Fan Fic - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Fan Fiction; Fan Fics

The next worst word you can couple with the word "fan" is, you guessed it, the word "fiction"...

— Strong Bad, Homestar Runner "fan club"

"I have looked terror square in its single, milky eye...There was "fan fiction"!"

—Shelley Winters meets her fanclub in Scary Go Round.

This page regards fanfic tropes. To discuss, recommend and advertise notable fanfics, we have the Fanfic Recommendations page.

Fan Fiction. Supplemental stories written by fans of a pop-culture franchise (or, alternatively, a celebrity's "real life"), using the show's pre-established characters and story arcs. Can be used to fill in plot holes, or have characters get into randy, nasty sex, and lots of it.

In what are often extremely bad cases, some fanfic inserts the author into the middle of his favorite action, usually in the form of a Mary Sue or Marty Stu.

It is also often used to explore Crossovers, combining characters and plot threads from different stories and attempting to create a unified whole from the mix. The classic debate of "Could the Enterprise defeat a Star Destroyer?" is thus open to creative energies, as are many other such what-ifs, most of which take the form of "Wouldn't it be cool if X and Y teamed up to take on Z?".

Fan Fic is the place where Epileptic Trees are planted and cultivated. Expect many, many, many more fics to star the Ensemble Darkhorse rather than The Hero.

Fan fiction provides a clear and compelling example of Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is crud"). All but the remaining 10% of it is ghastly stuff studded with misspellings, poor grammar, and horrid malapropisms; 5% of that is usually Dead Fic. For shows pointed at the demographic, melodramatic teenagers, most likely girls, are the authors, which doesn't help. On the other hand, the best Fanfic can be as good as, and sometimes much better than, the source material.

Saying "It was a Fanfic episode," though, is not usually a compliment.

Some franchises — such as Star Trek — have actually turned fan fiction into a profit center by creating lines of books based on the show. These books are usually penned by young and upcoming authors, often former Fanfic writers, and represent an intermediate step between fan fiction and completely original fiction.

Although Fanfic exploded along with the Internet, it existed well before the Net did. One notable example: In Star Trek II The Wrath Of Khan, Khan and Chekov recognize each other upon meeting. However, "Space Seed", the episode of Star Trek The Original Series in which Khan appears, is a first season episode, and Chekov did not join the cast of the show until the second season. The semi-official Ret Con (not explained in any of the shows or movies, but widely propagated by producers and actors in convention appearances) is that Chekov was on the Enterprise at that time, he just wasn't part of the bridge crew yet and thus didn't appear on screen. A very funny fanfic distributed in print ('zines, photocopies, etc.) not long after the movie came out expands on that, envisioning Khan and Chekov bumping into each other in the bathroom. Sillier versions have Khan vowing revenge on Chekov for making him wait for the cubicle.

However, it's even older than that. Two actual paperbacks of Trek fan fiction — Star Trek: The New Voyages and New Voyages 2 — were published by Bantam Books in the late 1970s, with Paramount's approval. Each featured ten or fifteen of the best fan stories from the previous ten years. And just to push it back even further, there have been reliable reports of Sherlock Holmes Fanfic written at the same time that Conan Doyle was still publishing — by J.M. Barrie, in fact, who is far better known as the author of Peter Pan.

Predating all of this, of course, was John Stuart Mill's continuation of The Iliad, written in 1816, when he was ten. Composed in Ancient Greek, even.

And predating John Stuart Mill's obnoxious display of prepubescent genius was Miguel de Cervantes' "Don Quixote." The first true, modern novel spawned the first true modern fan fiction. During the ten-year gap between his writing Part I and Part II, someone just couldn't wait. An unauthorized and hugely inferior pseudo-Quixote was published, much to Cervantes' chagrin. He spent an awful lot of the genuine Part II lambasting the hell out of the imposter.

Of course, fanfiction probably goes back as far as literature. Before medieval French troubadours were shipping Launcelot and Guinevere, the ancient Greeks were writing plays about relationships between characters in The Iliad. In Plato's Symposium one character complains that a fanfic play by Aeschylus got the characterization of Achilles and Patroclus wrong.

Not all Fanfic is written, though that's the most common form. It can be in any format that can tell a story. In Japan, doujinshi (fan-made "comic books") is a common vehicle; and with the increasing ease of their production on personal computers, fan videos (ranging from anime series, to Star Wars) have already appeared.

