Fanfiction

Fanfiction

Dear Wal,

I’m a proud supporter of fanfiction. Fanfiction can teach a writer everything from tips from another writer’s style to just simply keeping a plot from going all to hell. Emulating other writers is how we learn, taking elements of a story we like and making them into our own style. Plus it’s just too much fun to take your favorite characters and place them into your own stories, or take your own original characters and place them in your favorite stories.
I write Batman fanfiction (of course) some of which you can read here, and it’s one of my favorite things to write. I took the batman mythos and twisted it around into a parallel universe. I’m a big fan of the DC multiverse. Infinite Crisis was one of the first comics I read; one of the reasons I got so into DC comics was because I wanted to understand all the craziness happening in that book. I made my own parallel earth and my own Batman mythos.
In my stories, Bruce was shot the night his parents were killed. He ended up in a wheelchair, which meant he had to get over or at least learn to live with the death of his parents. I cast one of the robins as Batman (as much as I dislike them, they are good fodder for fanfiction) and added a new villain. His name is Tom Burdock, and his existence along with Bruce’s paralysis changes everything in my universe. He’s one of my favorite and best original characters I’ve created in my opinion, and it almost seems a waste to have him in just the fanfiction. I’ve built up a new and completely different character in my version of Batman and Tom doesn’t work nearly as well against any other hero I’ve invented for him before or since. He belongs in Gotham, as much as I’d like to make an original story out of him it just isn’t the same. I’ll probably find the Holmes to Tom’s Moriaty in fanfiction as well, considering writing Tom into a universe I was already familiar with helped me so much with developing Tom as a character. Even though I have my misgivings about writing him into superhero stories, sometimes I almost think it’s a waste of a great character, putting him in that universe was the best thing I could’ve done for him.
I thought about submitting my fanfiction to something like DC Anthology, but while I was browsing the site I read a few issues of some other Batman fanfiction and, well..it was basically Batman verses villains/heroes he would’ve never met in the regular DC universe. I was soarly disappointed. I haven’t found any Batman fanfiction so far where anyone has tried to do something original with the characters, but it’s superheroes. What else can I expect? Villain of the week formula has been the norm in comics for decades.
A friend of mine from school (see her deviantart page here) writes Dungeons and Dragons fanfiction, specifically fanfiction of the Dragonlance Chronicles. She has several original characters that interact with the characters from the series, but they very distinctly have their own history. We’ve both rambled about our fanfiction plots half a millions, and even though neither really has any idea what the other is talking about we can still relate through the genre of fanfiction itself. She did much the same thing with her main character as I did with Tom. Her name’s Karra. She’s a warrior, and her back story is incredibly extensive and complicated. I won’t recount it here, but it’s a tale of epic proportions. Her fanfic is really great by the way, I think she has the first few chapters uploaded on her deviantArt page, but she’s currently in the middle of completely overhauling her plot and revamping her characters. I’m also revamping, I decided this year I’m going to do Script Frenzy and, by golly, I’m going to write my Batman fanfiction as it should be; a comic book series. It’s going to be amazing. Expect the origin up soon on SHADOWS.
It’s stupid, I know, to think someday I can dredge up this old script and whip it into shape for an actual comic, but that’s what fanfiction is all about. Stupid dreams that may never come true, but amuse a writer’s troubled mind.
Here’s a great article about fanfiction.

/endrant

P.S. You know what’s funny. The acronym for my fanfic is BS.