[ SECRET POST #6914 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #6914 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


01.




__________________________________________________



02.



__________________________________________________



03.



__________________________________________________



04.



__________________________________________________



05.



__________________________________________________



06.
[Wicked: For Good]



__________________________________________________



07.
[Sanda]


__________________________________________________



08.






















Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 19 secrets from Secret Submission Post #987.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

08. https://cdn.imgchest.com/files/55c9271aabb4.jpeg

[(Anonymous)]

Agreed.

Transcript

[(Anonymous)]

I think if you write a fanfiction and then later you can remove the characters names and make an original fiction from your work you FAILED at writing FANFICTION... How do people write fanfic without it being heavily connected to the world its set in? Who kept reading their fic if the characterizations were off enough to have eventually become original characters? Lunacy!

[(Anonymous)]

Then there's what happened with this "Game Changer" book. Apparently it was an original story that she slapped Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes' names onto and then removed them again to publish as an original novel.

[iff_and_xor]

I think a lot of people just like the genre of fanficcy romance. They'll read stuff exactly like that because they're less concerned with the characters' personalities and more concerned with the genre tropes. You can see the way that characters get smoothed out in fanon to fit them into the preferred mold.

(I used to know someone who would happily read in fandoms they knew nothing about, as long as they could look up pictures of the characters and a short summary of the setting.)

Very strange to me. Character is the most important. I have a hard time with a lot of AUs because it doesn't feel like the same person anymore.

[(Anonymous)]

(I used to know someone who would happily read in fandoms they knew nothing about, as long as they could look up pictures of the characters and a short summary of the setting.)

I'll do this occasionally, though I don't need pictures of the characters just a loose basic knowledge of the source. Mostly I'll do this when I'm looking at certain tropes or kinks. There are definitely some characters or pairings that are based on a basic archetype so it is translatable for me.

[(Anonymous)]

Me too.

I know enough about Teen Wolf characters to do this for that fandom.

[(Anonymous)]

I used to do this with porn fic because for fandoms I knew I always thought it was OOC and it distracted me from what I was actually there for haha. Now I just look for original work, but I kinda understand

[iff_and_xor]

Yeah, I’ve done that for straight-up smut/porn too. That’s a little different in my head and I absolutely hear you on it often being distractingly OOC when you actually know the characters.

[(Anonymous)]

The few fic-to-books I've read have not been great. Very little world building, characters are kind of empty husks, and just generally playing up tropes.

Though I will say I think you can make fic-to-book work, it just takes fleshing out the story more. Before reading a few I always thought it was more along the lines of those authors that write a detailed AU verse and fell in love with it so they work to replace the fic aspects with fully fleshed out characters. It doesn't make the fic less fanfiction, it just means a little more work on the authors part to get it to an actual original book.

[(Anonymous)]

I would like to agree, but the truth of fanfiction is that most are not well written when it comes to keeping IC. The few Fanfic-to-published books I know of were also all AUs, so even if the author nailed their character in the OG fic, most people who don't know the character won't think much of it, I think.

[(Anonymous)]

This. I've had some friends who filed off the serial numbers and while the original fandom is still noticeable if you know what to look for, there are enough differences where someone who's not in that fandom might not pick up on it at all. Mind you, these friends were good writers of original fiction as well as fanfiction, so they understand about world building details and characterization and their fics don't rely upon recognizable names to do the heavy lifting for them. The transition isn't so difficult that way.

[(Anonymous)]

I agree, but I also think that romance AUs are often not good fanfiction either. There are some very, very good ones, but they're generally not getting their serial numbers filed off!

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah... thing is, people write fanfic that doesn't seem very connected to the world its set in or its characters all the time, and from what I can tell, that doesn't necessarily disqualify them from being considered good fanfic. So long as readers' favorite tropes and plenty of sex scenes are provided, most people don't seem to care at all.

*I* don't consider that good, but I think I'm in the minority.

