A good book series can be a treat to read, but even long-running franchises aren't immune to the dreaded Fanon Discontinuity demon, as these cases show.
Note: Do not post examples of personal discontinuity. Examples should only be of groups of fandoms.
- Alex Rider: Some fans say that Alex died at the end of Scorpia and the other four did not happen, not because they were bad, but because some fans think surviving a bullet to the chest is unrealistic.
- Animorphs:
- A portion of the fandom likes to disregard the series' ending and Rachel's death, or at least the Bolivian Army Ending finale at the end of book 54, mostly because the existence of the villain necessitating such an ending was only introduced a couple of pages before the end, and any hints at anything making such an ending necessary only a chapter or two before the end.
- The fandom also tends to disregard the existence of the TV show (except maybe the opening theme) due to how sucky it was; it's the same situation for the Animorphs Transformers toys (because they succumbed to Kibbles and Bits badly), which are also ignored by the Transformers fandom as well.
- There are one or two more individual books that get it well. The Experiment is the most notorious due to it being badly ghostwritten by an author who turned it into a pro vegetarianism rant.
- The Mutation is disliked due to introducing mutated humans and having little relevance to the plot.
- The Resistance is also disliked by many, mainly as the American Civil War flashback subplot was hard for non-Americans to connect with.
- The Separation is ignored by some due to how it ended and not liking how the two versions of Rachel were portrayed.
- The Chronicles of Amber: Fans and Roger Zelazny's friends (like George R. R. Martin and Neil Gaiman) usually don't want to talk about John Gregory Betancourt's Dawn of Amber prequels. Setting aside the relative quality of the works, one of their reasons is that Zelazny, while having no problem with writing for Shared Universenote had said that Amber was his and he never wanted to turn it into a franchise. After his death, the literary agent of his estate interpreted this as meaning that Zelazny desperately wanted somebody else to write more Amber books.
- Arthur C. Clarke: Rendezvous with Rama: The sequels are generally left out of existence by anyone who happened to read them. Especially since Clarke didn't write them — though he's given co-author credit with Gentry Lee, to whom he provided ideas and consultation, and he obviously at least authorized them.
- Conan the Barbarian:
- Some fans ignore Conan the Bold because it does not fit in with the other stories, due to Conan crossing most of Hyboria in a short period of time.
- Many fans ignore the Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer novelizations, or treat them as alternate continuities because they contain details that conflict with the other stories (notably, the films themselves take place in their own continuity separate from the books)
- A Court of Thorns and Roses: A portion of the fandom prefers not to read beyond the original trilogy due to disliking the direction the later books take, in particular Feyre undergoing Badass Decay, certain characters coming off as OOC and/or becoming unlikable in these readers' eyes, Rhysand's questionable treatment of Feyre in the fifth book, and the ever-increasing number of sex scenes (which some readers find distracting more than anything).
- Cthulhu Mythos: While August Derleth's contributions can't be denied (he invented the name "Cthulhu Mythos", and helped to popularize Lovecraft's work), many people consider a plethora of the elements he added into his version of the Mythos as this trope, as they often went completely against Lovecraft's vision. For one thing, he tried to introduce the concept of good vs. evil into the Mythos (while Lovecraft himself always maintained that good and evil are concepts created by humans and cannot be applied to godlike alien beings), and his "elemental theory", in which he associated the various Great Old Ones and the Other Gods (he never realized the distinction between the two) with the four Greek elements, no matter how little sense it makes. For example, he associated Cthulhu with Water due to his octopoid appearance and underwater prison, handily forgetting that water is the only known substance that completely blocks his telepathic powers, and that he's trapped under the sea. Many fans rearrange the creatures' positions in the chart, or work with the five Chinese elements instead, or reject the entire idea of classifying beings in this way when many are not even made of matter as humans understand it.
- Some fans of Dean Koontzs Frankenstein regard only the first two books in the series as occurring. Dead/Alive, Lost Souls and Dead Town did not happen.
- Dexter: Many fans prefer to ignore Dexter in the Dark as much as possible, because the Dark Passenger is revealed to be a supernatural entity, rather than a part of Dexter's mind, which readers perceived as a weird direction for the series to take (the first two books are fairly grounded psychological thrillers with nothing overtly supernatural). Notably, the following books in the series mostly ignore this plot point too, so it appears the author agreed with the fans' assessment.
