gia (Level 13)
Watching Durarara 16 on Crunchyroll! http://www.crunchyroll.com/media-539900 #crunchyroll
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I used to read a ton of fanfiction back in the day-- I even wrote some. (No, I'm not sharing.) I've read fanfic from a lot of different franchises, including some not-anime (mostly Harry Potter. Don't judge me.), along with stuff like Fullmetal Alchemist, and I also find that I really like some of the better-written fanfiction for the unsung series Ghost Hunt.
But nowhere in the world can you find awful fanfiction as easily as in the Harry Potter fanfic world, I suspect. By virtue of its genre and age range, I suspect that Harry Potter has the highest rate of what we call "self-insertion" fanfiction-- where the author essentially writes an idealized version of herself into the story, usually as a love interest --of any fandom ever. Which is not to say that it doesn't pop up fairly frequently elsewhere, either! I think that self-insertion and its hand-in-hand culprit "Mary Sue" (the idealized female character, whether she is based on the author or not), are probably the worst things about fanfiction. It's important for characters to be likeable, but they shouldn't be perfect-- and if you must write an original character into someone else's story, it can be really tough not to make them a deus ex machina or another idealization.
That said, fanfiction has always fascinated me as a geek culture element. I hang out in an IRC channel other than #AnimeVice on IRCHighway, and it consists primarily of a slightly older set of anime fans, most of whom apparently met in a channel dedicated to Ranma 1/2 fanfiction. At some point one of them made a statement about how most fanfic authors are male, which absolutely blew my mind-- I was, and still am, of the opinion that there are more female fanfic authors across all fandoms than male. But they were in a sub-sub-subfandom, and it happened to be one that was primarily male dominated. Veeery interesting.
But nowhere in the world can you find awful fanfiction as easily as in the Harry Potter fanfic world, I suspect. By virtue of its genre and age range, I suspect that Harry Potter has the highest rate of what we call "self-insertion" fanfiction-- where the author essentially writes an idealized version of herself into the story, usually as a love interest --of any fandom ever. Which is not to say that it doesn't pop up fairly frequently elsewhere, either! I think that self-insertion and its hand-in-hand culprit "Mary Sue" (the idealized female character, whether she is based on the author or not), are probably the worst things about fanfiction. It's important for characters to be likeable, but they shouldn't be perfect-- and if you must write an original character into someone else's story, it can be really tough not to make them a deus ex machina or another idealization.
That said, fanfiction has always fascinated me as a geek culture element. I hang out in an IRC channel other than #AnimeVice on IRCHighway, and it consists primarily of a slightly older set of anime fans, most of whom apparently met in a channel dedicated to Ranma 1/2 fanfiction. At some point one of them made a statement about how most fanfic authors are male, which absolutely blew my mind-- I was, and still am, of the opinion that there are more female fanfic authors across all fandoms than male. But they were in a sub-sub-subfandom, and it happened to be one that was primarily male dominated. Veeery interesting.
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