I just realized that I seldom write/read fanfiction of books, and when I do, it’s because they’ve been adapted to multi-media. Like, when I was into the LoTR and Hobbit fandoms, my baseline was the movies. When I got into Hannibal, it was because of the TV show. Harry Potter–the recent video game. Even my most recent story, set in the Song of Ice and Fire, is based on the series.
The only time I’ve had the book-version in mind, was when I was looking for stories on Arya/Jaqen H’ghar.
Everything else, I imagined the assets and events used in the shows/movies.
It’s the same with drawn media. Manga and comic books don’t inspire the urge for fanfiction in me, but anime and movies do. I had no interest in reading Marvel fanfiction until the movies came out. I only got interested in fanfiction for Haikyuu, One Punch Man and Chainsaw Man when I saw the anime.
The type of media I tend to write for is video games and the ones I read from are TV shows. I have no idea why, but I just thought it was interesting how certain media can make my brain latch onto the IP more creatively than others.
How about you guys? Any media preferences as well or maybe you have other factors in play?
Like a_mac_and_con, my thing has often been the story’s original media. Most often that is comics and games.
The greatest exception to this is the Shin Megami Tensei series and it’s many spin offs. I originally got into the games. Didn’t touch the original novels for a long time. I eventually got to the first one but. Oh god. The original novels are very painful to read. The kind of pain that makes me wonder how the heck did it get sequels. Why. HOW anyone was inspired to make games based off of them. The main character is no less disgusting than the villain but the narrative is all, “what a cool tragic hero this man is don’t you want to be him?” NO.
Painful originals are such great sources for better fanworks though :D
I remember when Mass Effect 3’s ending came out and all the fan content it inspired due to spite and disappointment: a collective fandom developing their own band-aid solutions to a sub-par ending. It was great! XD
I mean, that is how I approach Pokémon lol.
While not a part of the Mass Effect fandom, my heart went out to them. What a joke for a series to sell itself on how choices mattered for YEARS before dropping that.
I forced my way through that first book somehow. It was one of the few times I have ever thought something was so bad but I still couldn’t put it down.
You are stronger than me. It should of entered “so bad its funny” but sadly did not become so for me.
It wasn’t funny. But my obsession with SMT made me desperate to find something good about it.
I am now extra sorry.
I don’t think so? It’s harder to say these days however. I read so much Good Omens fanfic back in the day. I read some now, since the show came out, but I’m not sure I’ve read as much of it as I did a decade or so ago. My first fanfiction was based on the LotR, but I read the books at the same time as the movies came out.
Also, I’m into a lot of things which have been multimedia for a while. BanG Dream! is a video game, an anime, and real life bands. It’s all interwoven, so even if you have only dealt with one of those parts the canon is still basically the same all the way around.
Pokémon has so many divots and I mainly care about the nuzlocke portion of it (which is a slim margin of the overall video game wing). I’m completely uninterested in reading fanfiction based on the Pokémon anime.
Then there is Yu-Gi-Oh, which in a way has different characters whether you go by the English or Japanese version of the anime. And I only write based on the manga canon, not even the anime.
Actually, based on all of this you could say I tend toward the original media. Even when I enjoy what else officially comes out of it. Even when it wasn’t how I was introduced to the series! The Good Omens book, the Pokémon video games, the Yu-Gi-Oh manga. The Persona games inspired my love for Persona fanfiction way more than anything developed in their anime or manga.
Wait, Yu-Gi-Oh’s characters change depending on the language? Is it a big difference in characterization or more subtler shifts due to differences in language?
The main thing is they cut out a lot of scenes, which dove into everyone’s characterization. It makes all of the characters more two-dimensional. However, there were things like Malik and his other personality, who were changed into “WORLD DOMINATION” types as opposed to the revenge for family/born to cause chaos which they were originally.
Things weren’t always (or often) subtle in the manga either, but the English version made it ridiculous. They made everyone sound so stupid in English. I might not believe in “women’s intuition”, but it’s more of an answer than “I have absolutely no idea!” (word for word what they made Anzu say, like what).
I never finished the English anime, so I’m better at pointing out the differences between the Japanese anime and the manga.
…and I just cut out about four paragraphs I wrote about those differences, because I was writing an essay which was beyond the scope of your query. XD Whoops!
Well, that’s a shame. I assume the English version was the dubbed version and not the subtitled one? Usually, subtitles allow the original meaning to come across better because the translation isn’t constrained by synchronization to the mouth flaps.
If it’s both, then that’s pretty dang lame.
I am kinda curious about those four paragraphs of yours XD but admittedly, I have a very shallow familiarity with Yu-Gi-Oh. 😅
Well, that’s the thing. The version which came over was so cut up it didn’t come with the Japanese language at all. The language track wouldn’t fit. They actually tried at one point to both make a more faithful dub, which also included a subtitled option, but for some reason stopped after a handful of episodes. To this day you have to watch the original with fansubs.
