One of the many things that kept me occupied during high school was the mystical, magical world of fan fiction. Instead of going to the library, picking up a book, reading the first few pages, and knowing what the ending is going to be, I could just look online for the nigh-infinite amount of stories based off stories with characters I know and love. The thing with fan fiction, though, is it can be good, bad, or ugly.
I have a love-hate relationship with fan fiction. On one hand, some of these stories can be significantly better and more detailed and more extravagant than anything I've read in my life — due to the fact that it's based off of an already developed idea and develops it further. They can go more in-depth about characters and all the thoughts in their minds. They can also be about how much Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy are so in love with each other and have vampire sex that ends up getting Harry pregnant. There's a large variety, and a little something for everyone.
As a newbie in fan fiction way long ago, this new world both intrigued and confused me. So many things are so creative and diverse, whereas other things are just so...you know, M-preg (male pregnancy). And some things are just downright weird. Sometimes I'm not looking for anything of great complexity: I just find some cutesy fluff fiction on some of my favorite ships, which I can find a dime a dozen. Of course, some of these can actually be cute, some can be extremely terrible, some can be explicit, and some can try to be explicit but it's obvious that it was written by an eleven-year-old ("And then they put their thing in my thing and we had sex for the first time." - Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way from the fan fiction "My Immortal").
Anyone who has been on the weird side of the Internet knows what "My Immortal" is: the accurately-named "worst fan fiction of all time." Anyone else who peruses through fan fiction knows that 90 percent of all fan fiction sucks. However, I have found a very interesting aspect of this kind of fan fiction; much akin to why so many people enjoy the movie "The Room," I find myself immensely enjoying all the terribleness that the Internet has to offer.
Take, for example, the ingenious stupidity of "Metroid High School." Take an incredibly serious video game franchise about Samus, a space bounty hunter fighting space pirates, and her arch nemesis, Ridley, a giant alien purple pterodactyl thing, and put it into a high school romance AU (Alternate Universe). What do you get? Ridley asking Samus out to the baig dance [sic], then having sex with her, getting her pregnant, taking away the pregnancy and giving her cholera, and then all of it being retconned. Then, suddenly, Samus is a feminist football player who's into politics and Aranian [sic] policies — and apparently gets pregnant again. As you can tell, this would be incredibly amusing to read. I have read this with so many groups of people that it's basically a friend-making tradition — we are not truly acquaintances until we have read Samus and Ridley together.
I could go into more ridiculous fan fictions such as the "Dragonball Z" and Anne Frank crossover (Hitler had just become a "Super Saiyan"), but there's more to it than just that. Fan fiction is a form of expression for a lot of people on the internet; whether or not they are competent writers, they can still take their favorite characters and put them in the most ridiculous, crazy, stupid situations and still have fun with it. In that sense, I respect every single fan fiction out there, from the in-depth essays on Harry Potter to Sonic the Hedgehog and Knuckles raising their children together.
