Sweet Wrecks

Time to be weird and scary with big bro!

“Martha’s job is to watch a bunch of immature children constantly screaming at each other.

“So when she comes home, she likes to relax by turning on the tv and watch a bunch of immature adult women constantly screaming at each other.

“The difference is that the adults are not Martha’s problem.”

Which are basically "what if falling to your death wasn't actually a problem" and therefore fun.

I had a big fanfic in a previous fandom where one of the big reveals was the involvement of a kind of infamous villain, whose presence was built up to and foreshadowed through the whole fic until his reveal without ever mentioning his name, so that the name drop would be a gut punch. It worked especially well because of who the villain was and his presence in that fandom space specifically (it's very complicated) and if it was an original story this reveal wouldn't work at all the way it was written in the fic. Because if you don't have a predisposition to think about that character and his relationship to the hero in a very specific way, then just seeing their name won't do much to you; the reveal and the recontextualisation it pushes upon you hinges on your previous knowledge of the source material.

I think it's an interesting tool fanfic authors are given. One of my favorite fanfic of all time is partially a re-imagining of its source material's canon, and something it does is introduce antagonists much earlier in the story or deepen npcs' stories. It then works to evoke a tragic irony that again wouldn't work if you didn't know the source material, and it's something the author obviously has a lot of fun with.

this is one of the better reasons people say that i.e. shakespeare or paradise lost is fanfic--not just 'original concepts are not necessary for literary value' but 'some of the stuff we do in fic shows up here.'

the narrative structure of the iliad is completely bonkers if you don't approach it with the understanding that everyone was expected to already know the Trojan War story, and probably knew loads of versions even, and this was specifically a tragic dramatization of the emotional journey specifically Achilles went on toward the end of it, leading up to his death.

there's non-Achilles parts, as context and to create a well-rounded narrative and probably to appeal to people who just like Trojan War poems and will be mad if their blorbo doesn't show up at all, but this is the wrath and grief of achilles character study piece.

this is perfectly straightforward if you're used to the dynamics of a fandom space, but fairly hard to parse if you're used to the expectation that a writer is a least pretending to be making up a new story.

people still write books by remaking familiar stories all the time, of course, but since this is regarded as lazy and derivative by default, there's a tendency to change things for the sake of changing them as opposed to in service of the actual demands of the story you're telling, which sometimes introduces weaknesses to the work that really didn't need to be there.

the little thumbs up of approval after working in sync is so cute. crimefighting brothers of all time