For those of you who are fortunate enough to not know what fanfiction is, I’d advise you to go read elsewhere. I have a nice rant for you to read somewhere. Go on now – get.
For the rest of you, you’re already living a doomed existence, so I’m not really ruining anything, now am I?
I suppose most of the people I addressed in line one did not take my sage advice, so I’d better explain to them what it is I am talking about. Fanfiction, as the name implies, is a fictional story made up by a fan. They take a thing that exists, like a TV show, Movie, Book, Video Game, Musical, Manga… You get it? They can take anything, and then they write about it. They write a new story, using characters and settings from the original material, and create something new.
Let’s use an example that, at the very least, most Americans will get. There was a Movie called The Wizard of Oz. In the movie, Dorothy flies away in a tornado to a magical technicolor land, makes friends, and then wakes up realizing it was all just a dream. If you have not seen this movie, and wanted a spoiler alert… you really ought to have seen this movie by now – they play it on TV quite often. If you have seen it, and didn’t like my summary, tough for you. So yes, we have a story. Now how will the fanboys and fangirls, erm… add their own twist to this?
OC’s – An “OC” is an “Original Character”. This means that the writer of the “Fanfic” has introduced a new character to the story. This is usually some sort of an interpretation of themselves, except much cooler, and with possible super powers. This isn’t always the case, but I’d say at least 75% of the time. Don’t you love statistics with no citation?
The way this would work… Hmm… It’s like I’m about to write fanfiction… it makes me feel a little unclean…
Okay, so for an OC, maybe Dorothy stumbles across the Musical Witch of the South. She joins Dorothy and company on their adventure, possibly singing. I don’t know. I don’t care enough to make that up. The other thing that could happen, is that I decide that I want to go to Oz, so I ditch Dorothy entirely, and I end up in a funny land full of short people. Do I react the same way to situations I come across? No. I have witty comebacks, because I’m cool like that. Yeah. Or maybe we keep Dorothy, but ditch the lion. Maybe I need some courage. We don’t even need to get rid of anybody, we could just put me in as… a new fifth member, looking for… coordination. Maybe I work under the professor, as an apprentice. Who knows? The possibilities are endless.
Alternate Universe – From What I can tell, this means everything is normal, but one central event changes. I don’t deal with physics, but I think there’s a theory out there that says something like, “every possible choice and outcome has been made in it’s own separate universe”. Is this String Theory? I don’t know… Maybe the fellas at Big Bang Theory would…
Example? Maybe Dorothy decides she wants to become the new evil witch. Or maybe the munchkins tell Dorothy to go down the red brick road. Again, with fanfiction, nearly anything is possible.
Where does that red road go?
Crossovers – Oh dear… You ever wanted to see Rambo go, well, Rambo on those little munchkin guys? Perhaps Goku of Dragon Ball Z fame is sent to Oz instead. Maybe Oz is a planet he visits. Maybe the Tin Man goes to Hogwarts to become a wizard. No worries – It can be done.
At this point, you may be noticing that I’m putting less effort into my explanations, and have become a bit more sarcastic. I feel that comes in part with the increased, well, silliness of each writing tool. There is one more tool writers use, and boy do they use it a lot!
SEX – If you ever go into the depths of fanfiction.net, and there’s nothing particularly wrong if you do, I ask that you stay away from the rated M writings. 95% of the time, it’s because of sex. I’d rather not go into detail, especially with the example I’ve chosen, but just know it happens a lot. I think what you’ll see is denoted in the description by something like BOY/GIRL or BOYxGIRL. Of course, you’ll see a lot of BOYxBOY. This is known as Yaoi. Personally, I’m a straight male, so I avoid reading that. There’s some sort of stereotype that the ratio of people who write yaoi is 90% Straight Women to 10% Gay people. I don’t know the validity of that, I’m just putting that information out there. Once again, all of my percentages are un-cited. I apologize, but I’d rather not look up actual percentages for this kind of thing. The GIRLxGIRL equivalent of yaoi is known as Yuri. Again, I stay away. I try to stay away from everything I’ve mentioned in this SEX paragraph.
