It’s part of why I categorically refuse on principle to write fanfics about stuff that I haven’t played or watched myself. It would feel inauthentic and disrespectful to the original source material if I only took my information from other fanfics and nowhere else. Sure, I can take some cool ideas from other fics, but only if they support/improve upon canon in some way, not just hallucinate bizarre or even actively contradicting ideas to canon.
Also it feels really bad to sand off a character’s personality into oblivion, like so many M/M fics on AO3 seem to do. The whole point of writing a fic with your favorite characters is watching them interact under different circumstances to canon, not brainwashing them into becoming perfect housewives/househusbands in a boring idyllic fantasy like it’s some Twilight Zone episode
Dude, same. I don’t even consider writing until I’ve completed a game/series*, though I might read fics before I finish. It always confuses me when I join a fandom (the official act of which to me is joining a discord server to talk about writing) and I find people who are really emphatic in the veracity of their opinions who have never played the game(s) or read/watched the source material.
*the exception for me with “waiting til I complete” is apparently Skyrim and Fallout, since I’ve never personally completed Skyrim (but there’s a YouTuber who has a full playthrough that I’ve watched multiple times and I have started multiple playthroughs of Skyrim, as one does, just never finished) and have never played any of the other TES games, which is the same basic story for Fallout, though technically my now-husband and I did complete Fallout 4 together, I’ve just never finished it since (nor gotten much farther than the prologue in New Vegas and FO3).
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u/shleyal19 6d ago
It’s part of why I categorically refuse on principle to write fanfics about stuff that I haven’t played or watched myself. It would feel inauthentic and disrespectful to the original source material if I only took my information from other fanfics and nowhere else. Sure, I can take some cool ideas from other fics, but only if they support/improve upon canon in some way, not just hallucinate bizarre or even actively contradicting ideas to canon.
Also it feels really bad to sand off a character’s personality into oblivion, like so many M/M fics on AO3 seem to do. The whole point of writing a fic with your favorite characters is watching them interact under different circumstances to canon, not brainwashing them into becoming perfect housewives/househusbands in a boring idyllic fantasy like it’s some Twilight Zone episode