Better Than It Sounds/Fan Works

Some of the best fanfics out there sound extremely weird when trying to explain it in one sentence...

Aeon Natum Engel: H.P. Lovecraft, Alastair Reynolds, and Stephen Baxter got drunk together and watched all of Neon Genesis Evangelion in one sitting, then played F.E.A.R..
- Aeon Entelechy Evangelion: The above, rewritten, minus the sanity.
Beautiful Destroyer Sailor Moon: A crybaby Magical Girl is re-imagined as a Heroic Comedic Sociopath. Property damage follows.
Better Off Alone: A neglected and abused shadow person falls in love with a turtle creature.
Better Off Not Knowing: Huge Schoolgirl gets bad news about her biological parents; is unaware of it.
Blood That Flows: A magical girl has a smart-ass sorceress for a mother. Explosions ensue.
Code Total Drama Reality: A dysfunctional group of veteran reality show contestants end up being bodyguards to a lonely girl and her computer. They help her to save her friends from her psychotic "brother."
Cupcakes: A cheerful baker has her friend help her get the needed ingredients for making baked goods.
- Alternatively: A girl's life is ruined when her best friend bakes her delicious pastries.
The Dangerverse: Four adults conspire to train a generation to survive a war, with special emphasis on eight children.
- Living With Danger: A young boy's babysitter teams up with a strange man to kidnap the young boy, break into a high-security prison, release a man known to have murdered at least thirteen people and betrayed his best friends, then force the young boy into hiding for years, kidnapping another child along the way when said child's father attempts to rescue the young boy. The adults are eventually caught and put on trial, but get off scot-free.
- Living Without Danger: Four children brought up in an unusual household, only recently forced out of hiding, go to a school and are nearly killed repeatedly. After multiple murder attempts on the part of a teacher, said teacher is killed and a rock is destroyed, leading to the deaths of two elderly people. The next year, a boy, feeling different from his family, attempts to write in the diary he took from a younger child. He nearly kills multiple people doing so, and is almost killed himself before being stopped.
- Dealing With Danger: A man with a dangerous condition takes a job teaching at a large school. Meanwhile, a teenage boy's estranged father attempts to reconnect with his son, but is captured and sent to jail for doing so. Then, the teacher's condition is revealed and he is forced to resign. The teenage boy is ripped away from his family and sent to stay with a foster family he detests, despite their efforts to be kind to him. Another teenager is forced to compete with three other students, all of whom are several years older than him. He is kidnapped, but manages to escape, though another boy is killed in the process.
- Facing Danger: A student is expelled for disobeying a teacher, but continues to live at the school, attend class, and fraternize with other students, despite the teacher's best efforts to find him. Then he is kidnapped, and meets his birth parents for the first time, but chooses to leave them behind and go back to school, even with a psychotic madman trying to kill him. Many people are killed, and some captured, but a breakout attempt is soon made. Unfortunately, the time in captivity had an effect on one woman's mind, and she is no longer sure of her place in the world. Also, lots of teens try to figure out how they feel about other teens, and some of them kiss.
Decks Fall Everyone Dies: Moulin Rouge, but with more card games.
Digimon Fusion Kai: A group of children and their monsters fight a naked alien who is even more powerful than what they have fought in the past. One of them became a Super Saiyan after seeing someone too much dead. The rest eventually follow.
The Dilgar War: Babylon 5's World War II in space backstory that J. Michael Straczynski couldn't be bothered to film.
The Divine Comedy: A poet goes through the afterlife.
Egg Belly: One of the resident Schoolgirl Lesbians gets pregnant. Her partner deals with appearance problems.
Fortitude: A mean king takes over the kingdom of the female protagonist whose husband has gone missing.
Forward: Nine people on an old ship try to keep ahead of their problematic histories. They fail spectacularly. Weird formatting ensues.
From Fake Dreams: A retired mage has some dreams of the future. He decides to make sure his adopted son has a good magical education as a result.
Futari wa Pretty Cure Blue Moon: Two girls fight world-destroying evil. One wants to fight regular crime too. The other has her panties stolen.
- Futari wa Pretty Cure Blue Moon -solar eclipse-: The girls become a Takahashi Couple and continue their quest to glue a busted sundial back together. Monologues are replaced with flashbacks.
