# You weird fanwanks. **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [July 1, 2017, 5:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/you-weird-fanwanks/790292 "2017-07-01T17:21:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [July 2, 2017, 6:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/you-weird-fanwanks/790292/41 "2017-07-02T18:44:35Z")
> [@foolsguinea](#): > > What do you think people on your planet will do when the petroleum runs out? Clone wolly mammoths and use them for winding really high-tech clock springs. ---
**Author:** ![Grrr](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/grrr/32/146_2.png) [@Grrr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grrr)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2017, 12:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/you-weird-fanwanks/790292/42 "2017-07-03T00:45:11Z")
> [@glee](#): > > You’re not American are you? Such a young country! 😉 > > You see over here in England we have a couple of thousand years of recorded history. And lots of it featured men on horseback fighting with swords… > > Some highlights: > > 55BC Julius Caesar invades England for the first time > 122 Hadrian’s Wall is built (uncannily forseeing President Tr\*mp :eek:) > 597 Kings School, Canterbury founded > 731 The Venerable Bede completes his ‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’ > 880-890 Alfred the Great issues a Law Code > 1066 Tower of London built > 1086 The Domesday Book published (massive survey of England for tax purposes) > 1096 First Crusade (featuring men on horseback fighting with swords) > 1135 Civil War in England (just like Game of Thrones!) > 1167 Oxford University > 1215 Magna Carta signed (Barons restrict King’s power) > > I could go on, but you get the idea. > Actually I must mention one more: > > 1415 Battle of Agincourt (English Longbowmen slaughter French Nobles who were on horseback fighting with swords) I take your point. But the sense that I get from the show is the _recorded_ history is much longer than ours. But perhaps I’m mis-remembering older episodes. Plus there’s also a difference between piecing history together and having actual historical scribes chronicling the events in real time (or closer to real to real time.) ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2017, 1:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/you-weird-fanwanks/790292/43 "2017-07-03T01:39:09Z")
> [@](#): > > Quoth **Little Nemo** : > > Sure, he was a great actor. But there are a lot of great actors who are genuine wolves. Why does Hollywood keep casting coyotes in wolf roles? It’s hard to realize from our modern perspective, but Warner Bros. was actually quite progressive about that, for the time. It wasn’t too long before that that wolves were portrayed by dogs in furface, in the minstrel shows. Picture Sam Sheepdog, wearing cheap fake fangs, strumming an Acme banjo (with a neck made of dynamite, of course: Some things haven’t changed). ---
**Author:** ![Chimera](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/8e8cbc/32.png) [@Chimera](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chimera)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2017, 2:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/you-weird-fanwanks/790292/44 "2017-07-03T02:27:48Z")
> [@Superdude](#): > > Han mentions the Kessel Run and parsecs to see if Ben and Luke had any idea what he meant. When they didn’t appear to, he decided to charge the rubes enough to pay off his debt without knowing that they were being overcharged. Except Han didn’t have Free Will in that exchange. He was dealing with a Jedi, who mind controlled him into taking a bad deal. Chewy, who fought in the Clone Wars alongside Ahsoka Tano and Yoda, knew exactly who they were dealing with and went along with it. Chewy was also instrumental in their return to the Deathstar at the Battle of Yavin for that very reason. ---
**Author:** ![ExTank](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/35a633/32.png) [@ExTank](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ExTank)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2017, 6:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/you-weird-fanwanks/790292/45 "2017-07-03T06:22:52Z")
> [@Chimera](#): > > Except Han didn’t have Free Will in that exchange. He was dealing with a Jedi, who mind controlled him into taking a bad deal. Chewy, who fought in the Clone Wars alongside Ahsoka Tano and Yoda, knew exactly who they were dealing with and went along with it. > > Chewy was also instrumental in their return to the Deathstar at the Battle of Yavin for that very reason. I’m sure you’ve heard the fan theory that Chewie and R2-D2 are both actually top-level secret operatives for the Rebel Alliance, or something like. ---
**Author:** ![Gatopescado](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gatopescado/32/5711_2.png) [@Gatopescado](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gatopescado)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2017, 7:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/you-weird-fanwanks/790292/46 "2017-07-03T07:49:32Z")
I really don’t understand the term “fanwank”. ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2017, 10:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/you-weird-fanwanks/790292/47 "2017-07-03T10:00:50Z")
