Lame TV season? Write your own episodes online
| News Media Commentary | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Lame TV season? Write your own episodes online |
| Commentator: | A.S. Berman for USA Today |
| Date(s): | August 22, 2001 |
| Venue: | print, online |
| Fandom: | |
| External Links: | Lame TV season? Write your own episodes online, Archived version also reposted here: here |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Lame TV season? Write your own episodes online is an article in USA Today by A.S. Berman. It tried to explain the popularity behind fan fiction. Published in 2001, it was a little behind the curve in the great rush of other journalists trying to do the same. This piece focused on fanfiction.net and in typical fashion, cherry-picked some odder examples of fanfic, calling them "highlights."
The article provided direct links to the stories on Fanfiction.net that it cited.
Some Topics Discussed
- RPF
- the usual "aren't fans odd and creative?" stance
- quote from Steven Savage of Fanfiction.net
Excerpts
The X-Files agents find themselves lost in the nightmare world of The Matrix, Ally McBeal loses her brother to a predatory secretary, and Hogan's Heroes' chief Nazi seeks deathbed absolution on a very special Touched By An Angel.
If only. These are just some of the strange story lines found on FanFiction.net, a site that whisks popular culture through the looking glass by allowing visitors to contribute original stories based on movies, TV shows, video games, even music groups.
Contributors to the site are neither paid nor charged for posting.
Here, amateur works based on TV programs long dead (anyone remember 21 Jump Street?) rub shoulders with Harry Potter spinoffs and the superheroic adventures of classical chanteuse Charlotte Church.
"It's like the adult version of when kids play at being TV characters," explains Steven Savage, 32, who writes a column for FanFiction.net, in addition to doing programming for the site. The stories, he says, are an example of what can happen "when people really care about something."
Indeed, with a casual tally of stories posted on the site reaching nearly 100,000, FanFiction.net contributors seem to care about quite a number of things.
Launched in 1998 by Los Angeles software designer Xing Li, FanFiction.net reads like the 21st century successor to the poetry slams of the Beat Generation. Encouragement comes in the form of short reviews, usually positive, that visitors submit after reading a story.
FanFiction.net seemed "the best way to connect with a large audience that would be interested in reading something I wanted to write," [a fan] says.