Welcome to one of the most popular components of pop culture: fanfiction. Fanfiction is the fusion of fan imagination with the most popular TV series, movies, and books. In fan fiction, fans, like you, can let your greatest desires soar, and dream up whatever ending or storyline you want to have. The best part of fanfiction is that you can even create a character like you and pair yourself up with the hero of your dreams.
Not everyone chooses to write fanfiction to translate their dream duos into writing. Some take it up as a part time writing gig or more of an experiment in another writer’s world before they create their own. With fan fiction, there is a wider scope to experiment your writing skills on and it also helps that you can write anonymously and get feedback from people who don’t really know you (and therefore, can only judge you based on your writing skills).
Before I thrust you into the world of fan fiction, I need to give you a map of sorts to fall back on in case you get lost (which you will). First of all, you should be aware that there’s canon and fanon. Canon is the type of fanfic that remains true to the story and fanon is based on everything invented in the fanfiction world. It will take some time for you to get used to fanon and actually find out what on earth is going on.
Fanfics, just like novels, have different categories; the categories range from action/adventure to drama to parodies. The summary that the author provides usually let you know what kind of story it is and which characters are paired in the story. A little bit of advice here, watch out for summaries that contain the words ‘I suck at summaries. So yeah, just read and review.’ In my opinion, the skill of a good author is in providing an alluring summary and the lack of it sends glaring warning signals for the reader.
Like all aspects of pop culture, fan fiction has it’s own language, well abbreviations more like. Here’s a bunch you will find handy:
· Crossover- This means that the fanfic has been combined with another fandom. For example, Buffy, all of a sudden killing Lupin means that you are reading a Buffy fanfic with a Harry Potter crossover.
· Slash- This term means that the fanfic is based on same-sex pairings and sometimes change the sexual orientation of the character to make the story work.
· OOC (out of character)- If you find that you cannot understand what is wrong with character, that this because the author with the omniscient power that they have, has changed the character’s personality.
· AU (alternate universe)- This type of fic usually contains same characters but different setting and consequently, different background stories.
· Mary Sue- The annoyingly perfect character that every amateur author uses to end all the conflicts in the fanfiction.
Now that we have cleared these up, dive in! Below is a list of sites to get you started on reading fanfiction:
This is the biggest site out there for fan fictions. This site has fanfiction on everything from cartoons to books to movies. Beware though, this site is painstakingly slow and some of the works of writing are equivalent to primary school English.
Þ www.harrypotterfanfiction.com
Groan if you will, but yes, Harry Potter is one of the most popular stories when it comes to fanfiction. Perhaps it is because J.K. Rowling still has to publish the seventh book that the budding writers feel that there is freedom for them to twitch and tweak her world as they see fit.
This site is described as the Tolkein Loving Community and love Tolkein they do. They cover everything from LOTR, from books to movies and even fanfics on the actors.
If you are looking for special fandom fanfiction, such as fanfics about Buffy the Vampire Slayer or even Jane Austin, follow these three steps:
- Go to google.com.
- Type in ‘[insert fandom here] + fanfiction’.
- Voila! And you have thousands of fanfics waiting for you to read them.
Happy reading!
By Sarah Ahmed
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