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If you want something done right, do it yourself.
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 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; 50% of that is usually Dead Fic. For shows pointed at the demographic, melodramatic teenagers are the authors, which doesn't help. It should be kept in mind that among of the reasons for this is the proliferation of the Internet, the fact that just about anyone can post fanfic and that horrible works tend to steal the spotlight, painting a negative picture of the entire medium. On the other hand, the best Fanfic can be as good as, and sometimes much better than, the source material.
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.
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 Tie In Novels. 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. Such luminaries as John Stuart Mill contributed unauthorized, original stories set in a fictional universe. 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 play by Aeschylus got the characterization of Achilles and Patroclus wrong. Namely, that it got the Lover And Beloved dynamic backwards.
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 (amateur "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 Guinevere 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, which sometimes leads to a Fanwork Ban. J. K. Rowling has largely embraced Harry Potter Fan Fic, albeit with certain limitations, for example. By contrast, George R. R. Martin, author of the epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, 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. And in contrast to that and similar claims, writer/journalist James Bow makes a rather firm case for supporting Fan Fic.
Such authors do have reason to worry — as Mercedes Lackey had long taken 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 draconian efforts to suppress fan creativity. (Lackey herself was once infamously on the draconian side of the divide in part because of this event, but in early 2010 reversed her stand on fanfiction thanks to an association with Cory Doctorow.)
Even so, more and more media outlets are recognizing that fanfiction and other fan works are a simple fact of life. And as art imitates life, it's now possible to find "fake" fanfiction created as part of a marketing campaign. For example, the 2010 season of Showtime's The United States Of Tara introduced a new character, an artist who had created and published a comic book character named "Princess Valhalla Hawkwind". As part of the promotional buildup for this, Showtime actually created a "fan site" complete with fanfic, fan art, and fan video.
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 (rather than being just bad), 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.
A depressing sign of our times today is the "professional fan fic" where those writers of professional quality who would have been acceptable to publishers of 20, 30, 40 or more years ago, are no longer publishable due to the negative changes in the quality sought by today's publishing houses. There's something wrong in reading a piece of "fan fiction" and its writing is superior to the typical slop published by the large publishing house or in a modern television script. The modern publishing house seeks material that is "risk-free" and this is interpreted to be that which appeals to "the lowest-common denominator." As such, much of the material published (and in today's TV for that matter) is written to a low standard that is as low or even lower than that of typical fan fiction of the 1970s and 1980s. Requirements for grade school-level grammar and syntax are not uncommon and the writers of the past would be unwelcome by today's publishing houses. "Formula books" with interchangeable plots, situations and characters became common in the 1990s, leading many readers to cease reading fiction and science fiction. It should not be surprising that today's professional-level writing is now found in other places than today's mass-marketed books (and TV). A number of publishers, in desperation to boost sales, have resorted to importing those books that sold in Britain and to reprinting books that have been out of print for two, three or four decades that had sold well in their time.
See also Memetic Mutation and Shipping. Compare with other Fan Work forms, such as Fanart, Fanvid, and Fanime. See also the latest Sub Trope Literary Mash-Ups.
For fanfic-specific tropes see Fanfic Tropes. Of course, the hive mind have a few favorites. And a few unfavourites. Not to forget a few favorite unfavorites, if that doesn't confuse you too much. Some here have even written a few. And here are some that people took the time to make a page for.
Categories of FanficsBy format:
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