[(Anonymous)]

Even if you use the characters' canon personalities I don't think it works. Practically every character out there is essentially the same person as a multitude of other characters if they were put into a different setting. "This is Luke Skywalker but in a modern high school AU" buddy that's just the title character from Love, Simon.

+1000!

[(Anonymous)]

No amount of sandblasting the serial numbers off your fanfic should hide that it was written for its fandom. If it does, then all you did was write an original story.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm so confused by the responses, are there actually 100% IC fic fandoms out there? I thought we all knew that reasonable levels of ICness in fic are rare and most of what we get is going to be some level of OOC regardless? Am I crazy here? Not saying I like OOC fics, I hate 'em, but I've been in fandom over 30 years and always just shrugged and accepted the plethora of OOCness in the hopes maybe I'll find one IC fic per fandom.

[(Anonymous)]

I've got one fic I think I could do this for, but the key thing about it that makes it a possibility is that at this point it's entirely set in the real world, I'm largely focusing on a character who is not given any depth/focus in the film and I could in fact cut the only one of the film's protagonists to appear in the fic, as well as the film's setting and just... swerve a little once I'm past the prequel years, and like... just never tie this guy's life into the source material. Because it's so far been set years before canon, only one character is even really recognizably the same man he is in the movie, one of the characters the people who have read it have been the most invested in is the one character I invented from scratch...

But that fic is so uniquely removed from the ACTUAL source material, compared to other fics I've written/am writing, by virtue of mostly being set a solid couple decades and change before canon, largely featuring characters we barely get to know decades before we know them... and most fics I've written could not be removed from their canons in the same way. Even other fics with settings based in reality and a focus on minor characters have like... ONE important recognizable guy, or lack the kind of tropes that would work in the publishing market.

[(Anonymous)]

I have actually seen the sentiment expressed in this secret a *lot* in fandom (and if I see it, that's because a LOT of my friends are sharing/reblogging posts with this sentiment to strongly agree with it, so I would say it's a reasonably popular opinion), but, personally, it never really resonates with me, to be honest!

Like, it's easy to answer why a person writing fanfic is able to easily republish it as original fiction -- in many cases, it's because the fic is a setting change AU, where you're transplanting characters who are meant to be evocative/remind you of the original canon characters into a new setting and they have a new job (meant to be analogous to their canon one) and they're thinking about new/different problems (that are meant to be analogous to their canon problems), etc. So the author, when writing a setting change AU is often doing a lot of work that e.g. a romance novelist is doing when writing original work: they have to take the time to introduce you to these characters and what their main pain points are at the start of the story (because the fanfic author has to explain how their setting change AU works to the audience who knows the characters but are finding out from the author what is going on with them in *this* world...) -- but a lot of this is just the same work that an original novel author ALSO needs to do to introduce you to the main leads at the start of the story. In short, a setting change AU, because it plucks characters out of their original context and worldbuilding, basically requires the fic author to have to do fresh worldbuilding/world-establishing WITHIN their story, which basically resembles the kind of world-establishing an original work also has to do, making it much easier to cross the gap between fanfiction and original fiction, because less material has to be added in order to make it standalone.

But then of course, that just pushes the question back, right? That just means *setting change AUs* are barely fanfiction because they all involve taking two characters, removing them from the interesting canon world that shaped them/informs their characters, filing off all their edges, and making them the most bland and generic of (e.g.) romance novel protags ever. And in fact, I have seen this exact sentiment expressed widely in fandom (e.g. see this super viral Tumblr post: https://www.tumblr.com/starbuck/786572324657856512/is-this-ship-popular-because-its-legitimately -- but I've seen this sentiment expressed in very different ways in many places). I think if you're the kind of person who really hates setting change AUs and only want to see characters in their original setting, this definitely makes sense. But for me personally, I love setting change AUs and not only do I NOT see them as "fanfic-lite" (as in, barely fanfic, because they're barely responding to the actual canon) but I see them as "extremely fanfic" or "quintessentially fanfic" in that I think one of the characteristics that tends to make stories feel noticeably "fanficcy" to me is when someone takes a character and rotates them/shakes them around in their mind and tries to imagine what that character would look like in Regency England, or in the flower shop AU, or in the Mirror Universe or whatever. Sometimes canons even do this for their own characters and it ALWAYS comes off to me as that canon dabbling in writing fanfiction, to be honest -- that's how "fanficcy" that activity seems to me.

