People are not collations of logic; they are a run on sentence of the fanfic stories of the things they've heard that flow into what they already know.
Resisting going with your own mental flow takes work. You've got to rewind, rewrite whole chapters of the story, make it all make sense.
Yes, a lot of it is protecting one's own ego, especially if it's become a life totem, but it's a lot of self-introspection-aversion too.