Guide Me Home: An emotionally scarred divorcee and a hot widower have adventures and bond while trying to thwart the machinations of the female protagonist's Complete Monster of an ex.
Half Life: Full Life Consequences: A man rushes from his job in order to assist his brother. It doesn't end well. He also attacks the souls of the undead.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: The heroic protagonist of a beloved series is rewritten as a power-hungry, self-righteous brat who delivers Author Tracts.
- Alternatively: A shameless Author Tract in the form of a Fanfic that makes significant-to-radical changes to the personalities of the original characters. How radical? To the point where the murderous Big Bad of the original becomes a hardworking schoolteacher who makes a point of rewarding a student for doing the right thing.
Harbinger: Commander Shepard is the Point Man. Insanity Ensues.
Hemostuck: The same social plights used in canon, just reversed. Also, everyone's a little older in this story, which swaps years between installments and completely defies the apparently obvious relationships of the original.
Thirty Hs: Harry Potter makes creative use of a power tool with the help of his pal Dobby, before eventually playing guitar, eating a sandwich, and discussing life with a famous author.
The Ikaris: Two teenagers fail to get a divorce.
Its a Dangerous Business Going Out Your Door: Talking horses go on a road trip to get some medicine for a friend.
- Alternatively: An attempt to fuse J.R.R. Tolkien with ponies.
The Key to a Successful Interview: Legendary male-female duo known for their Belligerent Sexual Tension in canon get off on the right foot for once. Oh... and they are very pop-culture savvy.
Kyon: Big Damn Hero: The goddess of tropes uses even more tropes.
- SOS Pretty Cure: Pretty Cure just got a little stranger. Five of them, in fact. Except one of them is as normal as it gets. As for the other four, one of them is an alien, one of them is a time traveler, one of them is an ESPer, and one of them is thought of by a bunch of Espers to be God.
Lotus Hybridization series: Thanks to a few decisions being made differently, a team of supervillains are sentenced to community service.
Luminosity: An entire book series is redone by giving the main character a brain. It ends up better than the series.
a million miles of fun: A team of supervillains make a stop at a questionable all-night chain restaurant. The Big Bad is that guy who takes his sweet time ordering, The Brute has quite the appetite, the Blood Knight gets giggly when sleep-deprived, and the Punch Clock Villain's brain-to-mouth filter is out of commission. Crude humor ensues.
Morphic: Half-Pokémon hybrids were created in a genetic experiment! And now some evil anviliciously religious bad guys want to kill them!
Mighty Morphin Mecha Rangers: A Jerk with lots of money buys his own city and blackmails a group of mecha pilots into protecting it from various Monsters that want to destroy it for some reason.
My Immortal: Bratty teenage girl screws people and complains a lot.
- Or: Canon is raped in the worst ways possible. You laugh.
The Next Doctors: An episode is changed up after a man pulls a Heroic Sacrifice that saves his friend while changing him into a Talkative Loon.
Nobody Dies: A few people not dying results in a guy having a bunch of crazy eccentric sisters. And he's the most sane mecha pilot now.
On A Cross And Arrow: A sextet of unlikely friends try to take a day trip to the big city. It quickly leads to selfcest.
Past Sins: A filly is created from a botched spell, and a unicorn decides to be it's mom.
- Or: A fanfic writer tries to tell a deep, compelling story about an evil resurrected... using ponies. There's some mixed feedback.
- Past Sins MST: A group makes fun of the unrevised version of the above story.
Poke Wars Thanks to the efforts of a Well-Intentioned Extremist that thinks Humans Are The Real Monsters, once-lovable creatures now want to kill everything. Some of the godly creatures side with this extremist, others do not.
Pony Space: A mentally scarred engineer and a magic-using librarian team up to save her world from an evil rock.
Progress: A shut-in immortal whose best friend is an abacus tries to catch up on modern society.
Pretty Cure Perfume Preppy: Gratuitous French and Gratuitous Japanese combine their powers to make things smell nice.
- Pretty Cure Heavy Metal: An all-girl metal band protects the universe from a land of Satanists by using The Power of Rock.