So personally, I don't agree that setting change AUs are "failing" to write fanfiction. I do think there are ways to keep on getting more and more divorced from canon to the point where the characters don't feel like their canon selves anymore and you might as well be writing original characters, for all the resemblance they bear to the original characters. That definitely happens in fandom and would count as failing to write fanfiction, and yes, setting change AUs ARE absolutely the main way that this "characterization telephone" or "characterization drift" happens, so people are not wrong that there is a connection between setting change AUs and the "this character is basically an OC" phenomenon. But I also think you CAN absolutely write setting change AUs where the character still really really feels like the canon version. They are just translated into a different setting, but the parallels are obvious and the setting change AU only makes sense and is only enjoyable BECAUSE it is implicitly in dialogue with the original text.

I think these traits can even still apply to ex-fanfic that gets republished as original work. While the story stands alone (because of that "character/world-establishing within the story" work I talked about above), I do wonder how many people are drawn to these serial-numbers-filed-off books because they know it will give them similar experiences to the canon that the original fic was for? Like, I wonder how many 50 Shades of Grey fans also enjoyed Twilight, or if the reason why 50SoG was popular is basically the same reason why Twilight was popular? Or you know that feeling when you're reading fic where you're like "I would read 100 versions of this same setup" or "this is my favorite fic in the world; I wish there were 100 fics like it that I haven't read yet so I could read them all", because you just like that relationship and that trope *that* much? I don't think it's unrelated that people who like to read romances tend to read a LOT of romances, or people who like Dramione also like Zutara also like Reylo and will often snoop around in those other fandoms when looking for reading material. It's not because those characters are the same or their canon context doesn't matter, but rather that the traits that draw people to those (all non-canon!) ships are the same and they scratch the same itch. And when Dramione fics get republished as original, I think the reason they will be popular in bookstores is the same reason the original Dramione fics were popular, not because the characters "don't even feel like Draco and Hermione anymore" but because they still *do*, and they are drawing fans who would have been drawn to what Draco and Hermione have going on in Harry Potter, too. Same goes for the so-called "migratory slash fandom" -- a lot of times, people are really really drawn to a dynamic that involves "hyperactive youthful overly-friendly dude who often doesn't know when to stop talking" and "grumpy repressed dignified gay" which ties Sterek with Wangxian (and heck, Gelphie too for a F/F version, why not). And you know what is a good setup for highlighting and heightening the personality and sexual tension between two such characters? College roommates sharing a dorm room. (With Gelphie, it's just canon.)

[(Anonymous)]

No.

OP is saying that fanfiction is valid if it either adheres so close that canon that it does not change anything at all, and character's actions are not motivated by the plot of the fic but by canon background information that is not mentioned in the fic at all; or if the fanfiction is written about blank mannequins without any personality, who only start to seem like people if the reader is told to imagine characters that have been fleshed out elsewhere in their place.

On the other hand, an AU that transposes the character's background and basic motivations into the new setting in a way that makes sense in the new context, by OP's metric, fails as fanfiction.

OP is free to have a preference for economically written, missing scenes style fanfic, but that is not the only definition of "successful" fanfic.

[(Anonymous)]

I mean, you could write an AU about my curent Blorbo and now you've got a guy who was disowned by his family at a young age, drafted into the army, ended up working for some kind of law enforcement, and is super emotionally stunted and walled off even as the natural instincts he tries to squash are for mercy and kindness.

That guy could be a romance protagonist pretty easily! While incorporating Heinrix Von Calox's biomancy and Inquisitorial authority in a coffee shop AU would be difficult, the basic personality is functional in any setting.

But I've never actually seen it done *well* so...