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For Your Consideration...
I don't read much fanfic. It's rare that there's any that's actually good. My first experience with it was the monstrosity known as Undocumented Features. For those of you who have never encountered UF, you are actually pretty lucky; UF is titanic in proportions, as you can see in their chronology of stories.* Anyway, UF was my first exposure to fanfic. I started reading... and reading... and reading... and managed to get my head out of it before very long. It wasn't that it was great writing, it was just encompassing. The sheer volume and detail was staggering. When you start throwing in everything including kitchensink(fic) it gets out of control, unwieldly, and not really interesting. If I really wanted to read the sort of thing I was writing ten-fifteen years ago, I'd... uh, read the stuff I wrote ten-fifteen years ago.
But enough of UF; it's a monster that bears no further talk. Much, much later I was exposed to Children of an Elder God which was an altogether different beast. This wasn't a fanfic so much as a fan-made re-imagining and re-writing. And it was good. Or at least, decent, and better and more consistent than the original material. The characters were sympathetic, it had elements that were interesting to me (Cthulhu Mythos,) it was engaging, and it was internally consistent. I posted about CEG earlier in this LJ.
Not long ago on the TV Tropes Wiki (WARNING: Bloody addictive! =) ) I ran into another fanfic. Now, I don't read random fanfic but there is one thing that will get my attention: Subversion of tropes. In this case, the subverted genre was that of so-called magical girls exemplified by Sailor Moon. Basically, what happens when one of these girls gets frelling sick and tired of the whole thing? That's the premise of Sailor Nothing. It's fascinating in an artistic trainwreck sort of way. It subverts the 'magical girl' trope boldly, and there are some storytelling methods that are unique and different. Caution: This is not a happy story; I would actually rate it as having 1.5 shinjis on the Angst Scale; people are seriously broken in it and things don't get better until the very end. The battle scenes aren't overdone. (They're almost anticlimactic, actually; it helps to focus on the characters.) But again, this is not a happy story and it might actually be triggering in places.
It made me think of another subversion of the magical girl trope I ran into some time ago. A brief search and, yes, it is in fact still around. Magical Girl Hunters is not as consistent as CEG or Sailor Nothing. This is in part because it's a shared 'improv fanfic' and also because along the line it took on a life of it's own. It started out as a lighthearted subversion of the genre and became something like a psychodrama. (Fortunately, unlike UF, the manager of it ended it before it became a Behemoth of text.) The concept is pretty straightforward: Magical girls are a plague, and the two main characters are the cure. Along the line is takes every magical girl trope and turns it inside out. It's not for everyone, and it's definitely not for kids. (Then again, CEG isn't, and heck, neither is Evangelion, let alone hundreds or thousands of other anime, manga, and fanfics.)
Neither of these fanfics have a great deal to recommend them; they're amateur writing, done for enjoyment and not publication. They're a bit sophomoric in places, the characters at least start out broken (in SN they get worse before they get better) and they get... weird in places. That being said, I thought they were interesting (and subversive) enough to mention.
* - Bloody hell. I just looked at it for the first time and I'm floored.
Pax!
But enough of UF; it's a monster that bears no further talk. Much, much later I was exposed to Children of an Elder God which was an altogether different beast. This wasn't a fanfic so much as a fan-made re-imagining and re-writing. And it was good. Or at least, decent, and better and more consistent than the original material. The characters were sympathetic, it had elements that were interesting to me (Cthulhu Mythos,) it was engaging, and it was internally consistent. I posted about CEG earlier in this LJ.
Not long ago on the TV Tropes Wiki (WARNING: Bloody addictive! =) ) I ran into another fanfic. Now, I don't read random fanfic but there is one thing that will get my attention: Subversion of tropes. In this case, the subverted genre was that of so-called magical girls exemplified by Sailor Moon. Basically, what happens when one of these girls gets frelling sick and tired of the whole thing? That's the premise of Sailor Nothing. It's fascinating in an artistic trainwreck sort of way. It subverts the 'magical girl' trope boldly, and there are some storytelling methods that are unique and different. Caution: This is not a happy story; I would actually rate it as having 1.5 shinjis on the Angst Scale; people are seriously broken in it and things don't get better until the very end. The battle scenes aren't overdone. (They're almost anticlimactic, actually; it helps to focus on the characters.) But again, this is not a happy story and it might actually be triggering in places.
It made me think of another subversion of the magical girl trope I ran into some time ago. A brief search and, yes, it is in fact still around. Magical Girl Hunters is not as consistent as CEG or Sailor Nothing. This is in part because it's a shared 'improv fanfic' and also because along the line it took on a life of it's own. It started out as a lighthearted subversion of the genre and became something like a psychodrama. (Fortunately, unlike UF, the manager of it ended it before it became a Behemoth of text.) The concept is pretty straightforward: Magical girls are a plague, and the two main characters are the cure. Along the line is takes every magical girl trope and turns it inside out. It's not for everyone, and it's definitely not for kids. (Then again, CEG isn't, and heck, neither is Evangelion, let alone hundreds or thousands of other anime, manga, and fanfics.)
Neither of these fanfics have a great deal to recommend them; they're amateur writing, done for enjoyment and not publication. They're a bit sophomoric in places, the characters at least start out broken (in SN they get worse before they get better) and they get... weird in places. That being said, I thought they were interesting (and subversive) enough to mention.
* - Bloody hell. I just looked at it for the first time and I'm floored.
Pax!