Barely fanfictions

This is a discussion thread for novels that are formally released as fanfiction, but contain enough original characters, settings, and plotlines, that they are pretty much original stories that happen to take place somewhere in the same universe as a published story.

I have been recently reading two such stories, the first is the Alexandra Quick series, which takes place in the Harry Potter universe, and is about the titular heroine's canon-unrelated adventures in America, the other is the Battle Royale fanfic 72 hours, which is the chronicle of an entirely unrelated battle royale game that still shares the format and presentation style the original novel (as opposed to other "battle royale" themed stories like Hunger Games that also build their own world and context).

I think such works can be a particularly good examples of the best that fanfiction can be, explicitly and unashamedly inspired by some other story, while at the same time have enough of their own creativity and worldbuilding to be comparable to many originals.

The problem with this conception is I come from a tradition very different from what you're thinking of here.

Battle Tech.

Everything is an elsewhere story one way or another. Some of them are longer and stretch out a bit, there are repeated characters, but we have 50+ novels and they are in no way start-to-finish contiguous series. The series went through a huge changing-of-the-guard sequence during the Clan Invasion that traded out people like Hanse Davion and Romano Liao for their successors. There is huge precedent for taking your story about a company-sized merc unit nobody's ever heard of, setting it somewhere, and writing out a novel. That's completely normal over there. Hell, it's expected.

Similar rules hold sway in similar circumstances. 40k fiction, for example. I've not confirmed by reading but I gather MtG functions that way in its novelizations.

So really I regard this concept of elsewhere stories, about other characters unrelated, being somehow lesser as kind of bizarre. It's certainly untrue. They're not barely fanfiction. They're full-blooded provided they're dealing in what's been created as a world.

edited 3rd Aug '13 11:31:12 PM by Night

I guess that's depending on whether the original story was character-centric, plot-centric, or worldbuilding-centric in the first place.

I can certainly see that there are some works that treat their worldbuilding as their most creative feature, so expanding on that world with an elsewhere story, feels just as is not more derivative as writing the next adventures of a story's main character.

Another example of that could be the Fallout Equestria fanfictions: The original's plotlines were largely Fallout-inspired, but told through MLP-inspired characters, so the most recognizeable unique feature of the end result was the way the worldbuilding mended the two. Therefore, it was expected that it's own fanfictions would be elsewheres expanding on that uniqiely presented land of the Equestrian Wasteland, because the Equestrian Wasteland was pretty much the main character.

However, for a novel like Battle Royale, which uses a generic dystopia universe as a backdrop, and a generic There Can Be Only One fight as the whole plot, while the personality of the characters is everything, yes, I would say that an elsewhere like 72 hours in that case is "barely fanfiction", if it contains only a few sentences of a shoutout to the fact that it technically takes place in the same world where Greater East Asia exists.

Likewise, there is a reason why elsewheres are not all that expected for a series Harry Potter, that is equally about the saving-the-world plot, and the characters' personalities, while the whole universe is already ridiculously protagonist-centric, with only a minimum effort put into implying that something exists outside the walls of Hogwards.

So I'm not really saying that "Elsewheres are barely fanfictions", so much as that "doing elsewheres in a world that really doesn't lead itself to elsewheres can result in a barely-fanfiction".

Maybe the reverse could be also true, though I can't think of any actual examples that happened. Hypothetically, witing a romantic comedy about how Sam Gamgee ended up marrying Rosie, could also end up as a "barely fanfiction", even if it's a sequel about a Lot R protagonist living in the Shire, because it's so unrelated to the One Ring plot or to the larger Middle-Earth worldbuilding that made Lot R into what it is.

edited 4th Aug '13 5:37:33 AM by Ever9

Alexandra Quick is certainly a lot of fun.

Hmmm ... I wonder if the third fic in my series set in My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic would count. Canon characters aren't directly involved most of the time and it mostly takes place on the other side of the planet.