> [@Gatopescado](#): > > I really don’t understand the term “fanwank”. [Let me Google that for you](https://www.google.com/search?q=fanwank&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8). ---
**Author:** ![Face\_Intentionally\_Left\_Blank](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/face_intentionally_left_blank/32/288_2.png) [@Face\_Intentionally\_Left\_Blank](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Face_Intentionally_Left_Blank)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2017, 1:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/you-weird-fanwanks/790292/48 "2017-07-03T13:35:54Z")
> [@Superdude](#): > > Not mine, but still valid: > > Han mentions the Kessel Run and parsecs to see if Ben and Luke had any idea what he meant. When they didn’t appear to, he decided to charge the rubes enough to pay off his debt without knowing that they were being overcharged. I always fanwanked it so that the “Kessel Run” was an event that was more series of tasks and maneuvers than distance traveled. He completed them in a short distance, though I guess this would better indicate maneuverability than speed. Then I discovered girls(I’m being literal here), and forgot all about it. Later I realized it was more fantasy than sci-fi, and came to dislike the whole shebang. I’m sure I have a more current fanwank or 2 kicking around somewhere, if I can remember where i put it. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2017, 1:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/you-weird-fanwanks/790292/49 "2017-07-03T13:53:18Z")
My weird fanwank - I didn’t like the claim in the Doctor Who TV movie (the 8th Doctor story) that the Doctor was “half human”; when the Meta-crisis Doctor was created at “Journey’s End” I arbitrarily decided that the 8th Doctor, while still in a state of post-regeneration confusion, had a premonition about the MCD which led to his mistaken statement about being half-human. ---
**Author:** ![Quercus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/7ab992/32.png) [@Quercus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quercus)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2017, 2:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/you-weird-fanwanks/790292/50 "2017-07-03T14:06:49Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > An idea that’s been bouncing around for a while: [The Borg are farming the Federation](https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/1u94gt/theory_on_the_borg_they_farm_the_galaxys_creative/). That is, the reason why they keep sending attacks that the Federation can\* just barely \*fight off instead of sending a dozen or hundred Cubes is that they are deliberately prodding the Federation to develop new ideas and technology that the Borg can assimilate for themselves. You know, in a few 4X conquer-the-galaxy computer games, it often makes sense to not immediately wipe weak out AI races, but rather contain them and have lots of skirmishes where you can capture ships and learn their technology… ---
**Author:** ![Quimby](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/22d042/32.png) [@Quimby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quimby)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2017, 4:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/you-weird-fanwanks/790292/51 "2017-07-03T16:10:39Z")
The last twenty minutes or so of the most recent War of the Worlds is all in Tom Cruise’s head. He and his family die when captured by the Alien walker but he imagines an elaborate escape, unlikely family reunion and happy ending to the invasion. ---
**Author:** ![Push\_You\_Down](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/push_you_down/32/9095_2.png) [@Push\_You\_Down](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Push_You_Down)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2017, 4:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/you-weird-fanwanks/790292/52 "2017-07-03T16:22:57Z")
> [@darren garrison](#): > > clone wolly mammoths and use them for winding really high-tech clock springs. i get that reference! ---
**Author:** ![Just\_Asking\_Questions](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ba9def/32.png) [@Just\_Asking\_Questions](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Just_Asking_Questions)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2017, 4:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/you-weird-fanwanks/790292/53 "2017-07-03T16:42:04Z")
I think this has been mentioned here before, but… The Jetsons and the Flinstones are contemporaries. The Flinstones and their ilk are neo-luddites who are tired of all the high tech shit that their world offers, so they have rebelled and choose to live like their primitive ancestors. But, since they aren’t the brightest people, they don’t know that they aren’t emulating their primitive ancestors. It’s like the Time machine in Idiocracy, or the museum of Old New York in Futurama. All the “stone-age tech” is actually high tech. There are microprocessors in everything, with wireless communication, so the stone phone actually works just like a regular phone. The cities are far enough apart that the Flinstones don’t have to see the Jetson’s cloud cities. The Jetson-villes know about the Stone Age folk, but they just ignore them. Now, this is contradicted in some episodes, but even Star Trek has such contradictions, as does every show. You just have to apocraphize those episodes. ---
