Fanfiction

Well I figure my first post should be about something I really like, and considering I spend most of my spare time reading it I must really like fanfiction. Now for those of you not in the know fanfiction is stories that people, of various writing skills, write set in already created fictional words, like that of Harry Potter or Power rangers. Naturally the results vary wildly, from My Immortal, a story that is so immensely stupid it has been reported to make people dumber just by them reading it, to Nightmares of futures past, a brilliant time travel story involving a Harry who's lost it all going back in time to fix things. With that out of the way let's dig into fanfiction some more.

There is fanfiction for almost any show you can name, or at least for those people still remember. Of course there are exceptions and a lot of the collections are quite small but usually there will be at least a couple of fics. I'm lucky in that most of my fandoms contain a fair amount fanfictions, Harry Potter actually has the highest amount of stories on fanfiction.net, so I have a fair amount to choose from. Unfortunately this is where the main problem with fanfiction shines through. It can best be explained by Sturgeon's law, now sturgeon's law says that 90% of everything is crap. Why is fanfiction such great proof of this? Well simply with how easy it is to get a fanfiction on the Internet any guy and their dog, and some look like they were written by a dog, can put there story on the Internet. Let me tell you there is a reason there are so few so published authors out there, because some people have no talent. Don't get me wrong there are many diamonds in the rough but these are of a small number compared to those written by a thirteen year old on a sugar high whose closest idea of a plot is, these two get together and have sex.

Anyway I'm done ranting, for now, so lets move onto what makes this format great. Well one reason is it allows for aspiring authors to work on a story and not have to do a huge amount of world and character building and just focus on their writing style. It also allows for continuations of cancelled series which can be useful for fans disappointed in not having more seasons, books, etc. But my personal favourite reason is that it allows stories to take place that couldn't normally be done. To explain this I'll use an example. The Power rangers fanfic 'rangers in retrograde' is a fine example, it's a retelling of Operation overdrive that can only be done because it can ignore things like budget, or actor availability or even sentai footage.

Anyway I'm done here for now, if I think of anything I might post a part two but for now See ya.