Fanfiction

Haven’t been thinking about Zalamar or Urallia or Europa lately. Sorry, folks. Anyway, I’ve decided to devote this post to a long rant about why I hate fanfiction, or nearly all of it.

First off, there was a time during the earlier days of science fiction when someone at a conference asked writer Theodore Sturgeon this question.
“Why write science fiction? Isn’t 90% percent of science fiction just crap?”
He replied with,
“Yes, but 90% of everything is crap.”
This is known as Sturgeon’s law, and as far as I’m concerned it’s very, very true. Although the crap-o-meter ranges from 80 to 99% percent, it’s generally pretty high up there. The thing about fanfiction is that it pertains to the rule too much. Out of a given 100 fanfictions, one is liable to be good. The rest are going to be angsty, or illegible, or absurd, or just …ahem… godawful.

However, that isn’t necessarily cause to hate FF. Out of the thousands or maybe millions of fanfictions out there, there are going to be thousands of innovative and high-quality ones. However, in most places the really good things are given a lot of credit and importance, and the bad things fall by the wayside and disappear. Of course, bad things continue to be made, and these are as short-lived as always. This is because the consumers are not the ones making the products. There’s a divide between the producers and the consumers, and the consumers can tell when a show or movie or such is generally bad. Of course, there are movies or shows or books that are considered generally bad but are targeted at a niche, like little kids or pre-teen girls, and make enough money off of that niche to continue.

On the internet, however, the producers are the consumers. The people on the receiving end of bad fanfiction read it and decide that it’s just like theirs, and therefore good. They give it good reviews, and the writers read it and decide that they should write more. It’s a cycle that cannot end. If everyone is a peer and everyone is a bad writer, there are bound to be dozens, hundreds, thousands of Mary Sues, songfics, and cutter fics. Not to mention romance.

Which brings us to the next reason I hate most fanfiction: the types there are. Mary Sues, primarily, and Marty Stus (or whatever you want to call them). Stories about the main character being some absurdly powerful, beautiful being who just happens to meet the most attractive male or female in their fandom and inexplicably manages to fall in love with them, having an obnoxious, drama-filled, insipid romance, defeating some sort of evil overlord or other threat, and finally dying in an angsty fashion.

Another sort are songfics. ALWAYS written with an annoying My Chemical Romance or Evanescence song, these are basically FFs that, for some reason, have lyrics from a song tacked on. Yeah, I don’t get it either. They’re generally filled with angst and absurd character pairings.

Come to think of it, I really just hate romance fanfiction. I don’t particularly like romance fiction at all, but I can salute writers like Jane Austen who can create a bunch of characters and basically see how they interact. It makes them seem very real and believable, which is always best for a character. However, romance fanfiction… it makes me shudder. Consider taking two people and making them fall in love, while removing all traces of personality from them in the process. It seems pretty manipulative, bordering on evil. I’m not saying that fanfiction characters are ever real (unless it’s RLFF, which I’m not even going to go into), but the idea that you’re taking two characters who are, more often than not, intended to be mortal enemies or incompatible in some way, shape or form, and making them fall in love at the expense of their personalities is just kind of sick. If you’re going to change the characters so much that they’re unrecognizable aside from their names, why not just *gasp* create your own character?

One last reason to hate FF: the lack of creativity. Writing is, by nature, a creative process, and removing that is just a bit absurd. You’re taking pre-created characters, a world that’s already been explored in depth, and a set-in-stone story, and you’re writing stories about them. Now, this isn’t saying that, having read the whole series, or watched the whole anime or movie, and still wanting to, for lack of a better word, play in their world, is bad, but one should at least try to create their own characters, or a new story. As Anne McCaffrey once said, “This is my world. Go find your own.”

~ by pieboy on January 29, 2006.