I’ve been thinking, as Adam never said, about fanfic.
Now I’ve always been a bit snobby about fanfic. As a reader I dipped my toe in the water and found it not very tempting. Mediocre at best is my assessment of my admittedly small sampling of the quality. As a writer, it’s more tempting, but it feels like cheating – using someone else’s already created world and characters to tell my story in. Standing on the shoulders of giants an’ all. Also, and I’m aware of how pompous this sounds, I think that if you’re going to use these characters you kind of owe it to them to do a good job, and I’m not sure if I have the skills.
That said I understand the appeal of fanfic. At a basic level it allows us more of the world that we love to play in. There do seem to be some very common specific reasons to do fanfic, namely,
– to get your favourite couple of characters together and have sex
– to ‘fix’ perceived mistakes in the actual show and then have some characters have sex
– did I mention sex?
Now I have no problem with the sex, in fact I’ve been known to write sex-having stories myself. I just don’t need to have famous characters to do it. As for fixing mistakes, a) I don’t seem to see as many of ’em as some people and b) those I do – well fixing them that way would seem like cheating again.
OK so there is one other very common reason,
– to do cross-overs with other fictional worlds (so you can get characters from Harry Potter novels having sex with those from Stargate)
Now this one is what has got me pondering. See I recently did some tapes of Dead Like Me for M. Which meant I saw a whole lot of Georgia Lass in a short period and I can’t help wondering what it would be like to get Buffy and George in the same room. In fact it’s a thought that I can’t get rid of and am seriously considering writing about. Fancy that, me lowering myself to fanfic. (That was self-deprecating sarcasm unless the subtleties of it were lost by the medium of text only)
I wrote a bit about it today in my journal, together with some glimmerings of an idea. Oh that’s right I have a journal. I resurrected an old writing book/diary to get some thoughts out over a coffee in the MacDonalds in ASDA. On paper. With a pen.
It was kinda fun. My handwriting is terrible though. I forced myself to go slow to make it slightly better. That was useful, gave me both time to think and time to relax my hand.
Anyhow, back to Xander, Mason and all that sex…