When I get back on my computer, I could edit those paragraphs into something which makes sense for someone who doesn’t know it as well, if you want.
Either way, looking into all of the different ways 4Kids censored the anime they brought to America is a fascinating subject. Yu-Gi-Oh! wasn’t the only one they butchered, it’s just the one I’m most familiar with. Other than Pokémon. They cut out a ten minute short from the start of the first movie and turned Mewtwo from a confused creation who was desperately trying to understand their identity and value into, you guessed it, yet another villain bent on world domination and destroying everyone. Let alone the end of the movie. Not because of removed scenes, but because of changed dialogue. The entire meaning of the original was demolished for a more proper “black and white” story.
Because kids in the US couldn’t deal with nuance, I suppose.
Damn, I’m rambling again. Now about censorship. :P
I would actually be interested in those paragraphs if you still have them :D It always fascinates me how much different certain stories are once translated and how sometimes you can’t get a full sense of the story because of cultural nuances.
I only watch foreign movies or anime with subtitles now, but growing up, I actually started with dubbed over anime in my native language, Filipino. I am absolutely certain a lot of nuance was lost in the effort of translation, but at the same time, I can’t watch the anime I grew up with, subtitled XD
There are a few anime I can’t actually try in the original Japanese. I love the English versions so much. Or ones that, even when I can watch it in Japanese, I still enjoy more in English. One is Yu Yu Hakusho. It might be that I love Justin Cook’s voice, but I really enjoy the whole cast. It might be the one anime I’ve actually watched more than I’ve read the original manga. (And I’ve read that manga a lot too.)
The paragraphs! They are a bit bigger now, because you said you don’t know as much about YGO. Hopefully this makes sense!
To add more card games in, they made up a lot more… stuff. The plot was almost always about a card game tournament, so it was unnecessary. Anzu (the token female teammate), is known for being the “friendship speech girl” because of the anime. To be honest, some of the ways they do it really do make her seem like an idiot. In the magna, the entire friend group had those moments.
Fleshing out minor characters in the anime also went wrong. They were made flatter (which is why they seem even more two-dimensional to me in the English version). They shoehorned more romantic subplots in, when the only major one in the manga was Anzu’s crush on Atem. (Manga!Yugi’s crush on Anzu stopped coming up at all after a while.) Shizuka was only a plot point as Jonouchi’s sister. The manga never had her be someone else’s love interest. The anime had to make her the crush of both Honda and Otogi.
I’m all for an adaptation expanding on minor characters, but not like that. I know why they wanted to do something. Even in the manga, Honda is given very little to do as the story goes on. Then they brought in Otogi. He had a short arc about him (between card game tournaments) and then he was in the same place as Honda. They had nothing to do but be cheerleaders. Like Anzu. Except in the manga, while Anzu had her rather pointless crush on Atem, she was often used for the mangaka to inform the readers about something. Anzu would think through the situation from an outsider’s perspective. It wasn’t a great role for a character, but it gave her a little more purpose than poor Honda or Otogi.
I also started ranting about the anime filler arcs. Those made later things a lot more confusing. Because they still stuck to the manga, just added more events between things. You can’t have someone learn the same lesson twice and have the character not seem like an idiot for regressing. Not without showing why they lost that progress.
I wanted to like parts of some of the filler arcs, but because they didn’t decide to diverge from the manga after… It lost the point.
(One of my projects is a rewrite of the manga, with growing canon-divergence, just with keeping in mind the latter manga and putting those facts right at the start. I’m now like a fountain of opinion on this subject.)
I admit, I had to google some of the characters to refresh my memory of them (I think I’ve only seen 1 or 2 episodes of YGO 😅 I bought some of the cards as a kid but that was because they were so shiny and pretty :D). It’s a shame they felt they had to add more romantic subplot to make it more “interesting” --I always find it shallow when adaptations do that and it usually comes at the cost of character relationships.
I suppose that’s part of the struggle of anime adaptations. The business seems so finicky. It’s tough for developers to figure out which arcs to include when they don’t have the guarantee of another season. So they end up cutting filler content, but then some plot points don’t make sense without it, and so they include filler–but now there’s less episodes for plot. Then the characters suffer, because some arcs take a while to develop, but they still have to justify an animator drawing them in, so they get shoddy characterization instead. I imagine it’s far easier to have characters return to status quo, like a sitcom. So they end up learning the same lessons all over again.
Thanks for the write-up! It was interesting to read. Good luck on your project! :D
Oh gosh, I think it’s less media-specific for the media’s sake, and more about what medium I’m currently invested in. On an anime kick? I’m reading anime fan-fiction. Obsessed with a video game? It’s all game-verse. Etc.
