For those of you out there with hobbies that involve going outside and interacting with other human beings, fanfiction is what happens when an obsessive geek discovers the internet. More specifically, when he or she discovers that they can put anything they want on the internet and other obsessive geeks will read/look at/listen to it.
Some of you out there may already be aware of fanfiction and that either means you are an obsessive geek or you know an obsessive geek who doesn't know when to shut up and stop embarrassing him or herself.
For those of you I mentioned earlier, who don't know, here's the Urban Dictionary definition:
"A piece of fiction within a fandom utilizing characters and situations from a pre-existing work including (but not limited to) books, television programs, films, and comic strips."
As you may have guessed, I am quite familiar with this particular dark corner of the internet because I am, as I have written about many times, incredibly obsessive and incredibly geeky.
Now don't worry, this post is not meant in anyway to advocate or sell non-geeks on the idea of fanfiction. This is meant to illuminate for you normals just how batshit insane some of us are. Because it is hilarious.
(At this point I would like to state for the record that I have never written a fanfiction and I try to steer clear of the really fucked up shit.)
The first thing you should know is that there is an entire vocabulary of fanfiction. There are so many genres and sub-genres of fanfiction that it would be impossible to list them all.
As it mentions in Urban Dictionary, most fanfiction is based on some kind of romantic pairing of characters. This Romance genre is then divided into either 'het' or 'slash' fiction, meaning the pairing is either heterosexual or homosexual.
Now when I say that stories are focused on romantic pairings, that does not mean that they are limited to characters that are actually paired together in the original work. Oh no. Let us not limit ourselves. If some weirdo wants to read a story about Professor McGonagall and Hagrid gettin' it on, I assure you some other weirdo out there wrote that story.
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| Or maybe Harry/Draco is more your thing. |
(Here's another fun fact: if you have a particular couple that you're fond of, then my people would say that you 'ship' that pairing. Get it? Short for 'relationship'?)
But let's say an elderly witch and a house elf isn't off-putting enough for you. Maybe you want to read something truly twisted. Never fear, there's always a lower place.
There's a whole genre of Incest pairings out there, if that's the kind of thing that floats your boat. Fans of 'Supernatural' have even come up with a specific name for stories about the Winchester brothers getting a little too close - 'Wincest'.
(Again, I would like to remind you, before I go on, that I do not read these stories. I am just unfortunately aware of them and now so are you.)
Ok, ok, so incest is gross. But you know what's grosser? Incest plus pedophilia! So if you're really demented, you can read a story that pairs Rick from 'The Walking Dead' with his pre-teen son Carl!
Right now you might be thinking that I'm making this up and that no one would be sick enough to not only think that up and then write about it but then also post it on the internet where other people can witness their shame. But you would be wrong.
(I was going to try to post a link as proof but I started getting sucked into a black hole of depravity that I thought I might never be able to escape from. So you're going to have to just take my word for it.)
I'm going to move on from this train of thought and not go into some of the other sub-genres you might stumble across because I feel dirty even thinking about writing them down here.
Instead let me explain the 'Original Character' fanfiction genre. Because while it is pathetic, it's not horrifying.
An 'Original Character' story basically means the writer has taken her favorite character and paired that character with a character of her own invention.
(I'm just going to assume the author is female from this point on because that is usually the case.)
You might assume that this means that this person is more creative than other writers because she has created a new character and integrated this character into the canon.
(Canon means the actual story created by the people who are paid to do so.)
You would be wrong about this and I'll tell you why. Because if you see that a story includes a pairing of a character from canon and an 'OC' this just means that the author has written herself into the story. She has just taken the time to write down the fantasy she had where she is assigned to The Enterprise straight out of Star Fleet Academy and Spock, despite all his logic, falls madly in love with her.
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| "Oh yeah, this is gonna win an award at www.trekiverse.org this year." |
Another fun quirk of fanfiction is the 'AU' or 'Alternate Universe' story. In these the author has taken characters from the TV show or movie that she apparently loves and decided that the premise of said TV show or movie just doesn't work for her. So instead of Tate and Violet from 'American Horror Story' meeting in a haunted house in the year 2011, they're star-crossed lovers from Victorian England. And vampires. Because, why not?
So now you might be asking yourself, if fanfiction is this lame, why do I read it?
Well part of that answer is because sometimes I am so deeply fixated on a current obsession that even the shittiest story about it sounds more entertaining than watching something new, created by professionals.
The rest of the answer would be that sometimes, sometimes, you find a story that is actually good. Some of them are really, really good and you wonder why the hell this person is wasting their time on fanfiction when they could be writing novels.
And when I find that story I start to think that maybe this hobby isn't completely ridiculous. Maybe fanfiction deserves some respect. It's not all terrible and sad.
And then I see that there are 17,923 stories written about One Direction.
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