- Discworld: Terry Pratchett has stated explicitly that the (unnamed) Patrician in The Colour of Magic is Havelock Vetinari (although written by a less skilled author). But since a) he doesn't act much like Vetinari, b) it's a little dicey timeline-wise, and c) it's hard to believe that Vetinari could ever, in any alternate timeline, have been an obese man who threw wild parties and ate candied jellyfish, many fans choose to believe that the earlier Patrician is one of Vetinari's predecessors (Snapcase or Winder).
- Dragonlance:
- It is widely agreed that the original Dragonlance Chronicle Trilogy (Dragons of Autumn Twilight, Dragons of Winter Night, and Dragons of Spring Dawning) happened. It gets muddled after that: some refuse the Legends Trilogy completely while some acknowledge that but refuse the two Second Generation novels. Some accept the first Second Generation novel but refuse Dragons of the Summer Flame (especially since bits of it retcon many aspects of the original backstory, such as Raistlin having a daughter he doesn't remember because of a memory spell) while some accept both and say that's that. Since there are other novels adding on to the story, fans are divided on which to include and exclude.
- Further mention goes to the two books meant to chronicle the early days of Raistlin Majere. Opinion is widely divided on where they fit in the general continuity, if they fit in the general continuity and if they can be actually accepted to exist at all.
- Dragonriders of Pern:
- Most fans of the series consider all Green and Blue riders heterosexual unless specified otherwise, Word of God on the subject be damned.note
- Many fans also dislike some of Todd McCaffrey's books... the ones that were only written by him, to be specific.
- The fandom tends to treat the backstory of Masterharper Robinton revealed in Masterharper of Pern like a pizza menu: Some bits (mostly involving his father, Petiron) are mostly accepted. Some bits are accepted by some, ignored by others (his The Lost Lenore wife, his relationship with Silvina) and others are near-universally ignored (the fact that Camo is Robinton and Silvina's son).
- Some fans even choose to disregard everything about AIVAS. It was never discovered and Pern continued fighting Thread as usual for hundreds of years, thank you very much. Some fans are so militant as to ignore EVERYTHING written after the first two trilogies. Or the first two books.
- Many fans of David Eddings' The Dreamers series despise the ending of the final book, The Younger Gods, and so just ignore the book in its entirety. The biggest issue is that the plot of the series concerns fighting an enemy that wants world domination and is constantly creating new servants in new forms. At the end of the last book, the real creator gods (which came out of nowhere) go back in time and make the enemy infertile — which nullifies the entire series. As in, once they're done, the book's events change so that while the gods remember what had happened, nobody else does, because to them, it had never happened, and everyone is back where they started. Many fans found this extremely unsatisfying and so pretend it didn't happen.
- The Dresden Files:
- Ghost Story: Some fans felt that the book completely and utterly destroyed the series due to the way certain characters handled Harry's death.
- Others feel the same way about Changes because of the way the story dealt with Susan Rodriguez's character—in particular, Harry driving half-vampire Susan into a state of mind in which she killed a human, thus forcing her to transform into the newest vampire of the Red Court so that a curse affecting all in a bloodline would affect the whole Red Court. Since Harry and Susan were, according to canon, in the truest of true love, Harry manipulating Susan, depriving her of free choice in a horrible situation, and finally murdering her so the bloodline curse would affect the Red Court instead of Harry's and Susan's daughter and all her relatives seemed, to some fans, to be out of character for Harry.
- Dune: Many fans refuse to acknowledge any books not written by Frank Herbert, despite this ending the series on a massive cliffhanger. They choose to follow Muad'Dib's philosophy, instead: "Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife — chopping off what's incomplete and saying: 'Now, it's complete because it's ended here.'" Some go even further and ignore books after Children of Dune or Dune Messiah, or even accept only the original novel.
- It must be acknowledged that even Herbert himself broke down on continuity a couple of times.
- Some fans simply believe that Brian and Kevin cannot mean to end like that.
