Fanfiction

by Lorna, March 2001

I have the dubious honour of getting to write this page as I'm the only one that reads this stuff, or admits to it at least. Fanfiction is basically what it says it is, fiction written by fans. There's huge amounts of it on the web, of equally huge range in quality it has to be said. I mostly read stuff based on tv shows, but there's also stuff available for books, comics, films, computer games and even music groups.

Just some notes to those new to the idea of fanfiction, there are some terms that you may come across that you may not understand. Most people prefer to know a bit about a story before you start reading it and most authors will put some kind of guide.

• Genres - most fic's fall into a certain category, popular one's include action/adventure (fights, battles, running around, quests and the like), angst (a character sulking), hurt/comfort (also known as h/c, character sulking at someone who cares), smarm (soppiness and friendship), romance (whatcha think?) and alternate universe (a story which is set in a version of the show/comic/whatever that is different to the real version somehow).

• Ratings - many fic will come with ratings like films. However most of them go by the American system so there's PG13, R and NC17. These ratings are based on violence, swearing and sex - so don't complain if you've been warned.

• Warnings - authors will often give warnings of specific scenes which you may want to avoid. These include character deaths (some people get upset at the idea of their favorite character getting blatted) and adult themes (if you have to ask, avoid them).

• Spoilers - some authors are good and will warn you if their story contains specific reference to an episode which you may not want to know if you haven't seen that far. This is a particular problem with tv shows if you are in the UK and don't have Sky, as you are probably way behind. If there are no guidelines you may want to stear clear of the fic... unless you don't mind spoilers.

• Slash - slash fiction is stories with either male-male relationships or female-female ones. If you don't like the idea, just don't read the fic.

• Shippers - relationshippers (or shippers) are people that seem obsessed with a particular coupling that may or may not feature in the original show/book/whatever. I think these people are a little disturbing... but each to their own.

If you want fanfiction, go here. This site is absolutely immense and beautifully layed out. I recon there's about 210 shows and 15,000 stories in the tv section alone. This site has many nice features -

• Categorised - sorted into large categories, like tv, comics, movies. Then sorted into smaller sections by tv show.

• Updated regularly - Updates appear every few hours, depending on how many authors are writing for a particular section.

• Author searches - each author has their own page, giving a full list of their fic's, links to their homepage, their favorite authors, whatever they wanna put there really.

• Discussion forums - if you are an author yourself, there's plenty of help available.

• Ratings - each fic has a summary, rating, word count and record of last update.

• You can even change the site colour scheme! How much more do you want?!

There are a few other sites I use for specific tv shows.

An archive of StarGate SG1 fanfiction, has a really good search function allowing search by everything from characters, ratings, submission date. Updated every few days, there are lots of submissions (no total count - but there are 203 listed under titles starting with A). The slash and adult fics have all been placed in a seperate site - linked to from the main.

Although some sections are still under construction and there are not many updates this is quite a nice site for Buffy and Angel fic. The search isn't running yet but you can list fics by author and each fic has quite a lot of info on principle characters and spoilers, if not a lengthy summary. There's also a posting board for help and advice.

This site doesn't actually contain any fanfiction, but it does have hundreds of links for fanfic and fanart sites based on comic characters. Has a fairly funky menu system and lots of other interesting stuff to look at. Has lots of X-Men links, but not huge numbers of other comics that I can see (but I only read X-Men so don't really know).

An archive of posts to the USENET newsgroup alt.startrek.creative and it's subgroups. Loads of fics for all generations, updated fairly frequently and able to list fics in various ways. Brief summaries for all stories.

Lots of x-men stuff, including about 120 fanfics by lots of different authors. Has a lot of links as well, although stuff is a little hard to find.

Searchs and links lists

There are loads of search engines out there that will be able to provide you with lists of fanfic sites. A couple worth particular note are
Fanfiction on the Net - a list of links to archives, home pages and newegroups by tv series. Not updated recently so many of links may be broken. But has some more unusual shows listed.
Yahoo.com - the television/fan fiction subsection of the site. Then lists them in sections by genre of tv show.

There we go, that should be enough to keep you going ;0)

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