I have just seen the vapor trails of an argument concerning the value of fanfic that has flown around a corner of the internet quite recently.

Fan Fiction (Fanfic) is a curious beast. It is summed up nicely by wikipedia as “stories about characters or settings written by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creator.” Fanfic stories can be encouraged by the original creators or not but are very rarely accepted as canon.  You get different levels of quality in fanfic and different tones running from that which would be in keeping with the tone of the original piece  to comedic interpretations through to the exploration of… “romantic”…themes.

I’m not sure where I come down in the argument, or if I even have the right to hold a valid opinion on the matter seeing as I’m hardly a prolific creator and the creations I have made are hardly trail blazing pieces of originality likely to be hijacked by a fan community.  I think my problem with fanfic is that I don’t really see the point. I don’t see the point of creating or reading fanfic.  I suppose as a narrative exercise, it’s not a bad way of learning story telling using someone else’s prefabricated characters or settings, but I suspect that’s rarely why it’s written. Ultimately though, I don’t see how you can write fanfic and get anything to happen. They aren’t your characters and even if you understand them incredibly well, it’s still going to feel like you’re playing with a set of action figures: All the elements are there, but the result is something that just doesn’t feel quite right because you don’t know the characters properly.

I don’t see the point of reading fanfic. I can’t see why anyone would invest that much time in reading works about characters that they know and love that they know aren’t from a sanctioned source, because throughout reading, you will know that it is pointless: The events of the story must either reset themselves to the status quo by the end, or be completely swept under the carpet at the end of the story because it’s not part of the canon.

This is a bit like if you’ve ever watched an anime series and found an episode that’s not part of the usual continuity and breaks away from the main plot and feels ever so slightly off: Chances are that episode is “filler” – an episode used to hide a gap in scheduling whereby the animated TV show has caught up with the printed manga comic from which is based and they need to give them a couple more weeks to get the next comic or two out.  The filler episode can, optimistically, “explore themes and character traits not fully explored in the original works”, or more likely, provide no advance to the plot and no significant advance to our understanding of the established characters and can very happily be skipped entirely.  Fanfic, like the better filler episodes, can be fun, funny, well constructed, but it will always be ultimately pointless.

Calling something like this pointless is probably a little unfair, but I suppose it depends on what the fanfic is about. If it is fanfic concerning the characters of George R R Martin’s Fire and Ice, then it is pointless: The series is a multi-layered tangled web of intrigue, plots and overall strong characterization. Anything written about those characters in that world that is not from George R R Martin himself is going to detract from the experience and narrative if read, especially as the series has not reached its conclusion yet.  Maybe for something like Sherlock Holmes, then fanfic is less damaging due to the episodic nature of the stories and the fairly light hearted tone of the piece. Likewise, maybe fanfic set in the star wars universe, so long as it doesn’t mess around with the main characters and original plot too much, wouldn’t necessarily be damaging.

Finally, I don’t really see the attraction of creating fanfic, beyond the fact that I think it’s pointless. Maybe this renders my argument utterly moot, as I am basically saying “I don’t understand it, therefore I don’t think I like it” but I just can’t see the attraction of taking someone else’s creations and trying to build something of your own out of them. I of course can’t comprehend why other people don’t like building their own creations. I started drawing comics after reading a series of batman and thinking “I think I’d rather do my own now” and I’ve started trying to program for similar reasons.  Being a terrible geek, I have been running a D&D campaign and despite the setting not being entirely original and still borrowing from the standard settings when I run out of time or creative juices, I have created my own campaign space with my own regions, creatures, religion, politics purely because I can’t see the attraction in using all of the prefabricated stuff. 

I once made a little side scrolling shooter game using sonic the hedgehog sprites, just to teach me how to use a particular creative suite. This is probably how the argument goes with fanfic: using the prefabricated stuff to learn a skill. That’s fine, but I showed my game to a friend and he said “yeah, that’s not bad, but if you’d used your own sprites that would be good” and he was absolutely right.

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with fanfic, but it amounts to little more than children playing with action figures and so long as it’s seen that way, it will have about as much impact.

Additional Notes:

Probably destroying the entire argument, I did read a piece of fanfic (and I’m sorry to say I can’t properly cite it) that was set in a world that assumed J K Rowling’s world of Harry Potter did actually exist in the same world as our world, our world with the books and films of Harry Potter published in it as well.  A nice little paradoxical soft brain twister. 

The story focussed on Cho, who went for an audition for the part of herself in one of the films, but didn’t get it because she clearly didn’t understand the motivation for the character.  That made me giggle a little.