Fantasy
Don't click away--I have a point.
It's just that last night my fantasy football league had its annual draft.
Typically, this is the moment when anyone other than the original poster (or the other people in his/her league) abandon the discussion. It's usually a lot like hearing someone describe her dreams, or detail everything he's eaten on his new diet. It's not that it's unimportant, but it's almost completely personal. Unless someone is invested in not only the same subject, but the exact same THING, that person will not be interested. If you've ever had kids, you know how important the contents of their diapers can be to you and your significant other, but you also know that no one ELSE has kids with diapers worth discussing (unless of course they're pooiping pure platinum or something.)
But as I said, I have a point, and it is this:
Fantasy football is the same thing as fanfic.
In both cases, individuals not directly involved with the original narratives--the events of a football game on the one hand, the events of a TV show/comic/book/movie/etc. on the other--select a handful of people from that narrative (players in FFB, characters in FF) and put them into new situations (teams and lineups in FFB, ships and stories in FF) for their own entertainment.
Granted, in FFB we don't know in advance how any of the stories are going to turn out (unless the games are fixed, but I'm fairly sure most fantasy players don't have the pull to fix them), while in fanfic the writer can direct the characters to whatever end he/she likes best.
But there are a whoooooole bunch of similarities. Last night I spent three hours trying to settle such questions as whether Torry Holt was a better use of my third-round draft pick than some other wide receiver, or whether I should perhaps use said pick on another running back instead. Is that essentially dissimilar from trying to decide whether you'd rather write a Spuffy fic or a Bangel fic? What about picking ships from a list and composing stories based on them? Isn't that like choosing from a draft board? And when you have to select a team name (among my favorites: The Naked Mole Rats, the Apex Predators, and the New England Transcendentalists), isn't that basically the same as choosing a title for your fic?
I'm not sure
spuffyduds is going to agree with me on this, but after our neighbor Burrito Girl pointed out that her husband and I were spending a lot of time worrying about our "pretend" teams, I felt as though it had to be said.
Especially after she just spent some ungodly number of hours putting together and posting a DS story about an impossible situation involving two characters who aren't real from a show that doesn't exist anymore. : )