General Discussion

Reader and writer. Recently been on a Helluva Boss bender TwT hmu if you want UHHHHH more info *dies*

[quote name="ImpossibleJedi4" date="2022-11-26 06:28:12" ] [quote name="@RtoRestart" date="2022-11-26 06:14:22" ] Meee! I feel embarrassed sharing mine though so I tend to keep them to myself T.T Not that I really write them anyway, I tend to just have ideas rotate in my mind like a rotisserie chicken... Unfortunately my current main fandom doesn't have too much of an art/fanfiction community (from what I've seen), so that's a shame. I've been wanting to get back into reading them but I get super embarrassed about looking it up so I just... never do it. :c [/quote] Hey no need to be embarrassed!! Rotating ideas is fun too lol but hey, there's a lot of people out here doing this and I promise there's nothing to be ashamed of :) [/quote] Sometimes I have to remind myself too that its okay to be cringey sometimes. <3

[quote name="StarlightDragon7" date="2022-11-23 08:50:33" ] I write plots for fanseries and fangames. I don't write fanfiction. However, if you haven't seen my broadcast message already, I make dark Fer.al AUs in the form of things... that aren't fanfiction. Such as fangames, worldbuilding projects, and animated webseries. What I do write is Fer.al AUs in the form of fangames, worldbuilding projects, and webseries. As such, I don't have any AO3 or Wattpad accounts. Since they're for fanfic... and I make webseries and fangames. Do AU webseries and fangames count on this thread? Although they're not actually fanfiction (one's a webseries, I have no idea what I'm doing with one of them, and one will end up as an MMO.), they are very much AUs. And I guess AUs could be considered... fanfiction. I'm currently working on 3 Fer.al AUs. (Although the other 2 are on the backburner for the one I'm currently working on.) So, in case you don't know, Fer.al was this really cool MMO in which you played as a mythical creature called a Spark. You collected stuff from various lands, played minigames, did quests for various NPCs, and you crafted stuff to customize your avatar. You also had something called a sanctuary which was a private island you could customize. The game was only open to the public 2 years before Wildworks (the developers of Fer.al) decided it would be a good idea to take Fer.al, rip all its assets out, and make an NFT game that looks completely like a ripoff of Fer.al. This project was called Cinder. Guess how the fandom reacted. They went feral. yes the pun was intended Backlash happened, and then Wildworks decided to shutdown Fer.al. They are now universally hated by the fandom. Now while these AUs aren't fanfiction, (one will be a webseries, I have no idea what I'm doing with one of them, and one will be an MMO very similar to Fer.al.), they are fanworks. So the AU I've been working on for the past few months is called FERA_GLITCH. It's an AU heavily inspired by Undertale, as well as an Undertale AU called Glitchtale. Glitchtale was what inspired me to make FERA_GLITCH. FERA_GLITCH is an AU about a very glitched gameplay session of Fer.al which started after 3 mysterious kitsune started a genocide route through Fer.al for unknown reasons. However, because of a very serious security vulnerability that wasn't patched properly, and a glitch that stemmed from this security vulnerability... the genocide route failed, because the Sparks escaped from Fera before the 3 kitsune could kill them. So, 8 months before the main events of the AU, 3 mysterious kitsune went on what was essentially a genocide route through Fera (the world of Fer.al in this AU.). It would have succeeded, if it hadn't been for a glitch that created a massive paradox in both Fera and Fer.al. This event was then known as the Purge. In the Purge, 4 Sparks (who are about 14-16 in human years) escaped Fera and survived. Our protagonists are Greyscale, an emo amnesiac kitsune who has no idea what happened to her or who she was before the Purge, Sanguine, a dragon edgelord who is an excellent hacker and who refuses to talk about anything related to her before the Purge, Sweetheart, who's a magical senri who's a genuinely nice Spark and likes anime, and Sparky, a Minecraft streamer & Youtuber who is the only major canon character from Fer.al who has a role in this AU. He is also a kitsune. They get thrown together by fate, 3 mysterious Sparks trying to kill them, and other things. The series has no real plot. Yet. If it gets finished, it'll end up as a webseries. (major spoilers for the au below) However, what they don't know is... they're in a cosmic horror story. And they also don't know they're actually playing the game... The 3 kitsune are actually 3 avatars of Wildworks' fictional equivalent, Serenity NEO Corporation. The reason why they're being hunted down is because if Serenity NEO Corporation kills them, the glitched timeline will collapse. And the world is controlled by 3 forces: the Developers, the Hackers, and the Players. And they're all trying to gain complete control over Fera. And the rest is a WIP! I just realized this sounds like homestuck crap The next AU is the first AU I started working on. It's called Spa.rks. Spa.rks is an AU set after Fera (Fer.al's world) got destroyed by the Bewixt (which is basically like the shade in FR) and... stuff happened. If I finish it, it'll end up being a project that expands the worldbuilding of Fer.al. I'm also thinking about making it into an MMO based on features Wildworks never implemented into the main game. It's on the backburner for FERA_GLITCH tho. And finally, I have a nightmare fuel-laden Fer.al X Backrooms crossover! Fer.al: The Rooms of Entropy In this AU, when Wildworks wanted to create Fer.al... they couldn't just destroy Fer.al. So what they did instead was they threw it into the Void. The Void is basically a garbage dump for Wildworks. It's a place where they throw stuff they don't want in Fer.al, but they don't want to delete it because it could be useful. After Fera ended up in the Void, things rapidly started to go downhill. Magic began to stop working, weird 'glitches' started happening, strange, glitchy monsters began to show up, computers showed up, Feralians would randomly fall out of the world into strange places not known in Fer.al, some corrupted, some glitched... The reason behind all of this happening is silent data corruption. I'll leave a link to a wikipedia article: Wikipedia article So... yeah, those are all the AUs im working on right now As for fanworks I like, I like AUs. I like Undertale AUs and Fer.al AUs. Unfortunately, Fer.al AUs don't seem to exist right now. There is Luranlow, a plan for a game inspired by Fer.al, but... that's not exactly an AU and all the information for it is locked away in a discord server. Also if anyone has an idea for a Fer.al AU feel free to infodump to me about it and if you find any please tell me thanks [/quote] @StarlightDragon7 keep me posted if you post anything!!!!!!

