A Thousand Words in Defense of Fanfiction

Fanfic is a joke

The other day, I woke up to the morning sun streaming in through my bedroom window. I was still groggy from the Benadryl I'd taken before bedtime, but I could swear I heard someone yelling.

"Baybee Ooey Tombs!"

Mazzy, my wife, didn't stir.

I craned my neck sideways. There it was again. That yelling.

"Baby Looney Tunes!"

Up popped my 5-year-old son's head. He was staring into Mazzy's iPhone, watching YouTube videos of Baby Looney Tunes. The boy has learned how to tell the Google search app to find his favorite videos, whether it's Baby Looney Tunes or Hot Wheels cartoons or clips of people playing Super Mario Bros.

Which means my son has embraced fanfiction from the get-go.

Hold on, you're saying. In what world are children's cartoons the same thing as fanfiction?

In any world.

Let me explain.

Fanfiction is a joke out there in the real world. Many of y'all might not realize that because you've become immersed in this world, where the only debate is whether there can, in fact, be too much sex in a single chapter.

You want evidence? It's all over the damn place. Take this, from the submission guidelines for a pulp crime 'zine I like to read: "Fan fiction will never be chosen AND openly mocked on the website. You have been warned."

Most of us get this. We understand it, however much we don't like it. It's why lots of us have adopted fake names. We mark Forks High School in the Facebook about me section and we don't tell anyone in our real lives what we're doing with our spare time. No one can ever find out. Ever.

This is total hypocrisy. Not the hiding. I get that. I do that. No, I mean the mocking of fanfiction.

It is true that much of what's posted on fanfiction.net and elsewhere is terrible. It's derivative, or it's poorly written, or it's plodding or, yes, it's not a story so much as a series of sex scenes.

But that's true of all writing. Most of it's terrible. But some of it? Some of it is amazing. You guys know what I'm talking about. Every now and then, you'll run across a fic that makes you think, Well, that person knows what's up. That person should be writing real books and making real money. And, eventually, I hope that's what happens. That the best of us rise beyond our origins here in pretend-land and make it out there where the stakes are high and the paychecks come rolling in.

Maybe the next Hollywood blockbuster will come from the Gdoc of one of you folks. Why not? Sometimes, it seems like fanfic is all the Big Movie Machine is producing these days, anyway.

I got to thinking about this not too long ago when Mazzy and I were watching "Oz the Great and Powerful," the colorfully bland movie where James Franco overacts and Mila Kunis reminds us all how drop-dead gorgeous she is before she turns into a monster.

The wicked witch is 113 years old

It occurred to me, not for the first time, that this movie, like many others, is nothing but an elaborate, highly polished piece of fanfiction.

What is fanfiction, after all? It is an original story based on characters someone else created. Often, but not always, that original story is based in a world someone else created, too.

That's a pretty good definition, I think. It's "Baby Looney Tunes." It's cartoons based on toys like Hot Wheels or a video game character like Mario.

And the definition fits "Oz" perfectly, too. The first Oz book, "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," was published in 1900. The 1939 movie we all know and love was largely based on this book. But did you know L. Frank Baum published 13 more books in the series? Many more "official" Oz books followed after Baum's death, too.

There have been other movies, there have been stage productions. There was even "Wicked," the wildly successful book by Gregory Maguire that reimagined the origins of the famous green wicked witch. The book, of course, became the play that became a Broadway sensation.

It's fanfiction. There's no way around that. "Wicked" is fanfiction. And so is "Oz the Great and Powerful." They are original stories using characters and a world created by someone else.

Like I said, fanfiction is all over Hollywood. "The Man of Steel?" It's a Superman reboot. It's fanfiction. All reboots are fanfiction unless the original author is somehow rebooting his or her own story. Even then, it seems questionable.

Superman 1st appeared in 1933

Off the top of my head, here are some more examples of Hollywood fanfiction productions. They're movies using characters created by someone else to tell a new story. I contend that they're all fanfiction. I'm not talking about legalities and whatnot. I'm talking about the plain definition here.

Look:

• The Iron Man series
• The Spider-Man movies
• The Pirates of the Caribbean movies
• Hansel and Gretel (the recent Jeremy Renner movie)
• The Lone Ranger (a character who first appeared on the radio in 1933, and then on TV in the 1950s, now set to be a Johnny Depp blockbuster)
• Transformers (they were toys first)
• Star Trek (all of them except the original series)
• The Fugitive (the Harrison Ford movie was based on a 1960s TV series)
• James Bond (these aren't just adaptations of the books)
• The Office (the American version is based on the original British version)
• Friends (based on the British TV show "Coupling")
• The Terminator franchise (after the second movie, they've been helmed by new people)
• The Tomb Raider series (based on a video game)
• You've Got Mail (based on, not a remake of, "The Shop Around the Corner" from 1940)
• Mario Brothers cartoons and movies (based on a video game character)
• Resident Evil (again, a video game)
• Battlestar Galactica (the new one, based on the 1970s show)
• Charlie's Angels movies (again, based on a 1970s show)

I could totally go on and on, but you get it. You might disagree about a selection or two. But I think the point's been made.

It's time the mocking ends, don't ya think? The world has already embraced fanfiction, they just don't know it yet.


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