Kimball Cho Is God, or How I Learnt To Stop Worrying and Embrace Fanon, by blogger Alasdair Stuart
If canon is the fire in which we all burn, then fanon is the fire we all sit around swapping stories. The basic idea is simple; you choose what you want to have happened. Nothing more, nothing less. If there's an episode or an issue of something you hated? Never happened. If you want to, you can take it further, embracing radical interpretations of shows, movies, or books that work for you and don’t have to work for anyone else. Why? Because it’s fanon and that means it’s yours and no one else’s. Go with what works, what makes you smile. This is what does it for me...
Special Agent Kimball Cho Is God
One half of the best double act on The Mentalist , Kimball Cho is an endlessly deadpan, competent, occasionally ruthless agent for the California Bureau of Investigation. He’s incredibly calm at all times, an unflappable, grounded presence that’s the perfect foil for Thomas Jane’s quietly flamboyant deductive genius. He’s so calm in fact, that I have a theory; Kimball Cho is God, or a God who has decided to become human for a while because Jane interests him. Cho knows how it ends, all of it, and he’s along for the ride because the idea of not knowing how it ends fascinates him.
Fringe Division is Fox Mulder’s Fault
Way back at the start of Fringe season two there’s a lovely little passing reference to how Fringe Division files used to be classified under the “X” prefix. It’s a nice nod to The X-Files but as far as I’m concerned, the two shows exist quite happily in the same universe. Both the Governmental Conspiracy and the Consortium approached Walter who in his more lucid moments turned them down and in his less lucid ones attempted to persuade them to give him more LSD. Any thought of recruiting him was eventually abandoned, although somewhere in the Massive Dynamic vaults are detailed files on William Bell’s research on the Black Oil...
The Winchesters Take In Strays
Jed on Bedlam seems to have done a surprisingly good job of making peace with his abilities. That, combined with the visual similarities in the ghosts of Bedlam leads me to one inescapable conclusion; Jed’s done some travelling, and, hitching across America, he got picked up by two guys in a ’67 Chevy Impala. In between arguing about what music to play and calling each other a wide variety of names, the Winchesters bonded with Jed. After it became apparent that he had certain abilities, they worked together and the Winchesters helped Jed come to terms with his abilities before he came back to England and moved into Bedlam...
Anya Didn’t Die
Anya's death at the end of Buffy The Vampire Slayer is a memorable moment; it’s one of those moments which feels wrong and small and cruel, as she's cheated out of a genuinely heroic death in the brutal scrum of Sunnydale's final moments, cut down by a Bringer’s sword. It’s also... a little too easy. Anya’s a former vengeance demon and, much like the Mob and the Church, you never leave, you just move a little further away for a while. As Sunnydale High collapses, D'Hoffryn appears over Anya’s corpse. He kneels, mutters something about how just because he sent people to kill her didn’t mean she had to take it personally and reaches out. There’s a flash of light, Anya’s wounds are healed, her eyes open and D'Hoffryn smiles and says, “They’re waiting for you at the office. There’s cake.” He teleports them away and Anya returns to life as a vengeance demon. Just one that, quietly, checks in on Xander from time to time...
This is a personal article by blogger Alasdair Stuart. Read more from our bloggers here on the SFX site. So, what are your own, personal fanon theories? Tell us below!