I'd like to say I don't see fanfic as practice for "the real thing". As someone who writes both fanfic and original fiction and knows there are people who are published and still write fanfic--it's an enjoyable thing to do on its own right and doesn't necessarily have to be something you do to build up to working on completely original fiction.

Personally, I get excited about fanfic a lot of the time in a way I don't with original fiction. There's this sense I'm having a lot of fun, the expectations are lower (in the sense there's no pressure to perform in a particular way for a particular end), you have more freedom to do whatever you want because there's no market you have to consider, and I get a feeling I'm sharing something with other people in a way I don't when it comes to original fiction. I think for a lot of people there's definitely pulls to one or the other and some people do start off with fanfic and realize they like writing and want to focus on original works more. But it's a hobby that encompasses a lot of different types of stories and writing styles from a lot of different people for a lot of different reasons and it's difficult to really give one representation of it because it's all so varied.

I've been reading fanfic for a long time and I also read a lot of published books. I think what readers want out of either one is so vastly different that aside from some prose and formatting dialogue you're not going to get good practice doing one for the other, necessarily. I mean even though I'm still the same person what I want from one or the other isn't the same. And there are things I genuinely believe fanfic does really well that original works don't.

As for readerfic? Actually I think it's a pretty cool thing that it's a niche that exist solely within fanfic. I mean think about it, regardless of what anyone thinks it's a type of story that doesn't exist anywhere else. Fandom/fanfic invented it and that's pretty neat. (I mean I guess you could say that dating sims/some VNs are sort of the game equivalent just with branching choices but for writing there's not.)

I think it's pretty cool that so many people use their talents and build their skills to share creative works for no other reason than to live in another world for a little bit and share that with others.