Canon Wank
Don't like the Canon Discontinuity the writers introduced in your favorite storyline? Something stupid never actually happened? Got a favorite element from the Expanded Universe that you just know in your heart is Canon? Forget the MST3K Mantra. Don't relax.
Go on The Internet and fight for your right to participate in determining show canon! Perpetrate interminably long tracts and holy wars on the Internet. This is Canon Wank-ing at its finest.
Compare Continuity Snarl, which this tries to fix, and Continuity Porn, which is the writers trying to address this. Contrast Headcanon, which is similar but good-natured and doesn't demand it be proven to the unwashed masses.
Ascended Fanon is the Holy Grail of this activity.
Examples of Canon Wank include:
Comic Books
- Many crusades have been fought over the Transformers comics. It doesn't help that the UK comics published stories taking place in between the US issues (which came out much more slowly) without knowing what specifically would happen next. At one point there were three Megatrons running around.
- The original cartoon is even worse, with every bit of Backstory contradicting all others as if it went out of its way to do so. It's no wonder the comics' take, even with conflicts, is generally taken over it. Ask someone where Megatron came from, you're more likely to hear "gladatorial combat" than "The evil Constructicons built him. Then he turned the good Constructicons evil. Then he built the evil Constructicons."
Live Action Television
- The Whoniverse is such a complete Continuity Snarl that it's only through severe Canon Wank (often in essay form) that people can begin to put things in order.
- Star Trek. Sort of. Most of ST's canon is straightforward enough other than that Abrams thing, time paradoxes excepted, which always work out in-arc. The Enterprise relaunch novels may attract this though due to avoiding Trip's death in the last TV episode.
Video Games
- The Legend of Zelda is a variation, in that it's not what's canon that's the problem, it's what order it's in.
- Mega Man X: Axl.
- Any attempt to work out how Sonic the Hedgehog's powers work in relation to physics—albeit a distorted set of physics, due to the conceit of a universe with seven Green Rocks which become an Infinity+1 Sword when their powers are combined.
Meta
- In Tumblr, there are many blogs in the form of "The [adjective/identity tag] character of the day", allegedly to compile "Headcanons" about gender, sexual orientation, or any possible disorder popular characters may have, and invariably most of them ends degenerating into this. It can be easily identified by repetition of the snowclone "Sorry, [Character] is [identity], I don't make the rules".