Just when I thought I was out...



...they pull me back in.

Due to mentions on the LJs of hazliya* and laura47*, I have been alerted to the existence of An Archive of Our Own, or AO3, a large, well-maintained fan fiction site that welcomes fics of all types and displays them in a stable, easily navigable structure. And I was surprised to find that even though it has been years since I followed fan fiction, I was inexorably drawn to a brand-new archive that I hadn't yet had a chance to dig through.

As a kid I was, of course, exactly the sort of personality that fan fiction appeals to. The ostensible reason for fanfic to exist is to give people more material with the characters and the world that they have come to enjoy. I have an obsessive personality, which I believe is the only real thing that separates nerds from normal people. So naturally whenever I would get into a media source, I would get waaaaaay into it as nerds often do, and unfailing whatever existed in the canon of that universe would not be enough, leading me to turn to fan fiction.

But anyone who's even been passingly interested in fan fiction knows what it's like-- the signal-to-noise ratio, as laurion* put it, is ridiculously skewed in favor of the absolute dreck. Any stupid slobbering fankid who can string two words together can and probably will write fic, so the chances of finding anything that really satisfy the craving for new material set in that world are slim. Still, every now and then you can find gems, and every small success only feeds the fire. When I rediscovered Gargoyles in high school I came upon the mammoth oeuvre of Christine Morgan, which was so unbelievably good it started an addiction that it seemed like no amount of later crap could end. (A must-read, by the way, for any Gargoyles fanatic. She changes the canon slightly because she started writing before certain things were determined in the series, but still, her writing is phenomenal and her storytelling is awesome. Even more amazing, her original character end up feeling like so much a part of the world that you end up caring about them just as much as the ones you came to see. Mindblowing.)

I also made more than a few forays into writing my own. Often out of frustration of not seeing the things I wanted to see, I would conceive of my own stories that suited someone of my tastes. Unfortunately I finished very few, for a number of reasons. I was very much a perfectionist, never being quite satisfied that I'd nailed the feeling of the original story so I was continuously tweaking and rewriting, and there was always some new project that excited me. And yeah, without some external deadline or whatever I often have a tough time making myself buckle down. But damn, did I have ideas, and damn, did I spend a lot of hours working on these things that probably would have been well-received by the fan communities if I ever finished them.

But after several years of wading through the nonsense, once I got into college, I found my devoted interest in fanfic waning. I figured I was growing out of it, moving on from it. I confess that notion pleased me on some level, if only because it drove me to spend so much time working on fan stories I never finished, time I could have spent on original writing I could have actually done something with.

As I mentioned, there is so little out there that is actually good. Bad writing, absurd premises, you name it, fan fiction is afflicted with it. I also have a pretty narrow interests in what fan fiction appeals to me. Basically, I want more in the same world-- I dislike radical changes to the nature of the source material. I want fan fiction to be an extension of the thing I enjoy, as close to qualitatively the same possible; if I wanted something different, I wouldn't be going to fan fic for it.  I mean, you can have radically different events happen, and of course force the characters to grow and change, but keep the milieu, keep the characters true to their natures, and perhaps above all else, keep the tone. Tone is in this writer's opinion one of the most important aspects to keep in mind when crafting a piece. Choose it carefully for the effect you want, and stick to it.

I think one of my stumbling blocks is that I'm not really interested in slash, except occasionally as porn. Apparently there is an enormous chunk of fan fiction writers who see the medium primarily as a vehicle for pairing off whatever characters they want to see get together or have sex, regardless of the plausibility in the original. I hear there's a lot of well-written slash out there, but I'm afraid I just can't get into it. Very frequently the desire for squishy romance seems to express in characters suddenly discovering they're gay for each other and having squishy sex. I feel like that's too much of a deviation from the original; I like characters to demonstrate the sexual orientation they had in the source, rather than one bent for the pleasure of the author.

I have a handful of finished pieces, written many years ago. One was a story I submitted to a writing contest hosted by The Gathering, the Gargoyles fan convention, when I was thirteen years old. I was up against all adult writers and I won in my category. :-) It's a little mannered now, but holds up relatively well. Another was written when I was sixteen for a Latin assignment and probably only barely qualifies as fan fiction; it was meant to transpose a story from mythology into a modern setting, and it came out kind of cute. The last was from an embarrassing interest in that LXG movie that came out several years ago; I've always been a fan of the Henry Jekyll character and because it was the first sort of dark, "mature" story I'd ever written I think the sheer, "oo, I'm being naughty!" thrill drove me to finish it. *eye roll*

Just for the hell of it I posted them on AO3. My username is breakinglight11, in case you're interested in viewing my shame. ;-) The real shame here is that now I'm getting interested in fanfic again, wanting to put in the time to finding the good stuff, and... God save me... dig out my old stuff and see if anything is worth salvaging. *sigh* The old poison, it heats my blood again.

Sometimes it really sucks being a nerd.