The distinction between Fanfic and original fiction, as we know it today, is largely created by modern copyright law; much of classical writing is actually "fanfiction" based on older sources. The major distinction between fanfic and a story inspired by another story is that the story a fanfic is based on has one or more "official" versions, usually owned by a company, a creator, or both. Thus, things like The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a piece of biblical apocrypha featuring Angry!Uber!Baby Jesus, or variations on Arthurian legend where there is no Holy Grail and Lancelot's affair with Guenivere never happens, would not "count" by this definition.

No statement on the legality of Fanfic has ever been given in American formal law or in its courts. Some argue that it's a form of copyright infringement; however, see "Legal Fictions: Copyright, Fan Fiction, and a New Common Law"

, and note the above precedents.

Authors often have conflicted reactions to fan fiction set in "their" universe. JK Rowling has largely embraced Harry Potter Fan Fic, albeit with certain limitations, for example. Similarly, Butch Hartman has embraced Fan Fic and Fan Art on his series, save Slash Fic, and fic/art that conform to Rule Thirty Four (there have even been Hartman sightings on Fanfiction.net). And Naoko Takeuchi apparently adores Sailor Moon Fan Fic, even lemons, and was known to encourage fan writers in editorial asides in her manga. By contrast, George RR Martin, author of the epic fantasy series A Song Of Ice And Fire, recently expressed his disdain for the practice, saying that "creating your own characters is a part of writing." He's even gone so far as to threaten legal action should he become aware of any fan fiction set in the Westeros universe. Similarly, Mercedes Lackey and her legal advisors are infamously hostile to Fan Fic distributed on the Net, even by email — although she does permit fics distributed via authorized paper-only fanzines

, after filing a release form

Such authors do have reason to worry — as Lackey takes pains to point out on her website, a fan writer was once able to wrest control (via a successful lawsuit) of part of Darkover away from its creator, Marion Zimmer Bradley. This is the ultimate nightmare of any writer, fan or professional, and drives some of the more ~~lunatic~~ draconian efforts to suppress fan creativity.

Some fanfiction becomes well-known enough to influence other fanfics, which themselves influence more fanfics, and so on in a domino effect. This can and does result in the creation and perpetuation of fanon, when one author comes up with a "cool detail" and others blindly copy it without realizing it was his invention. Furthermore, characters can become Flanderized by the feedback loops of fanfiction, sometimes changing dramatically from their original form.

Eventually, this accretion of fan-born details and mutations turns into things that "everybody knows" about the series. Those new to or unfamiliar with the original material are frequently confused into believing that it obviously must be canon if so many people mention it, even 'facts' of the Epileptic Trees variety. This is especially the case with series that have long runs and which gloss over details which are unimportant to the plot but are of interest to the fans and the fan writers.

One famous example of this is the anime Ranma 1/2, released well before the Internet became ubiquitous and when many fans had no easy access to the original source material. All manner of details (including the explanation of Akane's mallet as either a ki attack or as residing in a hyperdimensional pocket, her Flanderization into a "psychobitch", her lethal cooking, and the names and fates of the many missing mothers) were never touched on in the show but became standardized in Ranma fan fiction over the course of approximately a decade. The process was accelerated and exacerbated by the appearance of fanfiction written by people who had never actually seen the show itself and whose only exposure to Ranma was other fanfiction.

Another famous example is the Harry Potter fanfic The Draco Trilogy, which was apparently so widely read that details such as Blaise Zabini being female and Ginny's name being Virginia were taken to be canon, although they were both refuted by later books.

It's not surprising that fans of some shows occasionally pen FAQs solely to reduce the accumulation of fanon in this way.

Currently, the largest source of fanfiction on the Net (and probably anywhere else) is the aptly named Fanfiction.net, which offers a couple million stories across all but a select few canons (which were banned due to creator request) and an automated system for posting. While other sites exist, no other site offers as large an audience.

See also Memetic Mutation and Shipping. Compare with other Fan Work forms, such as Fanart, Fanvid, and Fanime.

For fanfic specific tropes see Fanfic Tropes. Of course, the hive mind have a few favorites. And a few unfavourites. And here are some that people took the time to make a page for.

Categories of Fanfics

By formats: