Marissa Meyer

Fan
Name:	Marissa Meyer
Alias(es):	Alicia Blade, Ali-chan
Type:	fan writer (retired), professional author
Fandoms:	Sailor Moon
Communities:
Other:
URL:	http://www.marissameyer.com/ http://www.aliciablade.com (Wayback, 2012)
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Marissa Meyer is the author of the best-selling Lunar Chronicles series. Her profic work, beginning with her debut novel, Cinder, has gained significant attention in the Young Adult market and YA fan communities. The Lunar Chronicles had a small fandom on Tumblr, though fanwork has decreased since the end of the series.

During her teenage years, she wrote Sailor Moon fanfiction under the pseudonym Alicia Blade. Her fic was posted on Fanfiction.net and a range of archives including SailormoonFiction, Destiny's Gateway Romance Fanfiction Archives, Arias Ink and Usako and Mamo-chan's home sweet home. As of 2017, most of her fic still exists online and is available to read.

Her fanfic garnered large amounts of popularity within the Sailor Moon fandom. Her fairy tale AU fic The House on Thornrose Lane: A Grimm Tale is the most reviewed Sailor Moon fanfic on Fanfiction.net. Ironically, her professional bibliography also consists predominately of fairy tale-related works.

Connections can be seen between Sailor Moon and The Lunar Chronicles, in that both involve a society of people living on the moon and a lost princess of the moon. Meyer has spoken about how her penchant "to take fairy tales and give them a science-fiction twist" began when she wrote "an alternate reality Sailor Moon fanfiction." A Sailer Moon story, Luna v. 4.2., that was written for a 2008 contest hosted on Aria’s Ink directly inspired Cinder.

Alicia Blade

On the now-defunct Alicia Blade website, Marissa explains her history with fanfic and what interested her about it:

Skip to sixth grade, age eleven, when I would spend the hour before school watching cartoons. One day while flipping through channels I came across a show where the girls had magic powers and wore short skirts. The first Sailor Moon episode I saw was the one where the scouts “defeat” Jadeite, and Beryl turns him into a crystal. While watching it I thought, “Schnikeys—that blonde bad guy is hot! Why are all those girls swooning over the guy in the cape? He’s not nearly as cute as the villain.” (True story.) So when Jadeite was crystallized, never to appear again, I determined that the show was awful and I wouldn’t watch it anymore. However, my best friend was able to convince me to give the show a second chance and when I saw the romance unfolding between Serena and Darien (a.k.a. Usagi and Mamoru), I fell for the show. Hard.

When that same friend introduced me to fanfiction a few years later, my life was forever changed. The first fanfic I read was a male author-insert fic, where Tuxedo Mask died and the author became the new hero of the story and won Serena’s heart. The story was terrible, but the damage was done. I realized that I had story ideas for Serena and Darien. I could write about them. And maybe people would actually read them! It was a dream come true.

I wrote fanfiction consistently for about three years. My parents complained that I didn’t go outside enough. One summer vacation was spent almost entirely in front of the computer (that was the summer “Royal Flush” and “A Million Kisses” were born). I had a journal filled with plot ideas. I felt like I could go on writing fanfiction forever.

By age eighteen, however, I had ideas for original stories filling my head and was headed off to college where my work load was about to quadruple. I “retired” from the fanfiction world thinking that I would never return. (This proved to be only a blip on my writing timeline, however. I would, after college, go on to write at least another dozen fanfics, including “The Professional” and “The House on Thornrose Lane.”)

External Links

• Marissa Meyer on Wikipedia
• Marissa Meyer on Lunar Chronicles Wiki