What is it with people and fanfiction?

[Canadamus Prime]

My biggest problem with fan fiction is the hypocrisy. People will decry things like Micheal Bay's Transformers, but will go write fan fiction that butchers their franchise of choice way worse than Micheal Bay could ever hope to do.

Okay, that's like saying the guy from family guy or the guy from robot chicken ruined star wars far more than George lucsas ever did.

Come on. Lets not play stupid. I've written fan fiction in my younger years.
One could argue any finfiction is as bad as say Sonic X.

Problem?
It shouldn't be that Close LOL. The core content is suppose to rape and
humiliate fan fiction.

Michael bay with his budge, with his actors, with his etc, etc, etc, is suppose
to do a better job. By a mile. Not just look better than the worst fanfictions
out there.

That's like some woman on well fair bragging about feeding her kids. You low
expectation despot your God damn suppose to.

Ok first of all what Family Guy and Robot Chicken did is satire and that's different. Besides I hate Robot Chicken.

Secondly the fact that Micheal Bay has a budget, actors etc. is irrelevant. The fact is he's supposedly butchering your beloved franchise and childhood memories and whatever, and yet you're[footnote]not 'you' specifically, but 'you' generically[/footnote] doing the exact same thing.
Now this doesn't apply to all fan fiction mind you. I'm perfectly willing to accept that there's probably fan fiction out there that actually does the franchise in question service. I mostly talking about the horrible ones which according to Sturgeon's Law is most of them.

 

[Entitled]

My biggest problem with fan fiction is the hypocrisy. People will decry things like Micheal Bay's Transformers, but will go write fan fiction that butchers their franchise of choice way worse than Micheal Bay could ever hope to do.

Really? Show me one person who did that, decrying Michael Bay for not following canon, and then went writing OOC fanfiction.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

My biggest problem with fan fiction is the hypocrisy. People will decry things like Micheal Bay's Transformers, but will go write fan fiction that butchers their franchise of choice way worse than Micheal Bay could ever hope to do.

Really? Show me one person who did that, decrying Michael Bay for not following canon, and then went writing OOC fanfiction.

I can't, but I'd bet any money that at least 25% of the people who whined about Micheal Bay's Transformers are fan fiction writers and bad ones. And Bayformers is just one example.

 

[Alex Baas]

People who write fanfiction do so because they aren't creative enough to come up with their own characters and universe, so they have to piggy back on someone else's work. That's why I don't want to read fanfiction, because if those writers actually had any talent they would be able to come up with their own shit, and possibly attempt to actually publish it.

Or writers are trying to hone their craft using something pre-established. Naw

 

[Alex Baas]

I've read a couple good fanfics in my time. I'm reading xcom:second contact now and I rather like it.

+1 I approve.

And totally not because I write that.

OT: The reason Fanfiction has such a poor reputation is two-fold.

1) Most of it is shit. There's no way around that. Sturgeon's Law (which states that 90% of everything is crap) is in full effect. It's exacerbated with fanfics though, because there is no inherent quality control like one would find with published works. When working with a publisher, authors are expected/required to proofread their work and ensure it meets a minimum standard of quality. Fanfics don't have that. Anyone who can put a word on paper can publish a fanfic, with no penalties or ramifications if that word is completely nonsensical. As such, there are a LOT more fanfics published and the ratio of quality to shit is horrendously skewed.

2) Finding the good ones is counter-intuitive and annoying. Barring an obscene amount of luck, it takes at least some degree of familiarity with the websites (or even better, friends/forums to mine for recommendations) to find any worth reading. Most of the fanfic sites do not have an actual rating system, and the ones that do are obscure and/or hard to use, and so the good ones get lost in the tide of shit that gets put out every day.

Neither of these problems are going to go away any time soon, and so neither is the stereotype. There's really not a whole lot anyone can do about it.

Not super hard, for me at least. http://www.equestriadaily.com/2011/09/eqd-super-simple-archiver-test.html

 

[Nosirrah]

I like reading fanfic for anything I quite like, to see how others react to it.
The most recent I read was a borderlands one. It was less of a fanfic and more fan service for the writer, in which the writer is a badass, saves the day, and gets to have sex with all the women.
There are some good fanfic though, like one called borderline madness, (don't quote me on that) which put the borderlands 2 characters in borderlands 1 dlc. Which was nice and original, until krieg was introduced, where his whole entrance was taken from his trailer, right down to everyone's reaction.

 

[rob_simple]

I just think fanfiction is kind of a lazy way to write; I'd much rather come up with my own characters and stories instead of vamping over someone else's.

Oh, and also I once read a Harry Potter fanfic where Snape literally skull-fucked Malfoy to death. Then had a baby.

 

[Jadak]

I dislike fan fiction. Not to the point where I'd care enough to do anything about it existing, but I won't read it myself?

