What do you think of fanfiction?

Cafe Society
21

Some of it’s great, some of it’s so so, and some of it’s horrible. And then there’s some that’s so horrid it’s hysterical – Ever read “My Immortal”? I think it’s fun, and for some book series like Harry Potter, it’s a nice way to get more out of the series, since the books themselves are all done, or to read stories about the Marauders, or Hogwarts, etc. (I read two really great ones about Remus and Tonks. The first was one in which they had survived – it was all about how Teddy finds out his dad’s a werewolf. The second was about the night Remus went out to tell everyone he was a father.)

And for those who say, “make up your own stories and your own characters!”, well that’s not the point. It’s like, you want to imagine what your favorite characters might be doing, or you want to write about a side plot the author didn’t explore, or something like that.

As for the really out there, Rule 34 stuff, I think it’s written for shock value. Ever see the episode that episode of South Park, “The Tale of Scrotie McBooger Balls”?

22

Yup. Honestly, I might question the imaginations of anyone who doesn’t at least do some sort of “mental fanfic” on occasion. This could range from a Mary Sue-ish “What if my closet had a portal to Narnia?” to a more direct “Man, if I could just write Batman for a year, here’s what I would do.”

Some people turn some of those thoughts into actual stories. For practice, for fun, to get it out of their system, whatever.

And if you have a story written down, you’re happy with it, and there’s an easy place to post it, why not put it up and see if others might like it as well?

23

While progressing as a writer is hard, part of it is that fanfiction communities are like cocoons. The comments on fanfiction sites are almost the anti-youtube. Where on Youtube even high production quality videos will have tons of comments that imply the video is terrible on a level that you’d think it was made by a 4 year old with sock puppets and a camcorder from the 1970s, on fanfiction sites there seems to be this cocoon of niceness. Where no criticism is tolerated, and even constructive feedback is limited to “you used this word incorrectly in paragraph 3” (and even then it’s usually wrapped in platitudes).

In some ways, it’s better than the abusive nature of Youtube comments, but it’s hard to grow as a writer when your audience is telling you your confusing, meandering self-insert Mary Sue fic is GOLD I TELL YOU, ABSOLUTE GOLD!

24

Yes, exactly. Practice should be shared with your close friends and passed around in closed message boards. Not posted on the internet for all to see (and for you yourself (editorial “you”) to be mortified about a few years later). Nothing on the internet ever dies.

Example: I once found a really, really appallingly bad Mary Sue fanfic written by a young girl who was gaga over a certain member of The Monkees, and also liked Star Wars (I won’t give her name, but it included bits of her Monkee crush’s name as well as a prominent Star Wars character). These were basically “I meet my crush, he falls in love with me, and we have wild, PG-rated Monkee sex for all eternity” stories.

I looked for them a couple of years later and they had disappeared. She’d taken them down, presumably because she’d grown up a bit, increased her writing skill, and realized that they were an embarrassment. It took me all of five minutes to find archived versions of them.

I am eternally glad that when I was writing my bad 13-year-old fanfic (mine involved Star Trek, my original characters, and no romance, but still…) the internet didn’t exist yet. :smiley:

(BTW, I’m not saying that anyone shouldn’t be allowed to post any fanfic, good or bad, to the net. The above is all just my individual opinion, and we all know how much *that’s * worth.)

25

I am a fan of Eric Flint’s 1632 series, which could be said to have evolved into an experiment in commercializing fanfic. There is a mainline set of novels in the series, written by Flint himself and his main coauthor David Weber. But there are numerous side tales by other authors that have reached novel publication. There is also a whole series of short story collections that are full of outright fanfic. Flint appears to have put a great deal of energy into organizing fanfic writers and evolving them into professional quality contributors.

26

There’s a lot of really, really weird stuff out there.

27

You do know that there are a couple of fanfic writers on this board, don’t you?

28

Meh. I can’t think of a single fanfic author I’ve ever run across who uses his/her real name. If you’re embarrassed about your deathless prose, change your pen name and start over.

I would certainly hope that the OP has been reading the thread, yes.

29

Well, the HP:MOR author may style himself as “Less Wrong,” but it’s a public pseudonym. The stuff he’s actually ashamed of are nonfiction works that he wrote under his real name.

