[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by gmw

The fact that fan-fiction has evolved terms like mpreg, non-con, otp and pwp I find a little scary. I'm trying to remember the quote, something about the most frightening thing about "friendly fire" is that it happens so often they made up a term for it.

Two words: Rule. 34.

There is a lot of fanfic out there. If we assume, for the sake of practicality, that half of all fanfic is posted on FFN, then the half-million Harry Potter stories on FFN imply that there are at least a million such stories out there somewhere.

Let that soak in: one million Harry Potter stories written by someone other than J.K. Rowling. If we assume 5,000 words each (short story length) to cover everything from drabbles (that's 100 words for you following along at home) to the massive tomes some writers churn out, that is five billion words of Harry Potter fanfic (or five thousand million, for you Europeans). The canon novels total a bit over 1 million words (1.08 and change) which means that there is approximately five thousand times as much fanfic as there is canon material. Five. Thousand. Imagine that you have one book in front of you -- say, Dune -- and the fanfic written about it amounts to five thousand more books of similar size. Shelves of them. Boxes of them. Stacks of them on the floor.

While that might be a bit exceptional, there's still a staggering amount of fanfic out there. And, yes, because so much of it is written by people just learning to write, a large percentage of it is terrible. When you have five thousand times as much fanfic as you have canon, you start needing words for all the permutations of human behavior that turn up. That's where pwp comes from, for instance, although I defy anyone to seriously claim that pwp is unique to fanfic, or even to amateur fiction ("Anita Blake, Vampire Humper" anyone?). And otp (something else far from unique to fanfic). And all the rest. There might not be a need to devise a word for something J.K. Rowling just hinted at, but if even 1% of 1% of the HP fanfic goes beyond hinting, that's a hundred stories that have just described something they need a word for, so a word will appear.

And remember, also, that fanfic goes back decades. Centuries, by some definitions, or even millennia, if you consider Vergil a Homer fanboi! That's a lot of time to invent words.

Originally Posted by cfrizz

Well at least you are finding out up front, rather than half way into a book.

Or a series.

But don't let all of that put you off, you can find all kinds of fics that are more to your style is that is what you want.

That's one of the great things about fanfic: whatever you want, someone probably wrote it. Probably several times. And this includes categories like "really good stories about how X did Y" too.

Me personally, I prefer the more well rounded characterizations of fan fics that tv shows can't do because they have to conform to a certain standard or the audience they are trying to target to run their idiotic commercials.

That's a big thing for me, because of my focus on writing fanfic for old TV shows. You look at our canon, and every story has to be jammed into 22 minutes, be immediately understandable to people who have very little clue about what the whole point is, and be transmitted through a purely visual medium without any explanation that must be told rather than shown. Also, due to the era of the original shows, there is no real continuity -- they had to be able to be broadcast in any order, for benefit of syndication, so none can make any reference to, or have any dependence on, any other. And, frankly, in one of them I write for, the canon writers ... well, sucked. Their research was execrable. Their assumptions about their audience were insulting. Some of what they wrote is embarrassing to watch. But we have the advantage of any length of time we need to tell the story we want to tell, and the whole Internet to research it to get the facts right. We can make our stories dependent on the canon, on our other stories, on other people's stories, you name it. We're not limited by putting in breaks for the commercials, nor by assumptions that the audience would have the collective IQ of a potato. Fanfic has -- if its writers will use it -- the opportunity to be better than the original. Obviously that's harder in some canons than others. Outdoing ST:TOS season 3 is a lot easier than outdoing Firefly.