My thoughts on fanfictions

The other day I was reading this article on austinkleon.com about stealing like an artist (which he'll turn into a book eventually) and thought about number 3 on the list; "Write the book you want to read" and as he further explained this he wrote about how he wrote a fanfiction about Jurassic Park after the 1st movie, and then comparing it to the sequel which he thought sucked. So if he advised all the artists & creative people out there to write the book they want to read, draw the comic they want to read, act the movie they want to watch, etc. then this explains A LOT about all the fanart, fanfiction & fanmade animation of a lot of fandoms in deviantART or any other art websites with twisted storylines come from...

Not blaming the advice; that is in fact a REALLY good advice.

The sad thing about them is, nowadays most of the fanfictions roaming around the internet are either extreme yaoi (and yuri, but mostly yaoi) with crack pairings of two characters that are meant to be completely straight and/or not even know each other in the original series, or storylines featuring the writer's own original character (OC) created for the fandom, and most of these OCs are known to be a bunch of Mary Sue's (or Gary Stu's) as if the whole universe revolves around them & their life. These have become widespread and mainstream to the point that even people are making fun of them (along with fanart, not just fanfictions) and that some people will straight away think of them whenever the word 'fanfiction' or 'fanart' is mentioned.

Don't get me wrong, there STILL ARE some good fanfictions worth reading. When it comes to these things, everyone likes a story with a good plot & reasonable happenings, and characters and their behaviors that makes sense. And relationships among characters that make sense too. So, kudos to the writers whose prose have all the qualities stated above (and maybe much more)

Personally I'm not the one up for writing fanfictions, I prefer following a certain movie/series/cartoon/game/musical's original storyline (and start making spoof/crack comics out of them for the lulz) but ironically, I DO remember writing my very first fanfiction when I was 8. Yes it was a bastardized mixture of Letterland (an educational children's cartoon series started out as books) and some other cartoon shows, and the main characters in there was my own letterland OC Reddish Girl & her rat Reff, along with one of the Letterland characters Golden Girl and two of the Rowdyruff Boys from the Powerpuff Girls. I can't exactly remember what were the stories were, assuming most of them are just fagging over the equality of red & green stuff (which is why from the RRB only Butch & Brick were featured, dont know where Boomer went though) and one story about Reff marrying his long-term girlfriend from college. WTF.

Of course a lot of fanfictions include OCs too, in this case, it's Reddish Girl. Thinking about her, her letter is R, and there's already a character in Letterland representing the letter R; Robber Red. But then again there's already two or more characters with the same letter in the show anyway. And of course like Robber Red, she wears red. But in the fanstories I wrote she & her pet rat hangs out with Golden Girl, who owns a Go-Kart. Not sure why Golden Girl, probably because she was my favorite character from Letterland? Anyways, Reddish Girl also has something like Golden Girl's green G-shaped Go-Kart, only it was a Racekart. Obviously red & R-shaped. And moving on to her name, why is it "Reddish Girl"? Aren't Letterlanders supposed to have their first and last names starting with the same alphabet? I didn't care about this, I was eight.

Looking at how I designed Reddish Girl's characteristics, I'd say she's just like most OCs created in fanfictions; there are some Sue-ish factors, but she's not much of a Mary Sue since she can't do EVERYTHING. I mean COME ON she's like a combination of Golden Girl, Robber Red & probably some other characters from different cartoon shows.

If I'm not mistaken she looks like this.

And then this morning I thought, "what the hell was I doing in my childhood?"

Back then I didn't know that these are called fanfictions. I started acknowledging fanfictions after stumbling upon My Chemical Romance yaoi fanfictions on deviantART, mostly about Gerard and Frank (better known as Frerard). Yep, not a big fan of them. But they're all over the internet, and not just MCR too, other bands as well. People have been shipping real life people in fanart & fanfictions now. I wonder how it all start. Probably the same as how people start writing fanfictions & drawing fanarts of their favorite fandom in the first place. Before that I remembered writing a Kids Next Door fanfic (though meant to be funny & parodying someone else's fanfic, turned out not-so-funny) and after that sometime later I also tried parodying other people's yaoi fanfictions just to make fun of them (the pieces, not the writers. They're actually good) but maybe that's just me & my so-called parodist behavior. But like I said earlier, I prefer writing fiction with original characters, OCs that aren't made for fandoms and that have nothing to do with any fandom at all. And I prefer drawing fanart & fancomics over writing fanfics cuz drawing is more visual.

Finalization, there's nothing wrong with writing fanfiction at all (even the sickest, most twisted & obscured ones) cuz it's how someone views a certain fandom and they just need to let it all out for their own sake, and some of them aren't even serious with some of their fanfics (there are people who write fanfics on purpose just to joke around or troll). The same rule applies with drawing fanart. And, well, we gotta be open, those sick fanfictions & fanart aren't the only genre of fanfiction & fanart that exist all over the internet. There will always be good ones and bad ones when it comes to talking about a particular something.