anybody else has ever suggested this (probably), but my theory is that the Mirror Universe was created by a malevolent member of the Q Continuum, who created his own universe so he could be God there.
This could actually make a good episode in some future Trek series. The Q we know (John de Lancey) recruits the cast of the new series is to help him get rid of the evil Q. At the end, they manage to kill him, which destabilizes the Mirror Universe (which only exists because he wanted it to), dooming it to collapse. This could then lead to a further episode where some of the Mirror Universe characters flee to the “real” universe to escape destruction.
The glaring problem with this is, assuming you take the prequels as canon, is that it’s established that the ability to control the Force is dependent on the users’ midichlorian content. There’s no evidence that R2 has any biological components (like Grievous), so he shouldn’t have any Force control either. (If there’s more info based on the EU, I’m not aware of it, as I’ve only read a couple of the earlier books.)
There’s evidence that a whole three-foot-eight actor was in there. 
OK, it doesn’t work once you add in the blighted trilogy. Lucas has said the reason R2 shows up so much and makes it through relatively unscathed is because the Droid’s his favorite character.
Simple. Behind R2’s access panel 17GQ4, there is a sac of nutrient fluid in which cultured midichlorians live.
I should be a writer.
Even in the original movie, the Force is specifically defined as an energy field “created by all living things.” That pretty strongly implies that it’s not something a droid could access.
There’s a similar fan theory, however, that holds that R2 and Chewbacca are the secret leaders of the Rebellion.
Yeah, and that definition is given to a beginning student by a teacher who was given to circumlocution. Still, 'twas but a passing fancy and it doesn’t hold up. (C3PO’s a cyborg, on the other hand…)
The Rebellion idea is a lot more developed and interesting, so thanks for that.
I’m pretty sure that’s referencing the same article from Post #42.
I think the real reason, stated by GRRM himself, is that he just doesn’t know children very well, and admitted he made them all a little too young. What he saw in his mind was closer to what is shown on the TV series, where most of the children are aged up 3-5 years.
I really liked the theory I saw (in Cracked, I think) that the monsters in Monsters, Inc. feared children because of the plague. Fleas jumped from the kids during the Middle Ages onto the monsters and caused them to get the plague, too. Thus the importance of not getting too close to children.