- Several fans use the non-canon (but Frank Herbert-approved) Dune Encyclopedia's take on the history of the universe because, among other reasons, it averts the cliché of the Robot War as humans rising against robot oppressors. The original novels implied (and the Encyclopedia outright stated) that the Butlerian Jihad was purely ideological (humans who hated robots against humans who loved them).
- The issue with the prequels as canon is not about their quality, but more about glaring contradictions. The new authors have made it a plot point that Paul Atreides was born on the planet Kaitain and had many adventures on other worlds. When the original Dune said in the very first sentence that Paul was born on Caladan and had never been anywhere else before the events of that book. There's also the whole "Leto the First's BFF is a robot-man that, at the time, would have caused Caladan to be RAZED FROM ORBIT by every other noble house due to the whole 'Machine enslaved mankind, so we don't even use calculators' mentality".
- Earth's Children: Many fans consider the fourth book to be the last. Given that the first four books (The Clan of the Cave Bear, The Valley of Horses, The Mammoth Hunters and The Plains of Passage) were published in 1980, 1982, 1985, and 1990, and it was not until after a lengthy Sequel Gap — then another — that books five (The Shelters of Stone) and six (The Land of Painted Caves) came out in 2002 and 2011, it's easy for long-time fans to keep thinking of the fourth book as the final one (the fact many fans believe Sequelitis kicked in hard with these installments contributes). While The Plains of Passage doesn't tie up every plot point, it does feature a happy conclusion to one of the main storylines of the first four books, ending with Ayla and Jondalar arriving safely at the Ninth Cave of the Zelandonii, intending to get married and Ayla having learned she's pregnant with Jondalar's child.
- Empire of the East and Book of Swords': Ardneh's Sword'' never existed for many fans of the series, since it contains several obvious and absurd retcons.
- Ender's Game: A number of fans prefer to deny the that the series kept going after Speaker for the Dead. Others ignore anything after the original, others discount the Ender-focused sequels but include the more recent Bean-focused series, and others acknowledge the four original books but ignore the Bean-focused sequels and more recently written Ender books.
- Fifty Shades of Grey:
- There's a growing group of readers who like to pretend that the series consists of only the first book, ignoring Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed. The book ends with Anastasia realizing that she cannot fulfill Christian's BDSM needs and leaving him, thus putting an end to their dysfunctional relationship. The first book could then potentially be viewed as a flawed yet interesting erotic drama, in a similar vein as 9½ Weeks. However, in the sequel Ana almost immediately take Christian back, with the rest of the trilogy chronicling the ups and downs of their romance, which largely remains highly dysfunctional and arguably abusive (though the series doesn't often treat it as such).
- Even some legitimate fans of Fifty Shades prefer to ignore the trilogy retelling the series from Christian’s viewpoint; while it doesn’t really add anything new to the story (with some calling it a cash grab), the really contentious part is that the retelling makes Christian come off as extremely creepy and unhinged; while his behaviour in the original trilogy is certainly questionable, the retelling made it difficult for fans to view him as an appealing love interest at all because Grey, Darker and Freed make him out to be even worse than when he’s described through Ana’s eyes. For readers who already didn't much like Christian, this trilogy often only reinforced their opinion rather than presenting him in a more sympathetic light.
- Gargantua And Pantagruel: The Fifth Book, allegedly written by Rabelais, could be the most impressive example. People began doubting its authorship ever since its first appearance during the Renaissance. The conflict only really came to a conclusion in 1994 with the help of Mireille Huchon's annotations and arguments. However, this does not resolve all issues since this part of Gargantua's adventures seems to have been written through a totally different perspective which does not always fit too well with the saga's previous books.
- Gone: Fans largely tend to disregard the sequel trilogy, as it seemingly retcons the entire series and does not follow up with the characters.
