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Hitler continued laughing, then finally said 'Goku! You came here expecting to find a madman, but instead, you found a GOD!' Hitler had become a Super Saiyan.
Suddenly, an eight-foot sub sandwich constrictor eng...sm...sploded out of nowhere! — Strong Bad
—Tavalya Ra, Mind of a Hero, AKA The Crack
Fan Fic on crack. The easiest type of fanfic to write, and one of the hardest to write well.
The easiest description of its content is "Fics That Make You Go :-O". But if you want to go into detail...
Crack fic is not merely humorous. In fact in many cases it doesn't have to be humorous. While it is similar to Alternate Universe Fic, in that they both change some fundamental aspect of the source material, the "something's different about this" idea taken to the extreme. In its broadest sense, crack fic is any story whose premise and events would be completely implausible in Canon. These frequently include bizarre settings and explorations of improbable relationships between characters — not merely unlikely in canon, as in Foe Yay, but totally irrational and turned up a notch beyond that, as in Crack Pairing.
Crack fic is often considered the result of a challenge, either from someone outside the author or from the author him/herself: "This idea is completely unworkable, but I bet I can make it work." The name stems from the notion that the author must have been ingesting some illegal substance just to think up the idea, let alone write it.
Even more than the rest of the realm of Fan Fic, crack fic is proof of Sturgeons Law. Much of what is actually labeled as crack fic is pure nonsense, streams of out-of-character absurdity stereotypically written by young teen girls who were "soooooo high on sugar/caffeine/cold medicine/red cordial that I had this great idea lol" and don't understand that randomness and the in-jokes they share with their friends do not actual humor make.
The rare and shining well-written crack fic, however, interweaves an outlandish premise with solid characterization, internally consistent logic, and a clear understanding of the rules and feel of the source material (as every writing teacher in history has said, you have to know the rules before you can break them). It's a difficult tightrope to walk, and it's easy to fall off one side or the other into "not quite enough to make the premise work" or "so crazy that it no longer makes any sense." This difficulty frequently drives both authors (who baulk at the work involved) and readers (who are often skeptical that the author has really pulled the premise off) away from the genre, but crackfic fans agree that the discovery or creation of a successful story is well worth the search.
Compare Crack Pairing.
"Official" Examples
- Super Smash Bros Brawl. If canon could be Crack Fic, then Brawl would be the veritable god of the world of crack fic. The entire plot of the story mode makes absolutely no sense and the premise the game works on is that the characters suddenly live in a mashup of all the game worlds in Nintendo.
- In the same vein this
Penny-Arcade strip parodies the same pattern in the Kingdom Hearts series.
- Our very own Pitch Generator is basically one giant Crack Fic crossover... generator, its most notable product being Azumanga Daioh meets Rambo.
- Sometimes the Pitch Testing Zone isn't immune to this either...
- Our Story Generator
also can create crack fics.
- "Can't Smeg Won't Smeg" was the first feature of Red Dwarf Night, the Red Dwarf Tenth Anniversary Celebration. It is Red Dwarf as a cooking show.
- Based on a real English cooking show. One full of the unintentional hilarity that comes of asking these characters to cook.
- The bonus "External Gazer" short story on the Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance disc is a moving drama about Snake, Otacon and Mei Ling teaming up to battle a giant sea monster from another dimension. Mei Ling turns out to be secretly married to Solidus, and it gets weirder (and increasingly Genre Savvy) from there. It's all told from Snake's first-person point of view, and he's utterly deadpan about everything.
- Breaking Dawn from the Twilight series is arguably a Crack Fic of itself.
- And Twilight is arguably a Crack Fic of Vampire Mythology.
- Kingdom Hearts definitely qualifies. It starts as a Final Fantasy/Disney crossover and gets stranger from there. Somewhat migitated by the fact that by the end, the main conflicts all steam from the main cast, consisting almost entirely of characters made up exclusively for the series; the Final Fantasy characters are merely cameos and side stories.
- The Duck Dodgers episode where he joined the Green Lantern Corps. Yes, they used the actual DC characters. He went to Oa and fought Sinestro and everything.
- On that basis, the Duck Dodgers episode where he ate poorly made Fugu, hallucinated he was Samurai Quack and fought Aku/Happy Cat, who was actually his father.
- Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe definitely counts. To clarifiy, Shao Kahn and Darkseid inadvertly get fused into a monster named Dark Kahn who begins fusing the two universes, and makes everyone fight everyone for no reason via his Hate Plague. Yes, it's non-sensical.
- Dengeki Gakuen RPG: Cross of Venus is another crossover game that could have been designed only by people being high at the time. The premise is that an evil organization is causing canon defilement. And if the fact that Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan meets Kino's Journey in the game didn't tip you off already, it just gets downhill afterwards with such absurdities like a creepy-looking villainous clone of Minori Kushieda, and time travelling in Nogizaka Haruka No Himitsu courtesy of Reality Warper Aureolus Izzard.
- Jack's third episode of Totally Non Canon Theater, Frigid McThunderbones
. There are no words to describe it except "cracky". Well, and probably also "offensive" (at at least one point to any given reader).
- Similar to Super Smash Brothers, we have The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny
. It includes unrelated characters such Godzilla, Indiana Jones, CareBears, Mister Rogers, and everyone else in between, and they are all battling each other to the death in Tokyo for no apparent reason.
Fan Works Examples
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