All There In The Manual / Web Original

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• The Anti-Cliché and Mary-Sue Elimination Society has a Wiki maintained by the authors that details events and characters.
• What exactly is happening in the final episodes of Board James can only truly be understood if one watches James Rolfe's breakdown of it. There are some hints to the truth (such as a Freeze-Frame Bonus of James' friends after he says "Imagine being trapped for all eternity with two ghosts") but the totality of how this 'verse works and what is really going on cannot be divined without help.
• Confused Matthew has the same opinion. He really didn't care for the number of things in Iron Man 2 that required in-depth knowledge of the Marvel Universe to understand, especially Nick Fury suddenly coming in halfway through the film and the film acting like we're well aware of who he is, after just one brief scene after the credits in the first Iron Man film. He ended up declaring that he now refuses to see The Avengers just out of spite over this.
• Critical Hit has an interview with GM Rodrigo on the Major Spoilers website, and he moderates the Major Spoilers Forum where he answers questions people have about the game.
• Dream (the Minecrafter and YouTuber) reveals in a livestream that sometimes, Minecraft Manhunt videos require more than one take, as Dream is occasionally caught and killed before even getting gear — and it wouldn't exactly be entertaining for the audience if a video was three minutes long.
• Elcenia has two indices, one for setting and one for characters. There's nothing you need, per se, but it does clarify or teach not-fully necessary bits of the background, and help keep everything else straight if one forgets.
• After he finished Fine Structure, the author released supplementary material that didn't fit in (some canonical, some not) and started taking questions. Some of the most pressing questions, however, were dismissed by Shrug of God — the fact that certain questions are never answered is part of the point.
• Honest Trailers: The trailer for The Rise of Skywalker complains how the Star Wars franchise has become extremely confusing for those that only watch the movies, since you have to follow tons of side material, including things like Twitter posts explaining plot points and Fortnite (which had a Star Wars-centric event which provided a scene alluded to in the opening crawl), for everything to make sense.
  Narrator: Didn't know [Janna was supposed to be Lando's daughter]? It was in the Rise of Skywalker visual companion book, idiot. You should have been reading that in-between rounds of Fortnite! Call yourself a Star Wars fan...
• In The Last Angel, the author goes into a lot of details on the setting in answering readers' questions on the forum he posts on.
• League of Intergalactic Cosmic Champions falls into this with several characters introductions being deleted off the web, information revealed in other cybersoap boards and author fics giving backstory.
• The official website for The Mercury Men provides tons of supplementary material, including blueprints, digital props, and faux-1960’s trading cards.
• The Noedolekcin Archives: The bulk of the lore not provided in the videos can be found on the creator's Twitter.
• The Noob webseries uses novels and a comic to tell about story elements that can't be put onscreen. While each media is supposed to be self-sufficient while focusing on different parts of the story, some important info ends up being present (or at least made clear rather than implied) in only one of the three formats.
• In her now defunct formspring, Elisa Hansen used to answer questions about The Nostalgia Chick, including explaining character motivations.
• In Fairies of Notting Cove an extra seventh chapter was released alongside the final chapter. It contained mostly meaningless details with some things that couldn't be written in.
• Obscured Eyes: Lauren's DeviantArt and Tumblr pages are dedicated to explaining the characters' backstories in more detail.
• Port by the Sea: The official website revealed background information on the two main characters.
  • Port and Umi are childhood friends.
  • Port wants to grow up to be like his father, a famous sailor.
  • Jolly Roger (Port pet crab) was his first catch and became his lifelong friend.
  • Umi never knew her parents would like to learn about them someday.
  • Ankle will be a very important character who appears in unexpected places and, for some reason, doesn’t seem fond of the ocean.
• Plinkett from RedLetterMedia hates this trope, and during one of his Star Wars reviews points out how stupid it is; when watching a movie everything you see really needs to be explained within the movie itself, not in countless other pieces of literature and comics.
• Completing the trifecta, SF Debris ranted on his review of Danny Boyle's Sunshine and Star Trek (2009) about how this is a pet peeve of his, because you shouldn't have to go out and buy a comic book/additional novel/check a website/hunt for a deleted scene to be able to understand a detail (or series of details) that appears in the movie and that, standing by itself, is actually (borderline or totally) nonsensical. He has mentioned that he is a teacher and thus this being a personal peeve makes sense: he cannot give a good grade to a report that forces him to hunt for data the student decided to exclude. He even went as far as lament that this trope dilutes Nero's impact tremendously, making him an "emo Romulan" when the backstory is probably even better than Khan's.
• During the run of their series Kissing in the Rain, Shipwrecked Comedy ran a contest that allowed fans to write fan fiction that would be included as canon backstory for the characters. Earlier videos created by Shipwrecked and Kuang are also considered KitR canon.
• The story of Sonic the Hedgehog 2: Special Edition is entirely contained in its manual.
• Survival of the Fittest (and by extension other Play-by-Post Games) can fall into this at times. Some information is only given in character profiles, and not mentioned anywhere else for any number of reasons. At other times, you may have to look through pre-game threads, other characters' plotlines, and sometimes even past versions to fully understand events that go on in the main game.
• While watching To Boldly Flee, you could probably guess that Turrell was exhibiting Never My Fault qualities while blaming The Nostalgia Critic for blowing up his planet (which didn't happen), but that's only confirmed in the Scooby-Doo commentary where Rob says Turrell got "distracted" by the Critic's review of Battlefield Earth and that's why he's so pissed off.
• Trinton Chronicles also has a wiki page which is mostly kept by the author's, there is no known Canon Bible par-say but there is a web page, a wiki page, and secret documents maintained by the creator.
• Unwanted Houseguest: Doctor Wolfula is a recurring character, without any mention of what he is. You'd have to go to his own youtube channel to find out that he's an alien called a Wolfulite.
• Enforced in-universe in Welcome Home (Clown Illustrations) — without any available footage, the only information available about this show comes from outside material.
• The Whateley Universe has a wiki that's maybe four or five hundred pages, most of which came from the secret Canon Bible the authors work from, even though it's maintained by fans. It has tons of detail, even on characters we haven't seen yet and secret threats we haven't even had mentioned yet in Canon.

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