- Halo: When 343 Industries, the then-new owners of the franchise, announced a new series of Expanded Universe books written by Karen Traviss, many fans were skeptical since Traviss was pretty infamous among the Star Wars Legends fandom for Writer on Board tendencies. Sure enough, the same thing happened with the first of her books, Halo: Glasslands, which demonized the once-morally ambiguous character Dr. Halsey as a straight up villain and distorted nearly every 'good' character to hate her. As a result, many fans discount the book as part of the canon, and feel the same way about its sequels Halo: The Thursday War and Halo: Mortal Dictata. Even though the Halo wiki Halopedia records the events of the book as part of the canon, it rewrites them in a particularly passive-aggressive way that allows them to reinterpret what was depicted — just look at this excerpt from the Catherine Halsey article
:Halopedia: Many of those unfamiliar with the internal dynamics of ONI and the SPARTAN-II Programnote have come to interpret Halsey and her work in a highly negative light. [...] Such views often have their basis on information provided by the Office of Naval Intelligencenote , which has frequently used highly selective or outright false information to shift the blame for some of ONI's more questionable decisions on Halsey alone. - While searching for more books featuring Hannibal Lecter you may come across two books called Hannibal and Hannibal Rising. The vast majority of fans will assure you they are an illusion and have never existed. The television series incorporating ideas and characters from these books has only slightly softened the fandom's rejection, with many preferring to declare, for example, Margot and Mason Verger to be original to television.
- Harry Potter: While most fans accept the series as a whole, there are fans who disregard the last book, or the last two or even three books, mostly to save characters who meet their ends therenote or prevent pairings they don't like. For most fans, the main issue is with the supplemental material, which they argue over frequently even if J. K. Rowling herself supplied the information. The only part of the books themselves they contest is the highly divisive epilogue, in which all the ships are definitively resolved with Babies Ever After; even some fans who didn't care about the shipping weren't fans of the epilogue (in part because it focused so much on the shipping).note Outside of that, Rowling's extra-literary canon tends to be accepted only in limited circumstances:
- Some things are made "canon" because Rowling was asked about them in an interview or Q&A session and gave an answer. More often than not, such answers were invented on the fly, and there's a tendency to simply align with pressure to make the series more racially, ethnically, and sexually diverse than it actually was. Some answers are almost universally ignored, such as McGonagall's retirementnote .
- Some things, like Lavender Brown's death, never appeared in the books but were invented for the film series, and Rowling made them canon later anyway. Most fans prefer to ignore that and consider the books the definitive versions.
- A large group of fans ignores any of Rowling's proclamations that involve implausible numbers, such as characters' ages or the number of students at Hogwarts. In some cases, they contradict what the books say (e.g. the birth years of Charlie Weasley and Bellatrix Lestrange). Rowling's Black Family Tree is considered implausible, not only contradicting the books but showing characters having children as young as 13 years old.
- Pottermore is a contentious source of canon. Some of its "facts" were clearly invented after the fact, especially biographies of minor characters which were never even hinted at in the books. Other "facts" are considered too stupid to be canon. Americans also ignore with the descriptions of Wizarding America, which tend to betray a lack of knowledge of American culture and historynote .
- When No-Maj became mainstream in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, fans were actually receptive to the movie. But sequel Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald could not be given the same courtesy between many questionable writing decisions (many of which had to be addressed in Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore).
- Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is a Spin-Offspring play written nine years after the series ended as something of an "eighth book"; although Rowling didn't write the script, she did approve of it. About half of the fans like it, but even many of them don't consider it canon and think it reads more like Fan Fic: its use of Time Travel contradicts what the books establish, the villain is Voldemort and Bellatrix's daughter, and Cedric Diggory (of all people) is given the Ron the Death Eater treatment.
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy lends itself to all kinds of fanon discontinuity, made easier by its very explicit Trilogy Creep and by the fact that no two adaptations of the overall story (whether radio show, book, TV series, or film) had the same continuity. Douglas Adams approved of the contradictory continuities and in several cases even wrote them himself. Therefore, there are many ways it can shake out:
- Some fans accept only the first two books, claiming they said all that needed to be said. The original radio series, comprising the first two "phases", were roughly adapted to those first two books, even though the events didn't happen in the same order. Indeed, these fans claim that the radio series considered the second books' events to be the "end" of the series, even though the ending of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe was based on the "Primary Phase" of the radio show (it's a complicated canon). In any event, the subsequent books and "phases" of the radio series were only created in response to the success of the second book; Life, the Universe and Everything in particular was hacked together from a partly completed script for Doctor Who that Adams was working on, which some fans felt wasn't befitting the series.
