Examples of What Could Have Been in Fan Works include:

  • The starting authors of An Entry With a Bang! had to decide whether to go with the Earth of Tom Clancy's 'Verse or the Real Life Earth, settling for the former. Fortunately, the existence of a Non-canon Stories thread allows for a glimpse at the latter. While some posts within will indeed come to pass after enough in-universe time has gone by, others will indeed never make the story's canon. The discussion threads, if you dare brave them, also have older versions of posts that made it to the Story Only thread. One of these had The Dukes of Hazzard explicitly show up, but it was rejected in favour of a less blatant Shout-Out.
  • The author originally planned for Veis instead of Vili to join Clan Gully in The Tainted Grimoire. Also, Vili didn't exist in the original plan. The original plan was scrapped and Vili was created because cuttingmoon57 didn't like the idea of altering important canon clans.
  • Mars Attacks: Simpsons originally had a characher called Norm, as in Norm MacDonald, as a reference to the TV show The Norm Show. However, when the real-life MacDonald died from cancer, the author had a rule on celebrities who died in real-life. As a result, the TV Show mentioned in the work was changed to Saturday Night Live, and the character Norm was replaced with Tracy, i.e. Tracy Morgan, as he was part of the cast at the time the Norm Show had aired.