Is there a medium you don’t really touch even if you’re on a binge? Like for me, it would be books. Or are you an equal-opportunity fanfiction consumer?
Hmm… maybe epic poetry, podcast, or song? I don’t think any of those have ever inspired any kind of desire to write fic. The medium has to give me more of a sense of attachment to the characters I’m likely to write about. I have never felt compelled to write a fanfic for Beowulf, for example. And in Beowulf’s case, the movie was somehow worse than the poem. >_<
I tend to focus on media that has an ensemble cast or else media that has an entirely different set of rules for the world than our own. My top fandoms are Harry Potter, Naruto, Persona (the game series), and Marvel. For Persona and Marvel, I care about spending more time with the ensemble characters and seeing them interact outside of canon, but am not especially interested in seeing authors rework the rules of the universe. For HP and Naruto, it’s more about the flexibility of canon to allow authors to do almost anything with the world, even if it’s pre or post-canon.
Ohh, so does that mean you’re not into Alternate Universes for Persona and Marvel fanfiction, but would consider it for HP and Naruto? Or do you still prefer the exploration of the world to be in canon for the latter two?
No, I definitely still read a ton of AU stuff in the Persona and Marvel fandoms, but I’m less interested in AUs for them where the rules of how the main characters affect the story have changed (e.g. it’s Persona but the main characters are all vampires instead of having Persona). Instead I like to see butterfly effect stuff, where canon unfolds differently from a single point of change, and how the characters respond based on that change.
For HP and Naruto, every character’s abilities or proficiencies can be so varied in canon that I’m not really bothered if one of the main characters has an ability never mentioned in canon , because a good writer can incorporate it as the character being unique instead of it being an entirely different world with similarly named characters.
I’m not sure that makes sense, reading it back, but I’m scratching around the edges of it at least 🤣
Uchronia is the term! It’s the umbrella term for “What Ifs” but specifically What If’s that show that Buttery/Domino Effect of change. Those are my favourite fanfics in general as well~
You have taught me yet another term! Uchronia.
No I refuse. I must of told you about that term before!
Don’t worry, it makes sense. :D
Seems like there’s an exploratory element to your tastes, that’s pretty neat! Like a… “If this _____, then…?”
I’m definitely with you on that first paragraph. I can enjoy other AUs, but I definitely prefer the butterfly effect concepts so much more.
Hmmm… This made me think. I’d say it’s mostly TV & film for me. Stranger Things, Star Wars, Star Trek, Mad Max (to break the “St…” streak), Pitch Black. But I mainly latch onto a fandom for the characters (& usually a specific character). I am a terribly one-track reader & writer of fanfic. 🤷♀️ But I likes what I likes.
No shame in that. XD I myself, tend to have obsessive periods towards one or two characters 😅
Any theories as to why TV & film get your brain fired up for fanfiction?
I’m not entirely sure I can explain it. I read a lot but books don’t seem to need fanfic according to my brain. I daydream about the ones that interest me but that seems easier because I’ve already had to build the mental world as part of reading the book, so the daydreaming is just a continuation of that.
Whereas film & TV feel naturally more constrained due to the medium, so when I come up with an idea for a favourite character, I feel more compelled to write it down & similarly on reading other people’s ideas for that character. I know a few people who fanedit films & I honestly don’t know how they do it because there’s just so little there to work with when compared to fanfic writing. 🤷♀️ It’s like I feel the visual medium of film & TV need fanfiction to make them whole or greater than they are.
I think you hit the nail on the head for me. 🤔 My brain doesn’t come up with fanfiction for books/manga because they feel “complete” and/or “free” in a way that imagination and - as you said - daydreaming, come naturally. So my urge to expand/explore the world and characters are satisfied.
I think fan-editing is a lot more like solving a puzzle 😅 maybe that’s also how they approach it?
Yeah, solving a puzzle sounds more on the ball for fan editing. Like a more constrained form of creativity since you could come up with a great idea but if the material isn’t there to cover it, it’ll never get going.
Part of the reason I like fanfiction is that I go in for romance/fluff/smut, but the characters I want to see in those situations usually aren’t the ones who get that in TV or film - they’re not the romantic leads or they’re too weird or it’s all suggestion (& no payoff!). So I write what I’d want to see if I had the choice of what happens on the screen.
I write based on thirst so I’m drawn toward anything live-action: RPF, TV shows, movies. Sometimes I’ll write for cartoons or video games or books, but it’s rarer. As for reading, I lean toward fandoms I’m familiar with but I’ll read OW and fandoms I don’t know if it’s an AU that sounds interesting.
Writing based on thirst ahahaha that’s great! XD I think my first ever fanfiction was because I had such a crush on both Jaffar and Matthew from Fire Emblem 7 :D