- Some fans accept the first three books, claiming that the fourth book So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish didn't feel like a Hitchhiker's book at all and shouldn't count as one, especially given its focus on Arthur at the expense of nearly every other major character from the first three books. Adams knew this wasn't what most fans wanted and actually devoted a couple of paragraphs of the book to tell the readers to skip to the end if they wanted a bit with Marvin in it (in which he dies, and actually feels happy for once).
- Some fans accept the first four books, but throw out Mostly Harmless. Although it feels more like a Hitchhiker's book than So Long, it was also written in the midst of Adams' ongoing Creator Breakdown and has a massive Downer Ending. There was also an eight-year break between the fourth and fifth books, which kind of set it apart from the others. Many people felt the characters hardly deserved the ending they got in Mostly Harmless, and some editions of the Hitchhiker's series, even a quarter-century after Mostly Harmless, still only include the first four books.
- And some fans accept all the first five, but not the sixth, And Another Thing.... Adams turned out to have regretted his Downer Ending in Mostly Harmless and started working on turning it into Canon Discontinuity, but Died During Production and was unable to finish. After another gap, Eoin Colfer wrote And Another Thing, with the approval of Adams' estate. Although it broadly does accomplish what Adams sought to do, there are many fans who believe Only the Creator Does It Right and accept only the first five books. And still others who previously accepted only the first four now accept all six, because now at least the series doesn't end on a Downer Ending, which was their only real concern.
- Pretty much everyone except for the most thorough biographers ignores the poems written in Classical Chinese by Ho Xuan Huong. Not only that they wildly clash with the image of her as a free spirit folk hero who elevated the status of Vietnamese as a literary language, the poems also just aren't as good and lack her signature use of sexual humor, Double Entendre and feistiness against the patriarchal and corrupt society she lived in.
- The Hunger Games:
- There are many fans who choose to disregard the events of the third book entirely and come up with their own conclusions to the story, triggered by Mockingjay's arguable Wangst and Romantic Plot Tumor.
- Some even bypass the second book and let the story be at the end of the first book, Left Hanging as it is.
- With the release of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, some fans choose to disregard the events in the story and stick to the events in the trilogy, due to the state of the Games being very primitive compared to what's seen in the first two books.
- Inkheart: Fans of the trilogy like to pretend that there was no Inkdeath because of Farid's derailment and treating Meggie horribly when they finally get together. This was never foreshadowed in the previous books and it feels completely jarring. Not to mention Doria being introduced as Meggie's new love interest.
- James Bond: There are several fans who completely discount The Man with the Golden Gun as the final novel in the series and instead treat You Only Live Twice as the finale.
- John Carter and the Giant of Mars, the second-last story in the Barsoom-series, tends to fall victim to this for multiple reasons. For starters, it most likely wasn't even written by Edgar Rice Burroughs himself but rather by his son John "Jack" Coleman Burroughs. The story is also very simple since it was originally written for the children's book series "Big Little Books", written in the third person rather than the first person narrative most Barsoom stories use, and uses English names for the Martian flora and fauna (there are other discrepancies, such as the ulsios/"Martian rats" having three legs rather than the invariable description of them in the other books as "many-legged"). One notable example of fans disregarding the book: in "A Guide to Barsoom", writer John Flint Roy clearly states he does not consider this story to be a true Barsoom story, and thus didn't include any information about this story and the characters appearing in it in his guide. Due to the shortness of "Giant" compared to the other books, it's often published along with the first (and only, as the author died before he could write any more) part of "Skeleton Men of Jupiter", which was written by ERB and generally is considered canon, although incomplete.
- Known Space has a few spots some fans would like to drop. The Ringworld Throne is one fans would like to forget about. The Fleet of Worlds series coauthored with Edward M. Lerner and released in the 2000s has its detractors for attempting to tie off strings the fans would have rather left hanging.
- Land of Oz: Some fans of the books refuse to acknowledge the existence/validity of those written by other authors after his death. This group included Jack Snow, the author of two of the later books, who included no references whatsoever in them to the works of Baum's previous successors. Even within the originals, Baum clearly thought of continuity as something that happens to other people.
