InsaneJournal

Current mood:

annoyed

Fanfiction - A Rant
I have a problem with fanfiction. And yes, it is a personal one, and no, you don't have to read about it if you don't want to. That's why it's ingeniously hidden behind a cut.

I'll admit, I've authored three fanfics in my time. 'My time' being when I was nineteen, thinking it was what all the cool kids were doing. Two of them were Final Fantasy, the other was a Silent Hill parody. (And somehow that one gathered a mass following. It wasn't really that good.)

One of my problems with fanfiction is the whole wish-fulfilment thing. And I'm not just talking Mary Sue. I'm talking real “Oh, these guys are so hot, they should have sex together.” wish-fulfilment, even when it's completely out of character for them to do so. But that's okay. I'm guilty of that one.

(It is however not okay if it's Invader Zim slash. Imagining Zim and Dib going at it just makes me cringe.)

Fanfiction can be okay, if it's actually fanfiction, i.e. if you take one of your favourite characters from a game/show/movie/book/whatever, and you feel you know enough about them to write a realistic story, maybe about something that wasn't properly or sufficiently explained in the game/show/... Yes. That's fine.

If you go and take characters but don't really know anything about them, and you start writing for them to do whatever you would want them to do, even though it's completely out of character, you're not writing fanfiction anymore. You're writing original fiction, but you lack the originality to just give the characters their own names.

Maybe you're just writing fanfiction because you like the world or setting, and the characters don't really matter to you? Then stop being lazy, and just write original fiction and explain the relevant details and characteristics of the particular world where it takes place, instead of just saying “This happens in the Gundam Universe (for example), and you're all familiar with it so I don't have to explain it to you.”

And you know what? Sometimes the setting isn't really even that important to a good story, or the story actually benefits from a setting of which the details are left vague on purpose.

Fanfiction that works just as well as original fiction is actually my biggest problem. Let me give you an example.

A while ago, I read a Lord of the Rings fanfic, slash. Okay. So what was I expecting? Frodo and Sam, happily on their way to Mordor, discovering they're out of food and that they might as well turn to each other's sausages, for example.

No. It wasn't like that.

It was about the actors. Okay. Right. So what was I expecting now? Ian McKellen and Viggo Mortensen getting drunk at an after-party and doing each other in the bathroom. Because yeah, that is hot.

Nope. Not like that.

Because it was set in an Alternate Universe. Right. So you have the characters, Dominic and Billy. Billy sets his friend Dominic up with a friend of him, Elijah. Okay. Remind me again, why is this fanfiction?

I really liked the story, to be honest. It was funny, cynical even, and I thought the ending was great. But why write it as fanfiction, when doing so contributes absolutely nothing to the story? Why not name them, oh, Roger, John and Zachary?

Is it because when you say they're Billy, Dominic and Elijah, I'll think of the actual actors? Truthfully, I don't even remember who the hell Billy was, and there was enough description in the story to make Elijah not look like the cute little hobbit I know him as in my mind.

Yes, there was character description! Yes, the setting was nicely described! No, it had nothing at all to do with Lord of the Rings, just that it borrowed the names of three actors who happened to be in the movie!

I found it sad.