**Author:** ![Just\_Asking\_Questions](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ba9def/32.png) [@Just\_Asking\_Questions](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Just_Asking_Questions)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2017, 4:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/you-weird-fanwanks/790292/54 "2017-07-03T16:48:35Z")
> [@Quimby](#): > > The last twenty minutes or so of the most recent War of the Worlds is all in Tom Cruise’s head. He and his family die when captured by the Alien walker but he imagines an elaborate escape, unlikely family reunion and happy ending to the invasion. I think the last third of Minority Report is also in Tom’s character’s head. He is still in prison, and will stay there. I also think Mulder and Scully never escaped the mind altering fungus hole in the ground. They just imagined what they really wanted, and they died shortly after the end of the episode. (I won’t say that the rest of the show, the movies, and the crappy revival are all part of their drug-induced fantasy. It would explain the stupidity of some of the later stuff, but I’m not giving Chris Carter an easy out. That’s all on him.) (I think the end of Brazil ruined a lot of stories for me!) ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2017, 7:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/you-weird-fanwanks/790292/55 "2017-07-03T19:49:33Z")
Balrogs do indeed have wings, but they’re vestigial and can’t support the beastie’s weight. The Klingons’ appearance keeps changing because they’re different racial subgroups who periodically gain dominance over the others, and with it the opportunity to go out and fight (or cooperate with) alien races. Tom Cruise’s character in _Knight and Day_ is the same guy from the _Mission: Impossible movies_, but on a relatively brief psychotic break. > [@glee](#): > > You’re not American are you? Such a young country! 😉 > > You see over here in England we have a couple of thousand years of recorded history. And lots of it featured men on horseback fighting with swords… “In America, a hundred years is a long time. In Europe, a hundred miles is a long way.” - Mark Twain ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2017, 8:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/you-weird-fanwanks/790292/56 "2017-07-03T20:19:42Z")
My personal Star Trek fanwank, which I never tire of, is that due to Earth’s post-scarcity utopia 99.99% of all people are content to laze around watching holoporn. Starfleet is regarded as a bunch of silly eccentrics who like to do dangerous stuff for no reason, like we regard people who climb Mt Everest. And just like those climbers, it’s not taxes or the industrial might of the Federation that keeps Starfleet funded. It’s all self-funded. If you want to show up to Utopia Planitia shipyards and start working on building starships, they’ll accept the help, because they do it all themselves. And the reason they don’t just have ships with 5 guys running things from a computerized control room is that everyone joins Starfleet to explore the galaxy, so they have to add all those extraneous staterooms holding hundreds of people just to hold them. Yes, it’s legit dangerous to wander around the galaxy filled with crazed aliens and negative space wedgies, just like it’s legit dangerous to climb Mt Everest. But they aren’t doing it because it’s a job, they’re doing it because it’s fun. Just like you can’t get paid to climb Mt Everest. I mean, how can you pay somebody to be a starship crewman, when back on Earth everything you could ever want comes out of a magic box? The only way you can pay them is by social status within the organization, which is why they have all the ranks and costumes and such. Note: This really applies firmly only to the Next Gen time period, back in TOS Starfleet was still a legit thing and 99.99% of humanity hadn’t crawled up their own assholes yet. In TOS it’s only 80% of humanity. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2017, 8:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/you-weird-fanwanks/790292/57 "2017-07-03T20:34:14Z")
> [@](#): > > Quoth **Elendil’s Heir** : > > Balrogs do indeed have wings, but they’re vestigial and can’t support the beastie’s weight. This is almost my view. Balrog wings are huge, and would easily be large enough… if they were corporeal. But a balrog’s wings are composed entirely of shadow, and a corporeal being can’t exactly fly with shadow wings. ---