- The Legend of Drizzt, like any long-running series, has things that some fans just won't acknowledge, and things that other fans won't acknowledge.
- For example, some think Salvatore should never have had Wulfgar come back from the dead, even if it meant another author doing so, and probably more poorly, or the Spine Of The World novel never being written. Others think Wulfgar should never have died anyway.
- Some think that Drizzt's attitude since about Starless Night has just been a big emo joke he's played on his friends, and those that apparently believe his playful, half-crazed personality from the first trilogy was a mask he wore for the world.
- Some don't believe that it took something like ten years after Wulfgar's death for Catti-brie and Drizzt to go to bed together, and some think it's a trick and never happened at all, and some can't believe that either the relationship or the marriage happened so quickly. More recently, some just don't understand why Salvatore would go to the trouble of putting them together and setting up a possibility for her to live a very long life—i.e. magery—only to marginalize her character for the last two books, hand her a Distress Ball, use her as a plot device to put the characters where he needs them to go, and then kill her and put her in one heaven that Drizzt won't even get to go to. Especially when he could have avoided all that and just taken her magic away and had her die of old age before the new era in 4th Edition Forgotten Realms.
- The Lion King: Six New Adventures books introduce a character called Kopa, Simba and Nala's son. This clashes with the premise of The Lion King II: Simba's Pride, where Simba and Nala had a daughter named Kiara instead. Hundreds of fan theories, fanfics and headcanons attempting to link the two sides together have been created and debated over the years as a result of this. Numerous fans have claimed that Kopa isn't canon since he was created by a third-party publisher, writing off the 6NA books as just Disney-approved fanfiction. This often sparks unbelievable amounts of fan-rage over Kopa and those books, and how they could still fit into the movies' story. Sides are often taken in these disputes, make no mistake about that. And Simba getting a son in The Lion Guard didn’t help things at all.
- Mass Effect: Deception, since acquired early by many fans of the franchise, has been effective immediately dismissed by members of the BioWare Social Network forums from canonicity along with producing 456 pages of hatred and a book burning video. BioWare and Mass Effect fans are notable for rarely uniting about anything related to their beloved franchise, making this a very rare moment. Kai Leng breaking into Anderson's apartment and eating his cereal is generally considered canon though, for being hilarious and completely in character.
- Modesty Blaise: Peter O'Donnell's final contribution to the saga was an anthology of five shortish stories set over the period of his heroine's life. The last story, Cobra Trap ends with her and Willy Garvin dying heroically. Long time fans refuse to read the last story or even admit that it exists.
- Monk: Many fans of the tie-in novels angrily disregard the final four books, which a different author wrote. The humor is far weaker (something even the author admits), the mysteries are less challenging (several have Recycled Plots from the author's previous mystery stories), and Status Quo Is God gets evoked, undoing a lot of well-received elements from previous novels (like Monk's Second Love).
- The Night Angel Trilogy: A few fans choose to ignore the middle and last book completely, only accepting Way of the Shadows as canon. This is mostly because of a little sloppy characterization and not one, but two cases of very annoying girlfriends.
- Percy Jackson and the Olympians:
- Some fans choose to ignore the Sequel Series The Heroes of Olympus in its entirety. There's even some that chose to ignore the last part of The Last Olympian, choosing to end the book right after the Underwater Kiss.
- On the flip side, while many fans consider Heroes of Olympus canon, some would prefer to ignore the sequel to that series, The Trials of Apollo, and even among readers of that series, there are some who disregard Jason's death in The Burning Maze and/or Reyna joining the Hunters of Artemis in The Tyrant's Tomb.
- Scholars believe parts of the Ramayana were not written by Valmiki and instead interpolated by later authors. Regardless, the part where Rama sends Sita into exile based on an overheard conversation after she's long since proved her fidelity by leaping through the fire, and while she is pregnant with his twins, after spending the entire plot of the epic rescuing her... didn't happen.
