Comics Fandoms and Oh My Brain

I have learned from past experience that it's impossible to read fanfic in a comics-to-movie fandom without taking a crash course in decades of comic lore. I managed to read for about a day in X-Men fandom before I got dumped headlong into Genosha in about ten different incarnations, and the whole Wanda-created House of M-verse. So it didn't really come as too much of a surprise in a first day of serious Avengers reading to find myself browsing Wikipedia for the background on Dead-Then-Not-Dead Steve Rogers and I-Wiped-My-Own-Memory Tony Stark.

Fandom has a lot of fun with Guilty!Amnesiac!Tony, but Marvel didn't come up with these plotlines to provide entertaining angst for the fangirls, so I have to wonder - wtf, Marvel? Do their writers have an internal competition to see who can come up with the craziest crack and still get it in print?

(And yes, I know that Marvel aren't alone in this - I offer up Jason!Robin and Kon-El as DC examples of boggle. This does not exactly dilute my point.)