As the old cliche goes, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  We all try to imitate someone we respect: a parent, a colleague, a teacher, a boss.  When we’re inspired by a person, we seek to emulate the things that brought them success and admiration.  This is true in all circles, and it rolls down to entertainment as well.  Fan works are prevalent across the internet.  A Google search is just as likely to bring you official work as it is fan conceptions.  I’d talk about fan art, but I couldn’t draw to save my life.  Instead, I’m going to talk a little bit about fan-fiction.

Fan fiction is ubiquitous as well.  There are entire repositories on the internet.  You could choose your favorite game or TV show or movie, and there’s an unending library of fan-based works.  In fact, a certain friend has spent the better part of a couple weeks gushing to me about her favorite Harry Potter fan works.  And it really sort of got me thinking about fan fiction in general.

While I personally have never written direct fan fiction, I’d really be a liar if I said I didn’t just straight copy stuff when I was learning to write.  One of the first monstrosities I created was this just absolutely bizarre amalgamation of concepts.  It involved angels fighting demons and also robots and sometimes there was time travel and big fights.  And, if you had read it back in the late 90s when I was penning this junk, you’d have also said, “Hey wait a second, Max.  This arc is beat for beat a rip-off of Dragon Ball Z!”  You’d have been absolutely correct.  “Max, I’m pretty sure this squad of all-lady fighters are just the Sailor Scouts reskinned.”  Guilty as charged.  Hell, I even “created” a setting where a bunch of kids got powers to change into animals to combat an alien invasion.  I wrote like three pages, and they were ripped almost 100% from the opening pages of the first Animorphs book.

Despite being totally plagiarized and also bad, the imitations taught me a lot about the nature of constructing stories and how to line up plot points.  Now it’s true that trying to write a novel or short story is wildly different from writing for visual media like cartoons, but there were still important lessons.  And I was ever-encouraged by my third grade teacher to continue writing this trash, but her constant reinforcement that I was doing a good thing fundamentally drove me to get better as I continued honing the craft of writing.

Plenty others do this too.  Rebecca Sugar, the creator of the fantastic Cartoon Network series “Steven Universe,” got her start doing fan-art and fan-fiction for 90s cartoons such as “Ed, Edd, and Eddy” and “Invader Zim.”  Now she’s creating one of the best damn family shows available.  The realm of fan fiction lets people fill a niche that perhaps otherwise nobody would’ve gotten.  Admittedly, this falls largely into the realm of shipping and slash-fiction sometimes, but going back to Harry Potter: there’s works done that are essentially complete rewrites of the series featuring Harry as a Slytherin instead of Gryffindor.  That takes an astounding amount of effort and thought even if the base narrative was already completed for you.  Sometimes you even get stupidly lucky with your weird rip-offs (looking at you, E.L. James).

Just like anything, there’s plenty of bad and wrong – you might even call it badong – fan work out there.  Some of it should just be avoided at all costs, and the shipping communities can quickly become the bitterest of enemies because someone likes the Draco-Hermione pairing.  Apparently this is anathema; as a guy who only saw half the movies and can barely remember them, I’ll have to defer to an expert.  And the erotica.  Hoo boy, if you thought 50 Shades was bad, check out of some of this stuff.

Though I don’t think I’d encourage people to blatantly rip off famous works, we’re all influenced by something.  The faeries in my novella All’s Faer were originally heavily inspired by the creatures from Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files books.  Though markedly different in the end, the spark of creation started there.  Perhaps one day, when my own repository of work is large enough, people will be inspired by it or writing fan fiction.  Though if the responses by some of my early readers for All’s Faer are any indication, there’s already a demand for the slash fiction…