- Ravens Shadow: A few fans pretend that the being possessing Barkus at the end of the first novel was The Ally himself, rather than his servant The Witches' Bastard. This allows them to ignore Tower Lord and especially Queen of Fire and pretend that Vaelin killed the big bad and saved the world already. The reasons for this are many, but the biggest ones are the poorly implemented Switching P.O.V. introduced in Tower Lord (most fans agree that Ryan failed to give each character a unique voice,) the entire character of Reva feeling unnecessary, Vaelin's Badass Decay, and Lyrna becoming even more selfish and manipulative than before. Most infamous however is the extremely rushed finale, where Vaelin hardly gets to do anything and the Big Bad is taken down extremely easily without his motivations being truly revealed or discussed at length, turning him into a Generic Doomsday Villain. Many questions that have been around since the first book are also left unanswered. To say that most fans of Blood Song were disappointed is an understatement.
- Robotech: Before Harmony Gold USA's delegation of all expanded universe material to "secondary continuity", many fans preferred to forget End of the Circle which attempted to tie up all loose ends and bring closure to the Robotech saga. Many were also in favor of forgetting The Zentraedi Rebellion, The Masters' Gambit, and Before the Invid Storm, especially if they know that it was written by only half of the pseudonymous Jack Mckinney team, Brian Daley having passed away in 1996. James Luceno wrote those three novels solo but still using the pseudonym. Whether or not this is an indication that Daley was considered the better half of the duo, or it just didn't feel the same, is debatable since Daley was just as responsible as Luceno for End of the Circle.
- Sean Dillon:
- It can be tempting to ignore Eye of the Storm, minus one or two events that are frequently mentioned in later books, as it paints Sean in a pretty nasty light before Characterization Marches On. It also has a Happy Ending Over Ride to a previous novel, Touch the Devil.
- Without Mercy isn't a universally accepted installment due to the very poorly handled Dropped a Bridge on Him fate of main character Hannah Bernstein. For some fans, it's also where Seasonal Rot sets in, with one Amazon reviewer saying "Dillon has become less Irish, Ferguson less commanding, Billy and Harry Salter have become caricatures, the IRA has become populated with inept senior citizens, and the Russians are foiled by the most transparent sleight of hand maneuver. Gone are worthy adversaries like the Rashids or Grace Browning."
- Sherlock Holmes:
- "The Mazarin Stone" (adapted by Arthur Conan Doyle from his play "The Crown Diamond") gets this treatment by fans, for it is one of only two stories that are narrated in third-person, breaking the long tradition of Watson as the biographer (and the rare examples of Sherlock narrating his own adventures), with an plot of trying to recover the stone — via the Villains showing off the stolen goods right in the Great Detective's home after he switched places with a wax dummy of himself. Granted the dummy was a Chekhov's Gun since "The Empty House", but still...!
- Many Holmesians/Sherlockians discount the Holmes-narrated ones.
- Some have argued that everything after 'The Final Problem' was invented by Watson. More conservative fans have argued that most of the stories in The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes never happened.
- Star Trek Novel 'Verse:
- Details in the Novelverse are considered apocryphal unless confirmed or contradicted by canon. For example, members of Species 8472 call themselves the Undine, but it is unknown if the same is true in the series' canon.
- The Star Trek Shatnerverse fits in with the Novelverse, but is regarded as non-canon by fans who cannot accept some of the more outlandish events taking place, and they are not often referenced in other novels.
- Details from the official reference books Star Trek Chronology and The Star Trek Encyclopedia are disputed by fans. The placement of dates of and surrounding the five-year mission of Star Trek: The Original Series runs counter to what some fans prefer.
- Tortall Universe: There are several people who are ignoring the third book in the Beka Cooper trilogy due to varying (mild to outright extreme) levels of character chaos. One of the most popular characters in the series is Tunstall, and for good reason. He's a savvy Gentle Giant who's devoted to his job, his comrades, his Puppy, and his girlfriend. He's never offended by anything, gets along well with pretty much everyone, and he likes growing miniature roses. For the first two books. In the third, Mastiff, he's surly, alcoholic, terrified of magic, acts like a dickhead to everyone for no real reason, and has completely shed his savvy tag. That's not even getting into his Face–Heel Turn where he murders a child and attempts to kill Beka and another child. Because he wants to become a nobleman. No, really.
