Webnovel.Forum

Now that I'm back here again, let me answer a very simple question most readers that haven't written anything yet have about fanfictions.

Why do so many people hate fanfiction, and their writers?

I have always seen this question, and again, there's another question many of them ask.

Fanfictions take much, or even more effort than writing originals, so why the hate?

Look, I won't say or curse anything about anyone because I'm an author and it'll only ruin my name and create more opportunities for people to rub dirt on me later. But, I hate the people that say that.

Fanfictions are not hard to write.

Because it simply requires less creativity to write fan fiction.

Look, I have never before written fanfiction. But I did, once upon a time, use it as a practice field. I usually back then thought of it as a practice field. If I was struggling to convey action sequences in my writing, I would think why not take a break to write a fight scene between Batman and Black Panther? Can’t nail down emotion? Write about the first day of school after the Battle of Hogwarts.

Struggling with infusing your story with truly scary moments? Have your characters being chased after by the Alien. But that’s not a respectable final product.

Why? Because you’ve skipped several massive and crucial parts of the writing process.

Fan Fiction by its very nature is always less original than writing from scratch. FanFic writers are using characters, stories, and locations that are pre-designed and are not your own creation. This holds no sway on your writing ability, but it does comment on your creativity and willingness to start from the bottom and work your way up

• World-building.
  Instead of delving into what makes this world tick, from history to geography to genre to its very name, you’ve just yanked it out of someone else’s work. The Harry Potter series is impressive not just because of the depth of its characters but because of the expansiveness of its world. From candies to books to places to monsters, she has come up with some pretty ingenious ideas. Imagine if another author wrote a series with all of the same content and just three new characters. Would you be impressed or would it feel tired?

• Character Development.
  One of the most challenging parts of writing a story is coming up with the journey of a character. You’ve got to guide them along, throwing punch after punch at them not just to watch them get hit but to see how they’re going to respond. You have to figure out their desires and drives and dig into what makes them tick. Frodo Baggins isn’t just a vertically-challenged jewelry-disposal guy. He has depth because of his struggle and the emotional journey he makes. If you snag a character out of a book, they've already made that journey. Sure, you can add touches and tweaks, but it’s like putting a hat on a statue rather than carving it out of the rock for yourself.

• The very plot.
  The author or creator has already outlined the conflict for you, and chances are your fan fiction will involve that in some way. We know the Empire is willing to destroy planets to create a dictatorship based on fear and power of the Dark Side, and that the Rebels can only stop them with the help of ancient magic and those who wield it. We also know that there are complex and painful family ties between the biggest names in the war, and that sucks us even further into the drama. By piggy-backing off of that, you’re not doing the dirty work of balancing big and small crises or establishing the stakes; you’re just using what someone else did.

• Good writing.
  Ok, so this is entirely subjective, but part of the reason so many ‘real’ writers dislike fan fiction writers is that there are way more bad writers in the world of fan fiction. It’s easier to get into since things are already established for you, which means writers with less talent tend to show up there. That doesn’t mean all fan fiction writers are bad. C.S. Lewis wrote the Narnia series as an allegory (read:retelling) of the Christian Bible with monsters someone else came up with. However, it just tends to be an area with more bad writers.

If you don’t think you have any of these things, if your characters and world and conflict are original and your writing is good, then let me ask you a question; why make it fan fiction? If you have a story where a samurai travels through time to kill the gods who will one day destroy the world, but his name is Tony Stark… Why not just change his name?

People don’t often respect fan fiction because it just piggybacks off of people’s ideas and leaves out major parts of the creative writing process. It’s not that this kind of work is totally unoriginal, but the writers still stole parts of it.

Gyihhuhu_ i can see your point.... now im gonna post something not to be confrontational or anything..
just gonna balance it out and present a counter argument

Gyihhuhu_ Why do so many people hate fanfiction, and their writers?

Due to the inexperience of many fanfic writers, fan fiction has gained a reputation for being a source of horrible, horrible writing. However there are fanfics out there that are INCREDIBLY good. Sometimes being just as good as, if not better than, the original work.

