Fanfiction, and Why I Dislike It - Mostly

One of the most common types of writing to be found on the Internet is fanfiction. There are fanfictions of Star Wars, Death Note, Star Trek... You name it and there's a fanfiction of it. But the sad thing is that, despite the gross amount of it, very little of it is actually any good.

Fanfiction, for those of you who don't know, is a form of writing where the author adopts a character, setting or other part of an existing franchise/series and creates a story based around that borrowed element. This is, surprisingly enough, a very widespread thing to do. the benefits of doing this are great: You have much less work to do - the world's already made up, and so you have less stuff to work out for yourself. At the same time, if you misinterpret or misuse an element or idea from whatever you're copying off of, it ends up looking very bad indeed.

This is how most fanfictions turn out. Characters are put in situations they would never get to otherwise, and respond in exactly the wrong way. But there is a deeper problem, and one that cannot simply be attributed to the mere existence of fanfiction. The problem is this: Some people just cannot write.

It works like this. You have an idea, and you think "Wahey, I can go and write that down and everything will be fine!" Nuh-uh. As a friend of mine once told me, "I could be a great writer: I have great ideas, but when I get to writing them down, they look very boring."

Well, perhaps that was paraphrasing, and maybe it's because he is simply the most singleminded, stubborn goat of a jerk I've ever had a reaction to meeting, but it's essentially right. Having an idea and having a framework for something is no good if you can't hang something on it. It's like getting a great canvas and some excellent paints and then drawing a smiley face. Though you have all the tools to create a great work, you have to have some skill to be able to pull it off. This has resulted in some truly terrible pieces of writing that end up as hideous, unintentional parodies of what used to be a good thing. (If you haven't read Rinrei's 'A Bad Story', I would. It's a good example of something really badly written, especially when you compare it to whatever it's based on.)


Just as an example of a 'horrible parody'...

Now this is not to say that I A) do not enjoy some fanfiction or B) dislike the idea. However, this is very similar to saying that I like the idea of healthy food in that I appreciate the concept, but don't exactly enjoy the results. (Ugh... Lettuce.) There is some fanfiction that is well worth a read, assuming you enjoyed the original series or what it was based on.

There is actually quite a lot of what could be considered as 'fanfiction' in mainstream bookstores. For example, the Warhammer series of books. I've never actually read them, but they're reputed to be fairly good, and there are a fair number of them. These are works of fanfiction that have been comissioned and published. The difference between these and amateur fanfiction pieces is that the author is paid to be good. They have an incentive to research the universe, get to grips with the details and eventually execute a good story.


An example of published fanfiction, this one being from the 'Warhammer' universe.

It is due to an absolute lack of this incentive that most fan-made, Internet-published fanfiction is either innacurate or just bad. And that is why I dislike fanfiction. This is not to say, however, that there are not some talented people out there who really should be writing some stuff. But the matter still stands that thre are those who wish to write but can't. To those who try but fail: Nice try, but please - don't keep trying! Try something else. A different genre, perhaps. But it's only when a room is dark that a light can clearly be seen...

If anyone wishes to prove me wrong, I'm more than happy to listen. But seeing as no-one will protest - at all - I'll simply end this here and now.

Please, do not write fanfiction! Write something original.