Anyways, I like fanfic because it’s free, and, if you let other people curate it for you, you can usually find stuff that’s at least as good as mediocre genre fiction, especially the television kind. And I like HPMOR because Harry is a character I can identify with to a large degree. Characters like him just don’t seem to be written in regular fiction. (The closest popular one I can think of is the Doctor from Doctor Who, but he doesn’t struggle with his relevance to the world at large.)

Now, slash fic I don’t really get, really, from either the writer or reader perspective.

30

Professor Ferman Explains. :smiley:

31

Well, I… hang on, were you banned for that? It seems relatively mild. Was it just a spammy advert for Star Trek: Conquest?

My natural inclination is to pooh-pooh fan fiction, because I’m basically a monstrous snob. My limited experience of the genre is that it’s nowhere near the quality of a poor-quality mid-1990s Star Trek tie-in novel… but “limited experience” and all that. Perhaps there is a motherlode of terrific writing out there. But I suspect that the authors never get any constructive criticism, so they never improve, and they’re locked into an abusive environment that never produces the conditions required for a nuclear explosion.

It’s like DeviantART or Flickr, you know? The artistes start off bad, and they’re never subjected to a toughening-up process, so they never get good. Some sites like that have popularity rankings, but the rankings only tend to breed slick poor-quality fan-fiction, or slick poor-quality fan art / folk photography. It’s still fundamentally turdy. Derivative turdiness. Trivia turds that rot into soil. If the internet is throwing up an endless stream of brilliance, why is Reddit just a lot of reposts? Hmm?

When I had my first ever job interview as a writer, the editor made it very clear that in the professional sphere you go from being one in a million to just one of a million. The organised fan fiction websites and boards strike me as being essentially an abusive, stunting environment where the people hope to be a big fish in a tiny pond; they’ve lost touch with the bigger picture. They need to take a step back and realise that for all their ranking systems and fake internet points, and the illusion of substance, the illusion of community, none of it is doing them any real substantial good. It is possible for thousands of people, millions of people to have a zero per cent strike, to produce literally nothing of worth, day after day, forever.

It’s like energy states in physics, you know? Rocks have enormous potential energy, but they don’t spontaneously blow up, no matter how long you look at them, no matter how many rocks there are, no matter how well-polished. Without refining specific isotopes and constructing a bomb - which takes a great expenditure of effort, and pain, and sometimes people die - they’re just rocks. As an artist you can either remain a rock for the rest of your life or you can turn yourself into a nuclear weapon, which is difficult.

Did E L James emerge from the organised fan fiction community? I was under the impression that she came out of nowhere.

32

While I can see some merit in your post from the perspective of the professional writer, some people do fanfic strictly as a hobby, not a profession.

33

  1. There’s so much good fiction by professional writers out there that I can never seem to find enough time to read all the books I want to. Even reading 50-60 books a year, my “to read” list keeps getting longer and longer as new books are recommended to me by people whose opinions I respect.

  2. Of the Modern Library Top 100 and the B&N Top 100 lists, I’ve only read about 20-25 of each.

  3. Given those two points - that there’s a ton of good new fiction and a ton of great old fiction that I haven’t read yet - the only way I could see getting into fanfic is if there were one particular universe with which I was completely obsessed, and there simply wasn’t enough books/shows/films in canon to keep me happy. And I am not that way.

34

According to Wikipedia:

And from the entry on E.L. James herself:

35

Is there a way this can be read online? My wimpy-assed smartphone can’t successfully download the pdf of the first book, and I don’t want to monkey around with installing apps.

36

There are links at the top of the main page for downloading mobi and ePub versions…don’t know if that will help. Not sure if there’s an HTML version.

37

Thanks. The epub version is pretty clearly intended to be for dedicated e-readers, which I’m pretty sure my little Android is not. I’ll head over to wikipedia and see if I can figure out wth MOBI is.

38

It’s on Fanfiction.net at https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry-Potter-and-the-Methods-of-Rationality. I’ve never used the mobile version of the site, but the same story should be in phone-friendly form at https://m.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/

39

Oh, I thought he was talking about the James Potter series.

40

Reading his posts again, you were probably right. I just assumed he was talking about “Methods of Rationality”.