What is it with people and fanfiction?

[Setrus]

Well, seeing as I write fanfiction (and I'm male, zefiris ) - I'm blessed with quite a few fans from my "Heroism" stories based in the Mass Effect game - I don't have a problem with it in itself...but judging by what reviews I've read and what other fanfiction I've read there are a few issues.

Self-insertion is...well to be frank, bad, unless it's for some fun - like the guy getting miniature warhammer people alive in his home - it really doesn't work, because it's hard to realistically depict yourself, and some don't even try.

There is the issue with spelling, of course, but the major issue is more often in the story itself. It can be poorly paced, have no goal, have nothing that really grabs the reader. Some writers get so in love with some part of their story that they forget about the whole. If you spend half a story explaining the technical workings of a ship and how some cool shielding technology or similar works...well then you've reduced the number of readers, because those that aren't interested in that stuff will close your story and go someplace else.

Worse is if someone depicts a playthrough of a game and follows the dialogue word by word...I mean whats' the point of that? A playthrough can be followed, but then spice it up, change things, make the twists and turns more seamless than "gamey" and for goodness sake, avoid the dialogue of the game! Listen to WHAT the character is saying, not just the WORDS...and you'll find a way to write a dialogue that fits them without being a transcript.

And then there's the characters, one need to RESPECT the characters. If you change them, if you make them something else but what they are, people will notice them...and these readers are ALSO fans, and they will not recognise the person they're a fan of if you tinker too much with them. I think many fall flat here, one needs to think "How would this character react and react in this situation?" NOT "I want the character to do this in this situation because it's cool."

And then there's

 

[Something Amyss]

A majority of the fanfictions I've read are actually incredibly well done by talented young fans of the series they are writing for, some with and some without sexual content.

I'm glad that is your experience. Please accept that is not most people's experience.

 

[Bat Vader]

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.

That may apply to some fanfiction writers but I don't believe it applies to all. Sure, anyone can use someone else's characters for a fanfiction but it still takes a lot of creativity to come up with an original plot for those characters to follow. It especially takes a lot of creativity and talent to come up with a really good plot, new settings, and new characters to throw into an already existing world. Most of the Expanded Universe could be called nothing but legal fanfiction yet a lot of authors most likely make a good pile of money from those books.

 

[Something Amyss]

OT: For every nine shitty Naruto fics churned out by fourteen year olds, there's one really good DC 'Verse fic.

Of course, if that was true....

Good fanfiction exists, it just takes diligence and patience to find.

This would not be.

You can find good "anything." If you need diligence and patience, that's indicative of the whole.

I can practically trip and find a good book, for example.

 

[Something Amyss]

some people disregard posts in a forum at the first typo.

i half suspect most fan fiction readers might well be the same.

That would imply that the majority of the people involved could catch typos. I have trouble believing that.

Hell, I'm finding more and more typos in professionally published works.

 

[TheLogicalGamer]

Oh yes... I have been waiting to use this...

NINETY PERCENT OF EVERYTHING IS CRAP!

Ah some crap is more readily available than others. I know this speech. 90 percent of music is crap
90 percent of anime is and always has been crap.

If you find these things suck now it's only because you stopped looking hard enough to find that golden 10 percent.
90 percent of shows suck...... well i think there were times when things were better.

Maybe that golden 10 percent is just crap that doesn't personally interest us. It's the wrong 10 percent. And that's likely my problem with fan fiction. the stuff that might be good isn't stuff i want to care about.

Ahh... perhaps we should add the TV Tropes Corollary then.

"That 10 Percent may vary depending on the audience."

 

[stonethered]

I always like to share a few notes on fanfiction I've learned over the years.
First, it is not new. Cervantes(Author of Don Quixote) mentions in the story, the non-canon nature of a story that had been written in the interim between acts, about his characters. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alonso_Fern%C3%A1ndez_de_Avellaneda ]

Also, and a great example of political propaganda in fiction, there is Virgil's Aeneid. An entire Epic poem written in the early years of the Roman Empire, about a side character from the Illead of Homer who goes off to be a badass, found a city, and kill a bunch of Greek princes. Oh, and then his ancestors become Caesar Augustus, who basically paid for the whole thing.
And frankly I always felt that Achilles was the original mary-sue, with his nigh-invulnerability and magic armor in a low magic setting.



There's nothing wrong with Fanfiction, not inherently at least, but like anything else, it is 90% crap. The good parts however, are better then a lot of published literature.

 

[Guitarmasterx7]

I mean to my understanding by and large fanfiction exists to either self insert, hook up two characters that didn't in the source material, or flick the bean on characters that did.

I'd be more charitable towards it, but honestly, if you aspire to be a writer legitimately, create your own characters and setting. If you have the amount of respect and understanding for the source material that would be required to write a "good" fan fiction, you would realize that you shouldn't be writing fan fiction. Unless you're contracted by the owners of the IP to fill in some of the blanks of the canon (see Eric Nylund's halo novels) you really have no excuse to be doing it if you want to be taken seriously. Fanfiction is just mental masturbation with someone else's IP. If that notion seems fun to you go right ahead, but don't expect anyone else to legitimize it.

 

[Shadowstar38]

But fuck General Sprinkles dude. There's a special place in hell for that guy.

Who the hell is that?

He made a My little Pony fic about...Well, Hannible Lector was more subtle if you get what I'm saying.

 

[Gatx]

Technically anyone who ever wrote anything in an established setting that they are a fan of is fanfiction. The Star Wars EU for instance, I remember reading Michael A. Stackpole was a pretty big fanfic writer and he was chosen to be an official contributor to the EU because he was on of the better ones out there. Plus if you ever read I, Jedi, you'll notice that it follows certain fanfiction formulas - he placed his original character into an existing storyline, in this case Kevin J. Anderson's Jedi Academy trilogy.

Also there's nothing wrong with fanfiction in general - anyone ever read A Study in Emerald? Did Neil Gaiman create Sherlock Holmes? Is he a fan? Is it a work of fiction?

And god damn, you people, so cynical, just pouncing on writers of fanfiction as people who aren't real writers. The fact that they write stuff at all, flexing their artistic muscles in any way at all, is at least a bit admirable. It's not the best expression of one's own creativity, sure, but they don't care, it's just their way of showing their love of their franchise.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

Some don't like how the official canon stories go, so they write their own in an attempts to fix what may be perceived to be broken. Case in point the Mass Effect comic series; Marauder Shields (after ep 6[?] anyway), is a project designed to correct the discontinuous nature of the overall Mass Effect story by re-writing the ending of Mass Effect 3. It is one of the rare fanfictions that improves on the original.

 

[Abomination]

I'm certain a good > 95% is terrible and so I don't waste my time reading any of it.

If someone says they want me to read a/their fanfiction I tell them I'm not going to waste my time.

 

[jurnag12]

The problem with fanfiction is that for every Crown of Thorns, there's about 5 My Immortal's, and the latter ones are a lot more well known than the former.