Canon? Try Fanon.

Fanfiction is the kind of thing I wave a dismissive hand at and assume it is reserved for awkward unwashed teenagers who watch far too much bad Japanese cartoons and prance around in capes yelling, "i'm a riter!" And I will readily admit I've gotten in it my head to try my hand at it, but after a few pages of bad ideas and notably terrible writing, I deleted the Word document. Then took a shower. Then cried a little.

But even I cannot deny that there is a lot of the stuff out there, so much so that it has been getting serious attention as a serious form of writing. The website FanFiction dot com is the sewer grate that collects a good deal of it as it flows through the tubes of the Internet. And I am not going to go so far as to say that all "fanfics" are bad writing. I'll use one that my very own younger sibling wrote as an example of what I'm taking about (yeah, sorry sis, going to stick your head on a fence post. You can have it back when I'm done.) Most of the complaints I have about fan fiction are because it is fan fiction.

My sister's piece, Kage Matsuri, and I use italics because it is over 30,000 words so it might as well be treated like a long-form work, is based on the comic slash cartoon slash live action movie slash line of home appliances Death Note. Now, to someone who is very familiar with the world of Death Note, I'm sure the characters make perfect sense. To someone like me, who has only seen about five episodes of the cartoon before starting to suffer cognitive dissonance, it seems to take place in a Paper Mario 2D world where the good guys have the depth of a 1960s-era Superman, everyone else is a gargantuan idiot, and the word "whammy" is taken grossly out of cultural context.

As I said before, there isn't much I can complain about in the way of actual writing. There is some genuinely gritty action and witty dialog, but once again, that assumes I know the "canon" - what goes on in the actual base story the fiction is based on. You have to know the "canon" to get the "fanon," is another way of putting it. Thus anything written using the canon of whatever story is the basis of the fan fiction is meaningless unless you know it.

This is my first big complaint about fan fiction as a whole. Writers, at least the good ones, write for everyone. Even books like historical fictions or sci-fi, again, the good ones, go to great lengths to explain themselves so the reader isn't completely lost. Jurassic Park wouldn't have the popularity it did if it assumed that the reader already understood all there was to know about the finer points of replicating dinosaurs from preserved DNA. In fact, almost half of the book revolves around explaining stuff, but that doesn't detract from it being a suspenseful, exciting read. It seems to me that fan fiction wants to channel that detail in the literary world while not having to use up a hundred and fifty pages explaining it all, so it just takes place in a nice pre-made world with pre-made characters. Plus, it is virtually impossible to give an honest critique of fan fiction because of this. Chances are, if you already like Death Note, you'll enjoy its fan fictions, if indeed you are the type who reads them. Since things like plot, setting, and aspects of character such as motivation and personality are already taken care of, it is impossible for a given critic to appraise them unless, again, they know the canon.

And just to drive the point home, the "Reviews" on FanFiction-decimal point-com, if they could be called that, are not exactly the most helpful things in the world. For example, the "Half-Life Full-Life Consequences" thing, made more famous on YouTube by a funny-as-hell Garry's Mod video (click here to see what I mean), is a Half-Life 2 fiction about the sci-fi series hero Gordon Freeman's brother. According to the authors information, he is a nine-year-old boy who has some serious trouble grasping the English language, even for a 3rd grader. Reviews quote-un-quote ranged from, "Eat shit and die you sack of pig sick." to "OMG!!!!!!!!!! I want 2 hav ur BABYS!" Maybe it's just me, but something tells me that neither of those are going to land in the NY Times book review section. Reviews are supposed to analyze the subject and give some at least somewhat informed opinions on them, not just express hatred of a writer who is probably some thirty year old guy living in a basement reading them, saying between mouthfuls of cake, "Dance, puppets, dance!"

So again, most of the complaints I have about fan fiction are mainly because it is fan fiction. Now Tim, you Herculean Exemplar, you say, that isn't fair, you can't criticize something for what it is. Well, yes, you can. You can criticize Nazis for being Nazis. Getting back to my sister's writing, I really wanted to give her monster story offshoot an honest read, but because I don't know too much about Death Note, I had no idea what was going on. And honestly, if you are going to write a story for a specific person, you might as well just write them a god damn letter.

::hands head back:: All done.