Internal Consistency in Fanwork

[Jason_Miao]

Well, there's a lot of popular fanon that catch on strong.

I'm well aware of that in general ("Akane-mallet-sama").  It's just one of those things that are hard to pick out specific instances when one isn't familiar with the source.  In those cases, I might give a pass to some aspect of a fanfic that's particularly nonsensical, thinking that it's the writer following canon, when it's really just a product of a self-reinforcing mass bash.

[Dracos]

Well, at the end of the day, that's why I used to ramble about a Make Sense manner of writing.

It actually isn't important whether or not the elements in a fanfic are canon.  It might not quite be the least important facet, but it's pretty far down there.

Long ago, I probably would've said what matters most is that it makes sense internally.  Also not quite true, but it is definitely pretty close to the top.  If the story world reacts appropriately to the notions put forward, then it's okay.  If it doesn't, then its a real problem.  It doesn't matter if it's comic or seriously, it just has to hold to the rules it puts out and have the reality match it.

[Jason_Miao]

Well, at the end of the day, that's why I used to ramble about a Make Sense manner of writing.

It actually isn't important whether or not the elements in a fanfic are canon.  It might not quite be the least important facet, but it's pretty far down there.

I'm with you on internal consistency, in terms of general writing.  With fanfics, I figure that if you're writing a fanfic of a series, you've implicitly accepted that series' assumptions.  If a writer can't accept at least most of those, then the writer might as well be writing an original fic.

Because of that, I tend to give slack on internal consistency if the source reflects the particular aspect in the fic.  If the source is full of awesome professionals who are lazy-bum teachers, so be it.  If it's fannon that is consistent the universe (and whatever tweak to the setting/plot that the writer cooked up), that's fine too.  If it's ridiculously exaggerated fannon (e.g Akane's cooking attempts equate with, let alone eclipse, the problems that Lum's cooking had), they're breaking out of the framework, and if they do that too much, then I question why the writer is calling it a fanfic in the first place.

[Dracos]

More fanworks are driven by dissatisfaction than anything else.  Almost all the rest are "Man wouldn't it be cool if x was in y?" (Whether from the crossover or ridiculous sexual pairing angle).  It's incorrect overall to view them as inherently tributes to the original work.

Almost all lego sets come with a given design.  Something clear that was considered to be made.  How come people still call it lego when they're blatantly ignoring the stated design instead of following it up or extending it?

Because at the end of the day, the building blocks they're using to tell their story are still lego and it belongs more with that then with real original stories.

[Jason_Miao]

More fanworks are driven by dissatisfaction than anything else.  Almost all the rest are "Man wouldn't it be cool if x was in y?" (Whether from the crossover or ridiculous sexual pairing angle).  It's incorrect overall to view them as inherently tributes to the original work.

Whether fanworks are driven by curiosity or dissatisfaction isn't really what I was getting at.  Keeping the boundaries and assumptions of "Series X" is what makes is an "X fanfic."  Of course one needs to bring something new to the story to make it a new story, and sometimes, that involves breaking down previous assumptions of Series X.  But if you break down too many of those, it stops being a fic about Series X.

Almost all lego sets come with a given design.  Something clear that was considered to be made.  How come people still call it lego when they're blatantly ignoring the stated design instead of following it up or extending it?

Because it's still mostly the Lego building blocks.  If you took a 1'x1' lego building and stuck it on a 30x50 sized traditional model train setting, most people would call it a model train setting with some Legos, but not consider the whole collection to be a Lego set in itself.  If you build most of the setting out of Legos, of course it'd probably be called a Lego train set and get posted to reddit or fark or whatnot.  What if it's 40% Lego?  85%?  57%?  People will make the calls differently.

I built plenty of Lego castles and pirate ships as a kid, so let me elaborate on your lego set analogy further.   If I had the bright idea to merge the two sets together into a Castle-Ship ("What if the forecastle...WAS ACTUALLY A CASTLE!"), I could do it by slapping two complete Lego sets together.  The end result would look pretty stupid when joined together that way, but it is unmistakably a puniriffic lego Castle-Ship. 

