Create a free profile to get unlimited access to exclusive videos, sweepstakes, and more!
Vision's not dead and Winterfell's lack of Starks: The week's craziest fan theories
No matter what series they're into, fans tend to have two traits in common: they're extremely creative and not especially patient. Perhaps that's why there are so many fan theories, because fans can't help but try to predict what'll happen in Avengers: Endgame or explain away some obscure Game of Thrones mystery in the agonizing wait for the final season. Sometimes these theories are right on, but for every "R + L = J" there are hundreds of very, very wrong fan theories.
That's fine! It's great that fans are being creative with their favorite series. But we're less cool with websites cynically using those theories to get your clicks. And so when that happens, SYFY WIRE to debunk these crazy fan theories. We're not digging into subreddits to find outlandish theories to dunk on, we're just looking to see which news sites irresponsibly wanted to take you for a ride. This was actually not a terrible week for bogus fan theories, as the offenders aren’t wildly, irresponsibly wrong so much as they’re just misguided. Anyway, here we go.
01. Vision didn’t actually die in Infinity War, and he used the mind stone to trick Thanos
“When Vision dies through Wanda's hands, we saw him shatter into red pieces of himself but when Thanos rewinds time and grabs the stone on his head, he grayed out almost like this time he was able to transfer his mind to the mind stone and might've even had an influence on what actually happened to the dusted characters,” this theorist writes. “Thanos thinks he killed half of all life but Vision might've put them elsewhere…”
It’s not the craziest theory to ever get aggregated, but it has some problems, both from a narrative perspective and an in-fiction perspective. As other Redditors pointed out, Scarlet Witch was trying to destroy the Mind Stone while Thanos was merely trying to retrieve it, so it’s a bit of a leap to make that sort of assumption about what Vision “graying out” means. Narratively, it’s not the most satisfying way to resolve the consequences of The Snap, since it would undermine the emotional weight of Vision’s futile sacrifice.
Plus, assuming Vision does come back to life in order to star in that Disney+ show with Scarlet Witch, it’s probably because Shuri was able to make a backup copy of his digital brain in time, right?
02. The White Walkers returned because there wasn’t a Stark in Winterfell (except there was)
This theory is actually pretty fun in a thematic sense, but the facts just don’t line up. When a Redditor was thinking about the Stark’s three catchphrases, “Winter is Coming,” “The North Remembers,” and “There must always be a Stark in Winterfell,” they wondered if there was a connection. Must there always be a Stark in Winterfell to prevent Winter — aka the White Walkers — from coming? Did the absence of a Stark cause the White Walkers to rise up again?
The theorist posits that the White Walkers awoke when Ned Stark left Winterfell to fight in Robert’s Rebellion. Problem is, Benjen Stark had yet to take the Black at that point, and he remained in Winterfell during the war. So, there was never a time when there wasn’t a Stark in Winterfell, and by the time the Boltons temporarily took over, the White Walkers were already active.
When other Redditors pointed this out, the original theorist was quick to concede that the theory was wrong, but they were in good spirits about the whole thing. Still, kinda weird that a website would go ahead and aggregate a theory after even the original theorist had accepted it had been debunked.
