I have a confession: I used to write fanfic. It was a way of having some fun with characters I liked or, sometimes more often, characters I wasn't that familiar with before I tried writing them. My first fanfic was a sloppy sentimental piece about Alan Scott (the golden age Green Lantern) visiting the grave of a future U.S. president whom he had been unable to save when this future president was a boy. It was based on ALL-STAR SQUADRON ANNUAL #3. It was very short and basically revealed that, on Earth-2, this boy's name was Hal Jordan, something that always affected Scott's friendship with the Earth-1 Hal Jordan, who was of course the Earth-1 Green Lantern. It was the kind of short story that could only work in a fanfic setting and wouldn't have been worth writing about at all if it involved original characters. Too much backstory, too much explanation would have been necessary. Most of the appeal for writing fanfic is ultimately because it often requires less work on the part of the writer, though mostly this applies to popular characters. A fanfic writer doing a story about Batman and his cast of characters has it fairly easy, since most readers will be familiar with the mannerisms of Alfred, the interplay between Batman and Commissioner Gordon, and many other stereotypical Batman situations. I have to say, though, that most of the fanfic I wrote involved rather obscure or semi-original characters and required more work on my part to give them characterizations and such. Still, in the fanfic community within which I was writing, which was based on pre-Crisis DC Comics, some of those semi-obscure characters were more familiar to the other writers than a general audience, and since we basically wrote for each other (story feedback is always a problem for any writer), it wasn't necessary to get really deep into the background and character of, say, the golden age Hawkman.
After that first fanfic I got a bit better at it. I also did a few collaborations with other writers, which was mostly fun. And thankfully I never fell into the old trap of writing yourself into a story, or, worse, writing yourself into a story in which you romance a fictional character -- the "Mary Sue" fanfic. Neither have I ever written any erotica or slash fanfic. Not my thing. I haven't written any fanfic for a couple of years or so now, though, and I don't see myself getting back into it, even though I still own a couple of Yahoo Groups dedicated to fanfic, and I haven't kept up with them for well over a year now.
Occasionally I do read the odd fanfic, though. I've never come across any fanfics that are comparable to great literature, but I have had fun reading several of them. And, of course, there is a distinct pleasure in reading exceptionally BAD fanfics for their camp value. Sites such as
Godawful Fan Fiction list a lot of the worst ones out there. As the site's slogan goes, "Read them and weep."
Anyone know of any fanfic worth reading, whether based on comics or something else? Or fanfic that is just so cheesy and poorly written that, to read it is akin to watching a car wreck? Let us know. Post links if possible.
