Great book Bad Fanfic Potential / Bad Book Great Fanfic / Etc

[LynKit]

We were talking about the Black Jewels series on my Discord - and I once again remembered that while I enjoyed the series, it was So Absolutely Focused on this one More Powerful Than Anyone Ever group that any attempt to roleplay in the setting (and I did try, more than once) was nearly doomed. Fanfic almost had to be TV-style, i.e., focused on those characters, although truth be told the last time I went looking was before I knew about AO3.

Countering this with HP, which has had some amazing fanfic written - AUs, Epilogue-what-epilogue, what have you - but where the canon is pretty ... bad?

And then throwing in Jim Butcher's Chronicles of Alera, which people can't really agree on re. good/bad, but the fanfic I've read has the same problem as the Black Jewels world - the story is focused around one character who is Just That Powerful.

So here goes my thread du Jour. (The threading will continue until morale improves!)

a) do you think powerful central characters DO make a setting harder to fic/rp in? Why or why not? (10 points)

b) name a setting or book which leans one way or the other for you (good setting, bad for fic: bad setting, good for fic; good setting good for fic, etc.) and if there's anything in particular that leans it that way (2 pts, 8 points)

c) bonus points - exception to this rule? Not the easy stuff - not like, a really crappy fic written in a crappy world, because we can all point out My Immortal. I'm talking a fic or a rp that made you go "hey, maybe people CAN do this thing well" or... use your imagination.

(*) I just finished my first calc exam, okay? And I've been up to my ears in college lectures and homeworks trying to catch up.

[katrani]

oh this is an interesting prompt!

Honestly, it all depends on the *kind* of fanfic? Like, if you have godly-powered characters, sure, it's going to be hard to write them having violent encounters with enemies. But what if they have to get a "normal" job for a day for reasons? What if we just drop them into a high school AU? What if you're just writing the characters opening up to each other around a campfire? If you're making OCs, how do they react to their day-to-day getting interrupted? Are they trying to stop the heroes, or just run into them?

So honestly, the character power levels just makes certain types of fanfic or RP harder, not the whole thing. This can also be influenced by how fleshed out the world is, how widely-accepted fanon is (I would *never* want to write for like FiM is or MCU cause there's so much fanon for even minor characters that any alternate interpretation is prone to get you argued with), how crunchy any extra mechanics like magic are... There's a range!

[LynKit]

Ooh those are some good points. Granted, the stuff I was trying to do with Black Jewels leaned heavily on the fdomme nature of the setting.

FiM?

I do like the idea of folks-on-the-street sort of fic though.

[katrani]

Friendship is Magic. MLP incarnation that ran starting in.... 2008? or so??? Just finished up in the past couple of years, after a *decade*.
The fandom got very toxic very quickly- combination of memetic irony poisoning and clashes between *usually* men that do everything-must-be-classified-catalogued-and-canon sorts of fandom and *usually* women that'd been MLP fans for a while and treated it as more open-ended, and how Hasbro reacted to that with the merch that they made.

But it was a good show and I stuck with it til the end and cried a lot about it, lol

[LynKit]

Oh YEAH. I mean, I even know some relatively non-toxic bronies and it was still... uncomfortable.

[InspectorCaracal]

Okay so I suspect that this is because of me coming into the whole idea of fanfic/RP from a completely different angle, but bear with me here while I'm confused.

How does a series following a small group or an individual who is more powerful than everyone else (basically a Shounen Action Protagonist?) make it bad for fanfic or RP? What kind of fanfic or RP is it bad for? What is it about that narrative approach that makes it bad for fanfic?

[LynKit]

How does a series following a small group or an individual who is more powerful than everyone else (basically a Shounen Action Protagonist?) make it bad for fanfic or RP? What kind of fanfic or RP is it bad for? What is it about that narrative approach that makes it bad for fanfic?

So I might be wrong about Fanfic, but what I've found with the roleplay is that the stories are so focused around the Main Characters that they seem to suck up all the power in the universe. *cough* Which might just mean "we have to do more worldbuilding to decide what other people have in the universe." Or maybe it's "this story is cool because of its really powerful protag. What about less powerful protags?"

[Bee]

I keep meaning to reply to this lol

fwiw I think it really depends on the type of fic? If you want to expand on a setting, then you need more material to work with than just the overly powered protag around whom everything revolves

Harry Potter hit the jackpot in that the books provided just enough material to work with, while hinting at so much stuff happening in the background you could fill in as you wished while still being canon-compliant. Up until CC I read Lily/James stories almost exclusively and there was never a shortage of great takes on the years leading up to their death.

but for stories centered on specific characters, writing fanfic about them would be easier than writing fanfic in the setting? So you could have AUs, what-ifs, retellings, but not OCs that aren't directly involved with the protags in some way

[LynKit]

fwiw I think it really depends on the type of fic? If you want to expand on a setting, then you need more material to work with than just the overly powered protag around whom everything revolves

Yeah, I think this is sort of where I was leaning with this. Maybe it's the type of RP I was heading for...

but for stories centered on specific characters, writing fanfic about them would be easier than writing fanfic in the setting? So you could have AUs, what-ifs, retellings, but not OCs that aren't directly involved with the protags in some way

Hrrm, I hadn't thought about it that way! Thanks for the take~~

[InspectorCaracal]

How does a series following a small group or an individual who is more powerful than everyone else (basically a Shounen Action Protagonist?) make it bad for fanfic or RP? What kind of fanfic or RP is it bad for? What is it about that narrative approach that makes it bad for fanfic?

So I might be wrong about Fanfic, but what I've found with the roleplay is that the stories are so focused around the Main Characters that they seem to suck up all the power in the universe. *cough* Which might just mean "we have to do more worldbuilding to decide what other people have in the universe." Or maybe it's "this story is cool because of its really powerful protag. What about less powerful protags?"

Oh okay gotcha, you're thinking very specifically about the "put your own OCs in someone else's universe" kind of thing. (Which, I mean, we do that with those kinds of stories too but usually not as independent protags.)