  - Pretty Cure: Agents of Romero: History repeats itself, but this time our stalwart band of survivors consist of a soon-to-be-former autistic boy, his girlfriend, a Bifauxnen, a lady samurai, a snobby rich girl, her hapless overweight boyfriend, a ballet student, the school nurse, and a Tagalong Kid who becomes a protege of the ballet student. All except for the school nurse become Cures as they investigate the cause of the ongoing Zombie Apocalypse.
  - Pretty Cure Transient School: Eight students at a school with a Gender Flipped dress code fight a robot and his crossdressing henchmen, all while in drag.
  - Pretty Cure Old School Videos: Three groups of Cures unite to promote the early days of home video.
  - Pretty Cure Classics: Six drama students fight for the Golden Age of Hollywood... seventy years after it ended. Hey, the Golden Age has got good promotional value, doesn't it?
  - Club Pretty Cure: An artist/calligrapher, a gymnast descended from a Russian ballerina, a young cook, a drummer, an otaku, a gardener, and a detective interested in the supernatural fight an evil organization that's bent on stealing dreams.
  - Cyber Pretty Cure: A trio of video game and computer geeks fight your average everyday technological maladies anthropomorphized.
  - Dark Age of Pretty Cure: Four teenagers wielding the power of darkness fight evil in a story taken straight from The Dark Age of Comic Books.
Relationships Series: A librarian, a cop, and a military combat instructor get into a three-way relationship after a drunken night together.
The New Captain N: A young man makes lots of new friends, lives in a castle, and gets laid multiple times after breaking his best friend's television.
Renegade: A scarred soldier hunts down a treacherous agent amid a backdrop of multiple rival galactic powers while horrors from beyond the edge of the galaxy plot galactic extinction. A bald jackass with an insufferable grin plucks everyone's strings.
The Salvation War: God abandons humanity, gives Satan domain over earth. Humanity objects. Violently.
A Scotsman in Egypt: Two angry Scottish princes get drunk and decide to go on a lark halfway across the world. History gets a claymore up the arse as a result.
The Second Try: The two most commonly used Eva fanfic plots are done together.
Shining Pretty Cure: Fangirl ascends but ends up in the wrong genre. She doesn't mind at all. An Ill Girl glows and tries not to be too obvious a Sixth Ranger.
Shinji and Warhammer 40 K: A young boy finds a box full of wargame miniatures and starts talking to them. They start talking back. Then he gets a giant robot. And Psychic Powers. Then the weird stuff starts.
- Thousand Shinji: A different version of that young boy converts his friends to his cult in a plot against his father.
- ToyHammer: A reclusive artist and his geeky friend find the aforementioned wargame miniatures that have been accidentally delivered to his house.
Q-Basic Gorillas: An idiot touches a forbidden relic and turns his entire city into primates, as well as the enemy forces invading his hometown. Several millennia later, the rival primate factions are equipped with Magitek up the gazoo, and things quickly descend into a plot that reads like Transformers meets Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
Stars Above: An ordinary high-school girl's quiet life is thrown into disarray by the arrival of an angsty Magical Girl and a bunch of monsters. Yuri ensues.
Stray: a young Soviet soldier gives a new meaning to Stalking Is Love as he irreparably violates his universe's space-time continuum to get together with an anime geek who lives several decades in his future. Metaphor-laden gay sex ensues.
Swarm On the Somme Space cockroaches attack France.
Those Lacking Spines: Organization XIII suffers a Mega Crossover Groin Attack. Deconstructions ensue.
Though A Bird Can't Fly, That Doesn't Mean It Never Will: A minor character from a major anime and manga franchise doesn't die, and has adventures almost as crazy as those of the original series' main characters.
Tiberium Wars: A very badly-written Novelization of a game inspires a much-better-written fan-novelization of said game that waxes on the brutality of war and has a very badass old man.
Time Lords and Terror: A crazy British guy who lives in a box is turned into a horse, and helps save an alternate dimension from Darker and Edgier versions of characters from an animated movie for little girls.
Uninvited Guests: An albino midget opens his home to several hundred unruly psychopaths when an obnoxiously cheerful girl burns theirs to the ground.
A Very Muppets Mystery: A female OC detective solves a murder with the help of a comedic bear and a talking frog.
A World Without Rainbows: An alternate universe fic that borrows elements from Fringe and concerns a certain-kind of rainbow not occurring and the lives of 6 horses without it.