Gyihhuhu_ Fanfictions are not hard to write.

Fan Fiction is a form of Alternate or Expanded Universe created by the fans of a work, rather than the work's original creator. Fan Fiction, or "Fanfics" as they are often called, are written for any number of reasons, such as:

to continue a story that ended prematurely (Continuation);
to redo a story the way the author thinks it should have gone (Fix Fic);
to see what would happen if certain characters are placed in unusual situations (Alternate Universe Fic),
to see what happens when the characters of one franchise encounter the characters of another franchise (Crossover);
to imagine oneself in the fictional universe (elf-Insert Fic);
to get the characters to have sex with, date, marry, have children with, or have crushes on, each other or the author (Shipping)
so yeah doesnt involve any hard elements does it?

Gyihhuhu_ "Because it simply requires less creativity to write fan fiction.", "This holds no sway on your writing ability, but it does comment on your creativity and willingness to start from the bottom and work your way up",

One problem with fanfiction is sometimes writers don't do their research even when it is very simple. A common occurrence is when an author from a country other than the original work's country of origin writes characters as if they are from their own country. An example is Harry Potter where non-British writers (particularly American) make characters act and think like an American would; this also happens vice versa as seen in Fifty Shades of Grey.

so yeah up above are all copy and paste responses from me

• World-building.
  while indeed you dont need to make up a new world from the top of your imagination... through research you can see how others build worlds and learn from them how they established said worlds and also fix plotholes and inconsistencies with elements that are reasonable which is very hard to do.

• Character Development.
  just saying your not creating your own character means nothing, as in fanfic the most important part in character development is "staying in character" you will need to convey how a character acts and depending on the series you will need to convey a lot of colorful personalities. in a way its training how to make characters you write stay in character and not display irratic personality disorders

• The very plot
  yep there is already a plot there... its now your job to fix plotholes, expand on the universe and add additional elements, think how the character acts and how events will play out with your inserted characters imagine how other characters will react to your changes. is it believable? was it rational? did nothing change even though your character made big changes?

• Good writing
  yeah totally agree with you there there are a lot of bad writers in fanfics its one of the biggest reasons why it has a bad rep.. but you gotta keep in mind, a lot of beginner writers go into fanfiction thinking it is so easy to make good stories that they never noticed how much effort it takes to truly make a good fanfic and ultimately failing, ending in a situation that we are here today seeing fanfic as bad.

and lastly but not least

Gyihhuhu_ It’s not that this kind of work is totally unoriginal, but the writers still stole parts of it.

Although fanfic exploded along with the Internet, it existed well before the Net did. Such luminaries as John Stuart Mill contributed unauthorized, original stories set in a fictional universe. Before medieval French troubadours were shipping Lancelot and Guinevere, the ancient Greeks were writing plays about relationships between characters in The Iliad. In Plato's Symposium one character complains that a play by Aeschylus got the characterization of Achilles and Patroclus wrong. Namely, that it got the Lover and Beloved dynamic backwards.

all in all... fanfic should be categorized on their own and there are already great places for them no need to put them here at this site... most that go here expect eastern fiction rather than fanfiction.
also while fanfics is based on original works there are no trully original work as you call it as everything came from some kind of source in different types of forms and you cant reason that it aint hard to do... anyone can make mediocre stories, but it still takes good creativity and research to truly make something good
yeah..... anyway cant have a one sided view of everything
every thing i copy pasted i got from here fanfic
read more on the deep history pertaining this topic.

and cant stress this enough...
fanfics on the internet are usually categorized as the dumping grounds of horrible writing that it has such a bad rep... while also a reason why fanfics themselves are considered to be their own category and should not be mixed in with normal fiction.

it is how fandoms share their love for the series they are writing for and written by the fandom for the fandom
they are not things written to get Votes or be at the top of some sort of ranking.

Transparency What most of us are saying is that they need their own section because they by deffinition are not an original novel.

