15 days worth of Unspoken Words....
I was a fan-fiction junkie. Yes, one of "those" people who wrote stories based on characters in anime, manga, and yes...even wrestling (Hey, a girl can have the odd interest or two ^^). I think the obsession (and yes, the interest was deep enough to be called this) started back in 2000. Seems like a life time ago, but it was a year after I started watching wrestling on a regular basis (RAW on Monday nights and Smackdown on Thursday nights with the odd Saturday Night Heat in between). One day, I was bored, and decided to go online to google wrestling. The first few links were for the official sites but then I started coming across sites that had wrestling...fanfiction.
The first few I read were horribly written (as most fanfiction are as I found out later on [even though I shouldn't be the one to judge ^^]) so they didn't leave much of an impact on me. I even ran across a fanfiction featuring some maleXmale pairings (and as you can imagine, my 12-year old self was going: O_O). But as I read more and more of these stories, I became more and more addicted to them. It's like one of those sugar cereals. It might taste horrible the first couple of bites but once you get into it you're hooked. One reason why I think I was so drawn into this "world" was because it was something totally new to me. I never knew until then people wrote stories based on characters they never created. And naturally, as I read more of these stories, I started to want to write some of my own.
At first I wrote mostly about wrestling (and I still remember some of those earlier works. I could probably find them if I looked hard enough.) but I started branching off into other areas. Anime, mainly. I think fanfiction appeals to such a wide variety of people because it allows them to read situations that never happened in the book/anime/manga, etc. As for me, I began to write stories based on anime characters because some of those anime I watched were truly horrible, and I wrote as a way of "correcting" the faults of the anime and re-writing it so it was "better" (in my eyes).
One example: Weiss Kreuz. Horrible HORRIBLE anime series. It has one-cent art work combined with too many side-stories that didn't mesh well with each other, along with very little character development. I've read the manga, and although it is slightly better, the managaka never finished beyond two volumes (the last one being published in 1998 so I think I can safely say she's never going to finish the series). It had potential, having being backed by famous seiyuus and catchy music, and interesting characters but it never fully reached that potential in the anime series (I'd say it never even got off the ground).
So, I started to write.
One series I wrote was about Nagi Naoe and Tot. Their relationship was so messed up in the series it didn't really make much sense (he bumped into her outside somewhere, and he fell in love with her? Then chaos occurred and he ended up bringing the whole building down? Then at the ending scene it shows her rising from the rubble?). Because I did like the pairing, I thought it would have been better if more time was given to show how each of the characters acted in their separate lives. So in "Nettelu Toki" I wrote more about their backgrounds, and when they finally did meet it wasn't "love at first sight" (I don't believe in that. "love at first sight" is just falling in love with the other person's face, not the person himself/herself ^^), it had to be built up before anything came of it (and of course, in Weiss Kreuz style, with chaos and mayem thrown in for fun ^^).
But my interests in writing fanfiction started to wane about two years ago. I took a brief break of about six months in which I did little leisure writing, but then I started again. This time, writing original fiction. Even though writing fanfiction is nice, in the end, it is someone else's characters you are writing about. No matter how much you change the character's personality, it still ends up being someone else's. With writing original fiction though, the characters are your own, and you're free to be as out-of-character as you want. You have free reign over your own creations.
And this is the point I'm at now. I do still occasionally dabble in the fanfiction world (I don't think I'll ever get over that three year obsession :)), but for now I'm content writing stories with my own characters, my own plot, and my own thoughts.
The first few I read were horribly written (as most fanfiction are as I found out later on [even though I shouldn't be the one to judge ^^]) so they didn't leave much of an impact on me. I even ran across a fanfiction featuring some maleXmale pairings (and as you can imagine, my 12-year old self was going: O_O). But as I read more and more of these stories, I became more and more addicted to them. It's like one of those sugar cereals. It might taste horrible the first couple of bites but once you get into it you're hooked. One reason why I think I was so drawn into this "world" was because it was something totally new to me. I never knew until then people wrote stories based on characters they never created. And naturally, as I read more of these stories, I started to want to write some of my own.
At first I wrote mostly about wrestling (and I still remember some of those earlier works. I could probably find them if I looked hard enough.) but I started branching off into other areas. Anime, mainly. I think fanfiction appeals to such a wide variety of people because it allows them to read situations that never happened in the book/anime/manga, etc. As for me, I began to write stories based on anime characters because some of those anime I watched were truly horrible, and I wrote as a way of "correcting" the faults of the anime and re-writing it so it was "better" (in my eyes).
One example: Weiss Kreuz. Horrible HORRIBLE anime series. It has one-cent art work combined with too many side-stories that didn't mesh well with each other, along with very little character development. I've read the manga, and although it is slightly better, the managaka never finished beyond two volumes (the last one being published in 1998 so I think I can safely say she's never going to finish the series). It had potential, having being backed by famous seiyuus and catchy music, and interesting characters but it never fully reached that potential in the anime series (I'd say it never even got off the ground).
So, I started to write.
One series I wrote was about Nagi Naoe and Tot. Their relationship was so messed up in the series it didn't really make much sense (he bumped into her outside somewhere, and he fell in love with her? Then chaos occurred and he ended up bringing the whole building down? Then at the ending scene it shows her rising from the rubble?). Because I did like the pairing, I thought it would have been better if more time was given to show how each of the characters acted in their separate lives. So in "Nettelu Toki" I wrote more about their backgrounds, and when they finally did meet it wasn't "love at first sight" (I don't believe in that. "love at first sight" is just falling in love with the other person's face, not the person himself/herself ^^), it had to be built up before anything came of it (and of course, in Weiss Kreuz style, with chaos and mayem thrown in for fun ^^).
But my interests in writing fanfiction started to wane about two years ago. I took a brief break of about six months in which I did little leisure writing, but then I started again. This time, writing original fiction. Even though writing fanfiction is nice, in the end, it is someone else's characters you are writing about. No matter how much you change the character's personality, it still ends up being someone else's. With writing original fiction though, the characters are your own, and you're free to be as out-of-character as you want. You have free reign over your own creations.
And this is the point I'm at now. I do still occasionally dabble in the fanfiction world (I don't think I'll ever get over that three year obsession :)), but for now I'm content writing stories with my own characters, my own plot, and my own thoughts.