**Author:** ![Just\_Asking\_Questions](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ba9def/32.png) [@Just\_Asking\_Questions](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Just_Asking_Questions)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2017, 9:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/you-weird-fanwanks/790292/58 "2017-07-03T21:35:35Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > My personal Star Trek fanwank, which I never tire of, is that due to Earth’s post-scarcity utopia 99.99% of all people are content to laze around watching holoporn. > > Starfleet is regarded as a bunch of silly eccentrics who like to do dangerous stuff for no reason, like we regard people who climb Mt Everest. > > And just like those climbers, it’s not taxes or the industrial might of the Federation that keeps Starfleet funded. It’s all self-funded. If you want to show up to Utopia Planitia shipyards and start working on building starships, they’ll accept the help, because they do it all themselves. And the reason they don’t just have ships with 5 guys running things from a computerized control room is that everyone joins Starfleet to explore the galaxy, so they have to add all those extraneous staterooms holding hundreds of people just to hold them. > > Yes, it’s legit dangerous to wander around the galaxy filled with crazed aliens and negative space wedgies, just like it’s legit dangerous to climb Mt Everest. But they aren’t doing it because it’s a job, they’re doing it because it’s fun. Just like you can’t get paid to climb Mt Everest. I mean, how can you pay somebody to be a starship crewman, when back on Earth everything you could ever want comes out of a magic box? The only way you can pay them is by social status within the organization, which is why they have all the ranks and costumes and such. > > Note: This really applies firmly only to the Next Gen time period, back in TOS Starfleet was still a legit thing and 99.99% of humanity hadn’t crawled up their own assholes yet. In TOS it’s only 80% of humanity. I like that one, except for one thing. If there was a possibility of finding cybernetic beings living on the top of Mt Everest, and they didn’t know we lived down at lower altitudes, and now they want to come down the mountain and enslave the rest of us, well, we might not be so kind to mountain climbers. In other words, you can be lost in your private holodeck, having a three-way with Cleopatra and Helen of Troy, completely ignoring the rest of the universe, but when the whale probe creators come by, they won’t care that you weren’t one of the Star Scouts. Someone might just have to reign those guys in. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2017, 9:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/you-weird-fanwanks/790292/59 "2017-07-03T21:39:08Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > My personal Star Trek fanwank, which I never tire of, is that due to Earth’s post-scarcity utopia 99.99% of all people are content to laze around watching holoporn. > > Starfleet is regarded as a bunch of silly eccentrics who like to do dangerous stuff for no reason, like we regard people who climb Mt Everest. If I recall correctly, the novelization of STTMP supports this theory pretty well. ---
**Author:** ![Hermione](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/cdc98d/32.png) [@Hermione](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hermione)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2017, 10:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/you-weird-fanwanks/790292/60 "2017-07-03T22:52:19Z")
> [@Andy\_L](#): > > My weird fanwank - I didn’t like the claim in the Doctor Who TV movie (the 8th Doctor story) that the Doctor was “half human”; when the Meta-crisis Doctor was created at “Journey’s End” I arbitrarily decided that the 8th Doctor, while still in a state of post-regeneration confusion, had a premonition about the MCD which led to his mistaken statement about being half-human. I’d had no problem, at the time, with believing that the Doctor’s dad married a human (a maverick–like father, like son, eh?). But in light of what’s in the new series, I’ve revised it to the following: Several millenia ago, a young Time Lady, a newlywed, was on a field research assignment on Earth (or perhaps on a secret Interventionist mission–another maverick!) . In danger of being found out, she had to chameleon-arch herself to disguise herself as a human. Once she was out of danger, and a Time Lady again, she returned to her home planet and her beloved husband. But the young couple became anxious when they found out that she was pregnant–and had been when she used the chameleon arch. What if it had harmed the child in some way? The geneticists did a full checkup and reassured the worried parents that the child remained fully Gallifreyan. There might be some problems with some of his regenerations, but nothing that couldn’t be helped. Also, some Terran physical traits might show up in some of his future incarnations, but they could deal with that. There was always a possibility that Terran traits might also show up in some of their son’s children or grandchildren, but…well, they could cross that bridge when they came to it, right? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/you-weird-fanwanks/790292.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/you-weird-fanwanks/790292.md?page=4)