I’m sure there is a way to do fanfiction in a nice, constructive way, but there is so much out there that I can’t bring myself to sift through it. In The Wizard of Oz section, there are 257 stories. I chose this at random, simply because I know it, so it’s easy to alter in a quick explanatory fashion. That’s not so many. At the time of writing, The Last Mimsy only has one, and Yogi Bear, only four. But you get into popular stuff… Chronicles of Narnia, wait for it, is OVER 9000! Harry Potter has nearly 600,000! Imagine if Everybody who lived in the state of Wyoming wrote a Harry Potter Fanfiction. Now add 20,000 more. Twilight is up there, with nearly 200,000, but it has some catching up to do. Naruto still has more, at nearly 300,000. As far as movies go, Star Wars has the most at 27,000. The rule is, the more popular it is, the more people are going to bastardize it with their creative input.
…
That being said…
It may or may not surprise you that I have written a fan fiction. An explanation is in order.
So my friend and I, we’ll call this one Zach, were up late one night, and wanted to look at some of the sheer numbers of the Fan fictions out here. On a whim, we looked to see if there were any stories based on the works of Stephen King, one of our favorite Authors. He said there was, so we looked at what lie in The Dark Tower Series section. The first hit we got made us laugh our pants off.
It was written by a gentleman named Jayovac.
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5396304/1/The_bDark_b_bTower_b_Search_for_the_bTower_b
If you want to read it, it’s right there ^. In fact, do that. Open it in a new tab. I’ll wait. …
…
Seriously, go read it. It’s comedy gold.
…
So there are grammatical and spelling errors everywhere, with little coherent sense to the story. It has been suggested by some, ergo, my mother, that perhaps he is a foreigner who cannot speak English well. That may be. I don’t know. All I know is that he’s written around 25 stories, and they all have this quality, so isn’t getting any better. His profile also says he’s an English major – Pfft. Okay…
This thing was so awful that it was brilliant. If Jayovac ever reads this, all I can say is, man, I’m sorry for talking smack about you, but if you’re going to write and publish anything to the internet, run spell-check, use grammar, and maybe have a friend proofread it to make sure it makes sense. That being said, don’t let me keep you from doing what you love. Where was I? Oh yes, it was terrible, but Zach and I had a lot of fun reading it and figuring out what was going on. We figured if one man could a write a fanfiction, two men could write a GREAT fanfiction. So we did. We wrote a parody of Jayovac’s. Honestly, I see it more as a tribute, but parody might be a more appropriate term for what we did. We each wrote separate papers, and then I combined them. Bomb mainly wrote about all the desserts that the desert was, and I think he came up with most of the non-gunslinger names. That being said, I made some names too, and some of my own clever jokes, and in the end, we had a masterpiece. … Well, we didn’t, but we were proud of what we made.
I recommend you read them both side-by-side so you can compare the works. Feel free to tell me how awful a writer I am in the comment section below.
And if you wanted to know what Jayovac thought of our fanfic, he told. He left a review. It said, “3”. That’s it. I don’t know if that means 3/5, 3/10, maybe he was trying to make a “=3”, I honestly can’t guess. But I assume it’s positive. He added our story to his favorite stories list. We are the only story on that list, so I think he must have liked it.
(Backlog Update: Jayovac left us a comment down there. \/. It’s something of an honor. I’ve since decided that Jayovac writes this way on purpose. Zach stumbled across a piece of writing by him on amazon.com and…. It was readable. There were complete thoughts, decent grammar, Spelling was good…. If you ever want a good laugh, go to his fanfic site and try to read some of his stuff out loud. He has a new Gem, I think it’s called Harry Potter: Lord of the Potter. It a Potter/LOTR crossover. Pretty hilariously bad. Zach and I have had talks about making a parady of this one.)
The Thinking Place 