Writers teach old characters new tricks

“That ending sucked.”

When most people feel that way after reading a book or watching a movie, they complain about it. Fanfiction writers take action.

Anyone who has ever wanted things to work out differently at the end of their favorite TV series or book, or who wished their two favorite characters could hook up might want to look into reading or writing fanfiction.

Fanfiction is writing based off a TV show, book, movie or video game that lets amateur authors build stories around the basic frame of the original characters. 

Sophomore Erin Seri first took an interest in fanfiction when she was 13. The now-20-year-old writes her fanfiction stories based on romances from TV shows and books.

“I think everybody has certain characters from their favorite shows that they wish would just get together already,” Seri said. “I’m one of those people who goes crazy over cute scenes and thinks there’s never enough.”

She said everyone has ideas or fantasies about what they think should happen in their favorite books or TV shows, and writing fanfiction is a way for those fantasies to become reality.

“The hardest part of writing a fictional story is coming up with a world and characters,” Seri said. “In fanfiction, you already have all that, and you just need a good idea to roll with.”

The Internet has helped fuel the fanfiction subculture.

Seri publishes her work on fanfiction.net, a Web site that has thousands of posts from writers like Seri who write stories about almost any work of fiction with the slightest cult following, from the “Warcraft” series of computer games to the film “Pirates of the Caribbean,” which has more than 17,000 posts on the site, making it one of the more popular titles.

Seri said she likes the site because it gives her an outlet to write outside class and post whenever she wants to, but she still gets real feedback about her writing style and ideas.

“You get your story out to a large audience, and readers can review your story, so you know if they liked it or not if there’s something they’d like to critique.”
Members of fanfiction.net can use the “review this story” tool to post comments at the bottoms of stories.

Seri said knowing the original story as well as possible is the best way to make fanfiction come alive – in other words, it’s not for fair-weather fans. By having an almost obsessive knowledge of the characters, “it’s pretty easy to imagine things that could happen to them and how they’d react” and form a better story line.

Bethany Stayer, 19, started writing fanfiction after watching the anime show InuYasha in high school. Her strong desire to be more than just an audience member and create her own InuYasha universe led her toward fanfiction.

“I really liked the show, and after I’d watched all the episodes I needed something else,” she said.

Eventually, Stayer stumbled upon fan art of the show at deviantart.com. She said looking at the fan art eventually spurred her to employ her own talents and begin writing fanfiction.

“After that I was hooked.”

Stayer is a former IU student who is currently enrolled at the University of Kentucky as a sophomore. The Lexington, Ky., native hopes to come back to IU next year, where she can continue her degree in conceptual design for sequential art in the individualized major program.

Like Seri, Stayer sees fanfiction as a way for fans to live out fantasies of their favorite books, movies and TV shows by creating their own stories.

“I’d describe fanfiction as an opportunity for fans of a specific medium to express their own opinion of the medium by manipulating its characters and/or plot,” she said in an e-mail. “It basically covers nearly all the genres.”

Stayer has written a few fanfiction stories, which she has also published at fanfiction.net. She said she will keep writing it, but she hopes eventually it will lead her to bigger things. Her dream is to someday publish a novel, and she said writing fanfiction is good practice.

“Fanfiction is a good opportunity for me to practice writing and get a response from people who don’t know me and can be unbiased,” she said.

Stayer said she mostly writes “yaoi” stories based on the video games “Kingdom Hearts II” and “Final Fantasy VII.” Yaoi is a term for a genre of fanfiction that focuses on creating gay male-on-male relationships between characters.

Stayer has been writing yaoi stories for about a year. She said outside of specific characters’ relationships, her plots are mainly a continuation of what took place after games’ story lines ended, but sometimes she will create alternate plots for the original characters.

“Mostly, I try to resolve the conflicts left over in the game,” she said, but also said she will sometimes create or interpret conflicts on her own.

In addition to what she has written, Stayer recommends “Waiting” by writer A Spot of Brother as one of the best works of Internet fanfiction, but she likes many others.
“I’ve read so much by so many different authors it’s hard to choose just one or two stories,” she said.

East Asian studies major Sarah Marino, 25, said she also became interested in fanfiction through being a fan of anime.

“A friend showed me a site online that had a collection of anime fanfiction and I was hooked ever since,” she said.

The IU senior described fan fiction as being a continuation, or “what if?” of someone’s favorite book, movie, TV series or video game. She’s been interested in fan fiction for about 10 years and has started several fanfiction books based around anime and video games, and plans to eventually get these published.

Aside from her own writing, she said she likes “Sailor Moon” and the “Labyrinth” fanfiction, stating they are well-written but hard to find. She said she is unsure how she gets her ideas.

“No clue. It usually just hits me when it wants,” she said.