Fanfic: Difference between revisions

Some franchises -- such as ''[[Star Trek]]'' -- have actually turned fan fiction into a profit center by creating [[Tie-in Novel|Tie In Novels]]s. These books are usually penned by young and upcoming authors, often former [[Fanfic]] writers, and represent an intermediate step between fan fiction and completely original fiction.

Although [[Fanfic]] exploded along with the Internet, it existed ''well'' before the Net did. Such luminaries as John Stuart Mill contributed unauthorized, original stories set in a fictional universe. Before medieval French troubadours were shipping [[Arthurian Legend|Launcelot and Guinevere]], the ancient Greeks were writing plays about relationships between characters in ''[[The Iliad]]''. In [[Plato]]'s ''[[Symposium]]'' one character complains that a play by [[Aeschylus]] got the characterization of Achilles and Patroclus wrong. -- [[Slash Fic|Namelynamely, that it got the]] [[Lover and Beloved]] dynamic backwards.

One famous example of this is the anime ''[[Ranma ½|Ranma 1/2]]'', released well before the Internet became ubiquitous and when many fans had no easy access to the original source material. All manner of details (including the explanation of Akane's mallet as either a [[Ki Attacks|ki attack]] or as residing in a [[Hyperspace Mallet|hyperdimensional pocket]], her [[Flanderization]] into a "psychobitch", her [[Lethal Chef|lethal cooking]] (rather than being just bad), and the names and fates of the many [[Parental Abandonment|missing mothers]]) were never touched on in the show but became standardized in ''Ranma'' fan fiction over the course of approximately a decade. The process was accelerated and exacerbated by the appearance of fanfiction written by people who had never actually ''seen'' the show itself and whose only exposure to ''Ranma'' was other fanfiction.