- The Twilight Saga:
- Many fans consider Eclipse the last book of the series, to the point that there's a LiveJournal community about it, due to disliking how Breaking Dawn ends the story. The main issues include who gets paired with who (Team Jacob were naturally disappointed that Bella chooses Edward and even fans who didn't ship Jacob/Bella weren't too keen on him imprinting on Bella and Edward's infant daughter because of the icky implications), the plot revolving entirely around Edward and Bella having a half-vampire baby following the first part and the conclusion being viewed as anti-climatic.
- Some casual fans who like the first book consider it the only book of the series (it's generally considered the best of the series due to being a fairly straight-forward teen Paranormal Romance, while the sequels get a lot more contentious, dragged-out and downright bizarre).
- The Vampire Chronicles: In common with the other long-running series mentioned, very few Anne Rice fans acknowledge the entire series. Just where the line gets drawn varies, but fans generally fall into two camps: those that believe the series ended with Queen of the Damned, and those that acknowledge everything up to the point where Anne Rice started the Crossovers with the Mayfair Witches. The major point of contention seems to be when precisely Lestat became an Invincible Hero (note that "if" he did is not even brought into question). But it's worth noting that not even the most diehard fans accept Blood Canticle. Speaking of the Mayfairs, an awful lot of fans pretend that series ended with Lasher, and a significant minority refuses to accept anything but the first book. Tellingly, neither set of fans is happy with the VC crossovers.
- The Vampire Diaries: A portion of the fans refuse to acknowledge anything beyond the Return trilogy as canon, due to the fact the original author L. J. Smith was fired by the publisher and replaced with a ghostwriter (allegedly due to Smith and the publisher disagreeing on the direction of the series).
- Virginia "V.C." Andrews: Fans are often split on books after her death.
- Flowers in the Attic series is a pure example. The prequel was ghost written, causing some to contest it, although it was outlined by Andrews.
- In regards to Garden of Shadows, fans differ on whether or not making Christopher Sr. and Corrine half-siblings AND half-uncle and niece was a good idea.
- The more recent Diaries series is a continuation of that saga but controversial decisions have caused a lot more people to want it to be non canon or at least end with it being All Just a Dream.
- Then Secret Brother, the final installment of the Diary series, was published with promises of answering questions and wrapping up the Dollanganger saga... And promptly didn't answer a thing, not even about the previous Diary books let alone the Dollanganger books. Obviously fans were not amused, to say the least.
- Fans of My Sweet Audrina similarly tend to ignore the ghostwritten sequel Whitefern, though some find it alright if taken as a standalone story.
- Warrior Cats:
- Some fans like to believe that the first series of six books is the only series.
- Others think that it stopped after the second series. The Seasonal Rot of the third series and the rather... controversial mystical turn it took probably contributed to this.
- ... and some Ashfur fans like to believe that the series ends right before Long Shadows.
- And some may think the whole SkyClan thing never existed.
- Graystripe's parents are brother and sister according to Word of God. This was originally accidental, but once it was noted it wasn't changed because "they're cats". Most fans ignore this because it's weird and because nothing in-series suggests that Clans would allow sibling incest.
- Many fans reject Spottedleaf's Heart as canon, due to its butchering of the characters of both Spottedleaf and Thistleclaw, as well as its revolting use of child sexual abuse as drama.
- Brindleface as Sandstorm's mother. This was mentioned as Word of God several arcs in and wasn't the original intent (the original arc didn't have a family tree). Many fans reject it, especially because that'd make Ashfur into Squirrelflight's uncle (despite the two never mentioned as kin in-series).
- Worm: Many fans ignore the existence of the sequel, Ward, for various reasons.
- The End of the World as We Know It was the finale for Worm, which was already a dark story, so everything afterwards can veer into Too Bleak, Stopped Caring far more easily than intended.
- Antares is generally perceived as having weaker team dynamics than the Undersiders, and in some cases come off as totally unsympathetic (which is especially impressive given that one of the Undersiders was confirmed to be a rapist and showed no remorse over said actions).
- Some fans wrote off the story once it was revealed that protagonist was an Older and Wiser Glory Girl, as Victoria's initial showing was so poor that no one wanted to give her a chance to do better.
- Probably the biggest facing Ward is that Worm's ending was considered such that a sequel wasn't seen as necessary - people felt it should be open ended.