Just found this thread.
Don't let it die.
I fully agree to the suggestion of a separate system for fanfics, as I similarly don't like the majority of them.
Banning is in my opinion not realistic (cus who's going to check?)
I'm rooting for the lawsuit.

Agree, agree, agree. Don’t wanna add any points, but my voice. So here I am.

F—k fanfics.

(jk, just separate them.)

Blackvision
We are two who have not read fanfics on Qidian.
I've been a fanfic writer on Brazilian sites, so I understand the two sides of writing original and fanfics.

Particularly... I do not know which is the most laborious, I just know the result in a question of readers, works with fanfiction are more rewarding with the incentives.

Of course, the originals leave a greater strain when they are evaluated, after all, it is my world that is being exposed to thousands of people. So when a person criticizes the original work, for me, it's like a bullet in the heart. Already in fanfic, it is just a fantasy or a wish to be realized in that world created by another author.

I do not know if I was very clear about that.

Anyway, I do not read fanfic anymore, I do not want to destroy the perfect work of an author, even if he did shit in the last volume of his work (Bleach!).

But I'm not going to lie, I read some books (yes, real books, those bestsellers or those that go to the movies) and I feel a compulsion to modify some endings, especially if it is the character that I love the most and he dies of a very unfair and meaningless way. Then I restrain myself (I do not publish), just write to myself, to my self-satisfaction.

Come on men, we can't let this thread die! I watched tens and tens of sublime writers fall below the 100s when fanfictions became famous here, and I guarantee, I will fucking file a lawsuit if that happens.

Jk
On a serious note, if anyone is actually willing to do so, it's actually possible to file a lawsuit.

Lawsuit because of misappropriation of words, yes, you've heard me right. Filing fanfictions under a section called "original" is just short for funneling kerosene into your ass, webnovel.

Hey mods, where are you? @CKtalon

I don't mind fanfics much, but I have to agree that most of them on this site have dirt-poor quality. And it baffles me when there are fanfics about pornstars. Like, what even?

The amount of good fanfics on this site is so meagre that I was willing to severely lower my IQ to read ones that have horrible grammar and characters that are OOC because I was so desperate.

And yes, they should separate the fanfictions and the originals so that each of them have a separate voting system.

I also forgot to mention that the fanfiction community is in abundance of readers who don't know the meaning of character development. These kinds of readers are usually the ones who kept yapping on actually decent FFs about the MC not being OP enough. It really discourages any good FFs to be noticed and encourages more cruddy works that currently dominate the popular ranking in the Fanfiction genre.

AraiiYama heres a copy pasted response to that

One problem with fanfiction is sometimes writers don't do their research even when it is very simple. A common occurrence is when an author from a country other than the original work's country of origin writes characters as if they are from their own country. An example is Harry Potter where non-British writers (particularly American) make characters act and think like an American would; this also happens vice versa as seen in Fifty Shades of Grey.

Eventually, this accretion of fan-born details and mutations turns into things that "everybody knows" about the series. Those new to or unfamiliar with the original material are frequently confused into believing that it obviously must be canon if so many people mention it, even "facts" of the Epileptic Trees variety. This is especially the case with series that have long runs and which gloss over details which are unimportant to the plot but are of interest to the fans and the fan writers.

One famous example of this is the manga/anime Ranma ½, released well before the Internet became ubiquitous and when many fans had no easy access to the original source material. All manner of details (including the explanation of Akane's mallet as either a ki attack or as residing in a hyperdimensional pocket, her Flanderization into a "psychobitch", her lethal cooking (rather than being just bad), and the names and fates of the many missing mothers were never touched on in the show but became standardized in Ranma fan fiction over the course of approximately a decade. The process was accelerated and exacerbated by the appearance of fanfiction written by people who had never actually seen the show itself and whose only exposure to Ranma was other fanfiction.

Another famous example is the Harry Potter fanfic The Draco Trilogy, which was apparently so widely read that details such as Blaise Zabini being female and Ginny's name being Virginia were taken to be canon, although they were both refuted by later books.

It's not surprising that fans of some shows occasionally pen FAQs solely to reduce the accumulation of fanon in this way.