The Guardian has a piece on fanfiction. For those who don't know about it, fanfiction is basically when someone takes a bunch of existing fictional characters to put them in situation imagined by the writer. It is a quite marginal phenomenon and as Edward Helmore states, it is quite fucking dreadful. (full disclosure: I dated three fanfiction writers ... I should have known better when they all invited me to Renaissance festival)
The problem with fanfiction is that they are most interested in big, "original" ideas rather than in precision or craft in their writing. Think of a torrid sex scene between Han Solo and Princess Leia, or the new adventures of Lady Guinevere after the fall of Camelot or whatever stupid idea you could come up with the characters of Harry Potter. We're going from plot point to plot point without much regard for, well, pretty much anything. A pretty nice outlet for writer wannabes who pretend they are practicing their writing "skills" when they are actually too lazy to explore what it means to be writing or to do any reading. I don't have anything against Harry Potter, per se. I haven't read the damn books. But it reminds me of a remark Warren Ellis and Neil Gaiman made regarding aspiring science-fiction and comic book writers reading only, well, science-fiction and comic-books rather than everything else. (An aside: Many segments of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy made me cringe) So fanfiction reads so badly with their awkward sentence construction it makes Dan Brown and Ted Kooser sound like Philip Roth or John Milton.
Of course, it doesn't mean that fanfiction has to be bad. Don Barthelme's Snow White and The King, as well as Bryan K. Dietrich's Krypton Nights (a book of poetry riffing on Superman) were pretty amusing. A friend who interned at Gulf Coast when I was there actually asked me why Dietrich's book and various poems I saw about the X-Men were not considered fanfiction (well, fanpoetry).
We can also wonder if the current crop of "mainstream" comic books (i.e., whatever DC and Marvel Comics publish nowadays) is not actually glorified fanfiction. After all, we are talking here about self-proclaimed fanboys taking on characters created by other people, used not necessarily with the creator's permission in situations not thought about said creators.
The problem with fanfiction is that they are most interested in big, "original" ideas rather than in precision or craft in their writing. Think of a torrid sex scene between Han Solo and Princess Leia, or the new adventures of Lady Guinevere after the fall of Camelot or whatever stupid idea you could come up with the characters of Harry Potter. We're going from plot point to plot point without much regard for, well, pretty much anything. A pretty nice outlet for writer wannabes who pretend they are practicing their writing "skills" when they are actually too lazy to explore what it means to be writing or to do any reading. I don't have anything against Harry Potter, per se. I haven't read the damn books. But it reminds me of a remark Warren Ellis and Neil Gaiman made regarding aspiring science-fiction and comic book writers reading only, well, science-fiction and comic-books rather than everything else. (An aside: Many segments of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy made me cringe) So fanfiction reads so badly with their awkward sentence construction it makes Dan Brown and Ted Kooser sound like Philip Roth or John Milton.
Of course, it doesn't mean that fanfiction has to be bad. Don Barthelme's Snow White and The King, as well as Bryan K. Dietrich's Krypton Nights (a book of poetry riffing on Superman) were pretty amusing. A friend who interned at Gulf Coast when I was there actually asked me why Dietrich's book and various poems I saw about the X-Men were not considered fanfiction (well, fanpoetry).
We can also wonder if the current crop of "mainstream" comic books (i.e., whatever DC and Marvel Comics publish nowadays) is not actually glorified fanfiction. After all, we are talking here about self-proclaimed fanboys taking on characters created by other people, used not necessarily with the creator's permission in situations not thought about said creators.
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