But I want the result to look less stupid.  Lego castles used grey or black bricks, and the ships tended to use mostly brown (at least, they did when I was playing with them).  Perhaps I'll take my general box of lego parts (they weren't always sold as fixed sets, and I did have such a box as a kid) and start to swap out part of the castle base so it seems the brown slowly merges into grey.  And that won't fix the fact that the Lego castles were generally much wider than the pirate ships, so perhaps I might remove the sides.  Having too much top-weight might unbalance the ship as well, so...

If I keep at it, at some undefined point, it's no longer really a Castle-Ship (although it's still all lego), is it?  It's just a ship with some weird grey bricks up front.  There is no objective limit to this either - there aren't any hard requirements where we could say "If I remove any more bricks from by lego castle set, it is no longer clearly a fusion of Castle and Ship, but would instead be the ship with perhaps a few bits more."


So if a writer keeps a rule that's internally inconsistent with the new rules he's put in place, I can give it a small pass, even if I personally don't agree with its use.  If it's a massive inconsistency, or there are too many of these, then the idea to integrate them wasn't such a good idea in the first place (Per the Castle-Ship example above).  If he can integrate everything in a consistent fashion that's optimal...but there are precious few fanfics out there that get close to this.

[Brian]

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HighSchoolAU

[Rezantis]

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HighSchoolAU

. . . I was thinking of that precise trope when Jason was talking about the train metaphor. 

I'm honestly a bit confused by that entire genre.

[thepanda]

I'm honestly a bit confused by that entire genre.

A ready-built reason to have all the characters you like in one place and interacting with each other that doesn't require plot judo?

[Brian]

Who knows?  It is most certainly a thing, though.

[Dracos]

I'm honestly a bit confused by that entire genre.

A ready-built reason to have all the characters you like in one place and interacting with each other that doesn't require plot judo?

Also comes with ready made "And we didn't kill x,y,z or won't kill x,y,z because we're high school students."

It's not just a stupidity of fanwork though.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Vixens - Ikki Tousen for example :\  Is this still a Three Kingdoms story?

I think it'd be dishonest to claim it entirely isn't, but it isn't necessarily truthful to say it's in the vein of the original.  It's undoubtedly a fanwork about the Three Kingdoms though, even though it threw away the:

Setting
Time Period
Gender
Violence level
Capabilities of characters
And probably more that I'm not familiar enough to say.

[thepanda]

Is this still a Three Kingdoms story?

It's Hollywood's 'inspired by' or 'based off a true story'. You know, like all those horror movies that totally happened!

[Brian]

Actually, not to be too much of a pedant, there are a few types of 'based on'/'inspired by', Panda.

One of them is, "And it should be even scarier, because it happened!  Supposedly."  That's like Blair Witch (ugh).

Another is, "We have based this on a public domain story that you may be familiar with, but changed it enough to avoid colliding with the rights of someone who has some sort of basis to sue us for imitating their own version."

And then there's the ever popular, "You liked this novel, right?  Well, now watch the expensively produced bad fanfic live-action version of it!  We got the rights, so it sucks for you to have been a fan of the original!"

[Dracos]

*takes a second to stab at Maou Yuusha anime on that note*

[Jason_Miao]

Also comes with ready made "And we didn't kill x,y,z or won't kill x,y,z because we're high school students."

Heh...there's a spamfic/vignette series idea in that remark.

Write it so that they do kill each other.  e.g, set up a Naruto-School fic but have explosions, death-vengence quests, monsters of unlimited power sealed into people, and Naruto trying to take the position of principal by beating the Principal Sarutobi.

The first paragraph would read: "Hi everyone, I've decided to write a Naruto story.  I don't know anything about Naruto, myself, but I've read [some utterly ridiculous high school fic], People Lie, and It's for a Good Cause, I Swear, so I think I've managed to figure out the important parts".