Why Fan Fiction?

I've written short fiction for a number of years now. None of it has been published. In the early days, I would get a copy of the Writer's Market, comb through it, circling any prospective publishers. Typing up my stories on my 1986 Mac SE, I'd print them out, and mail them en masse, wave after wave of stories to the prospects. It's a math game, I thought. At the time I was working as a telemarketer, and "the math game" theory was pretty burned into my mind. The more you keep picking up the phone and dialing numbers, the more likely you are to get a hit. So there more I kept writing, and printing, and mailing, the more likely I believed I was to get published. The proof of this theory is still in the works.

I never thought seriously about fanfiction until very recently. Up until then, I associated the word with things like My Immortal. But then, I started playing the Touhou games.

The thing about Touhou Project that most appeals to me, then as now, is the literary spirit of the games. It's still a vertical scrolling shooter game that is arguably one talented musician's way of releasing songs, but it also boasts a very long cast of characters. There are a few protagonists, some more prominent than others, enemies (however temporary - defeating an enemy leads to at worse an uneasy truce), minor players, cameos, and extras. That in itself is not necessarily unique to gaming.

However, the game's creator has written a number of works providing further histories and backstories of the characters, as well as the history of the world in which they live, Gensokyo. This breathes life into the characters - they have developed personalities, levels of social interaction, a shared history of events that span centuries. A mythology is created here. This is a rich well of material to draw from.

When I first got these games, I used to play them for hours on end. So the mythological aspect of it grew more vivid in my mind's eye. About two years went by, and then maybe out of boredom, I started writing a piece about Aya getting a hot lead on a story ... which I never completed. I'm not sure why, to be honest. Sometimes stories just decide they want to take a nap for a while.

My first complete fanfiction, written a few months later, started as a joke. Me and a few friends were on IRC, and somebody posted a link to this (moderately NSFW) image. We began to speculate how Cirno would make such a discovery, and what events would follow. At the time, I was sitting in a job-related class with my laptop open, so I went ahead and wrote Down On the Corner. From there, things started to pick up steam.

Writing fanfiction is in some ways a challenge and in other ways leisure. Your characters are all fully developed in advance; their personalities, their lives, their interactions with each other. Your audience knows a great deal about your characters' motivations beforehand, and if you know your audience well enough, you know which characters they like and dislike. That definitely takes some work off your shoulders.

But then there's "canon", i.e., all the aspects of your characters specified by the game creator himself. Different fanfiction writers have different approaches to canon. Some pretty much ignore it; bringing in different genres, original characters and the like, while drawing from the parts of canon they want to utilize for the story. Others try to aim to stay within the boundaries of canon. That can be a challenge. Although the mythology of Gensokyo is rich, you run into the problems of maintaining consistency and, more importantly, creating something fresh. Knowing your audience is already enthusiastic about the mythology you're basing a story on can also add pressure; fans can be very protective of that which they cherish, and if they feel you've done a disservice, you'll definitely hear it.

In most other ways, writing fanfiction works the same way writing literary fiction does. You still have to breathe to life a story that keeps the reader going until the very end, and enjoying every step of the way. It's the act itself of shaping a story from pencilled notes to a living thing that keeps me going. And there's worse source material you could draw from than Gensokyo.

(Image: Pixiv)