Why? I get invested in the stories that I love, in the characters. And to me, maintaining any sort of serious interested in something is subject to actually knowing the story, and that is dependent on canon. There is one version of events, somebody making an unofficial story means nothing, it's like a dream sequence yet worse, as it doesn't even manage the loose claim to relevance in the form of the characters having dreamed it.

As for as plot lines, character development, and anything else goes, non-official stories do not exist, they do not progress any of those things, and at best, are lying to me or conflicting with actual events and wasting the time I have set aside to expand my experience with the setting.

 

[RogueportJack]

To the people that say they dislike Fanfiction because it isn't canon... Jesus, really?

You do realize that none of it is real, right? Actually none of it? If it was good, enjoyable to read, and interesting, then what does it matter if it's "canon" or not?

The Dragon Ball Z anime added a bunch of filler, but Toriyama didn't write it, so it's technically not canon. Yet despite this, some moments from the filler episodes are some of the funniest, most meaningful parts! To look down on somebody's work because it's "non-canon" is ridiculous.

That said, yes, a lot of fanfiction is awful. The vast majority. But you aren't some bastion of intelligence and good taste because you don't read any of it, you're just a person who doesn't read fanfiction, and that's totally okay.

 

[Agayek]

Not super hard, for me at least. http://www.equestriadaily.com/2011/09/eqd-super-simple-archiver-test.html

Note how that's one (relatively obscure) site for a very specific fandom.

There's plenty of ways to find good fanfiction out there, I never meant to say or imply otherwise. What I was trying to get at is that it takes familiarity with the scene, or having a friend with same, in order to learn how to find the good stuff. The uninitiated go to FFN or whatever and are immediately presented with thousands upon thousands of fics, and the vast majority of them are both shit, and there is (almost always) no clear and immediate way to distinguish the good ones from the shit ones. It takes time and familiarity to learn the signs of a shitfic without opening the thing, and so the newbies open them and try to read, discover it's shit, and give up because they're sick of wasting time and only finding shit.

 

[Entitled]

At least in my eyes, if the writers for fanfiction were ever truly talented, they'd write their own shit. At least, that's how I see it.

There's nothing stopping you from writing both.

Dante's Inferno is fanfiction.

To answer OP the first fanfiction I ever read was good so I don't look down on the genre.

Which is why my post allows for such instances???

If you write your own shit, you can be a great writer. If all you ever write is fanfiction, you are mediocre at best.

Which is nonsense. You are a great writer if you write great novels, and you are a mediocre writer if you write mediocre novels. Whether these novels are fanfics has nothing to do with it.

Look at it this way: Let's say that Wide Sargasso Sea is a great novel, and the best novel of it's writer.

Would you say, that it's writer, Jean Rhys, should be considered less of a great writer, if she wouldn't had written any of her other, less acclaimed novels?

 

[likalaruku]

I read fanfiction back in the late 90s. It was 1% enjoyable comedy & 99% illiteracy, Mary-Sue lead characters, spectacular failure to capture the personality of the characters, porn written by horny virgin teen girls with weird & oddly specific fetishes, & an intro defending their work against negative comments.

Bennet the Sage had a series where he read the worst fanfics he could find aloud, Masterpiece Theater style. http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/bt/the-sage/fanfic-theatre

 

[HellbirdIV]

At least in my eyes, if the writers for fanfiction were ever truly talented, they'd write their own shit. At least, that's how I see it.

I would argue that fanfiction is a great medium for getting across ideas and interpetations about an existing work. I write both original works and fanfiction, and to me, there's a different point to writing fanfiction. I just don't write fanfics for the same reasons that I build my own universes, y'know?

In a fanfic, you have many benefits - an established setting and characters, which lets you focus on the important aspects of your story. As I noted above it also permits for interpertations of a work.

One of the most remarkable science fiction short stories I've ever read is a very old retelling of "The Thing" from the perspective of the alien creature - arguably fanfiction, but also a wholly original perspective that complements the original story, rather than merely aping its success.

 

[Entitled]

I just think fanfiction is kind of a lazy way to write; I'd much rather come up with my own characters and stories instead of vamping over someone else's.

Would you say that Joss Whedon's Avengers had lazier writing than James Cameron's Avatar?

That Disney's Beauty and the Beast was lazier than The Lion King?

That Alan Moore's League of the Extraordinary Gentlemen was more lazily written than V for Vendetta?

By the common definition of fanfiction, the only reason why these formers would not count, is because they were using someone else's characters in a legal way, which is not a direct description of artistic merit or moral appropriateness.

It seems to me from looking at the history of art and media, that this kind of "vamping" on someone else's characters and stories has always been a part of the creative process, and a very weak indicator of whether a story is actually inspired, entertaining, or even original, in any meaningful way.