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The A-Z of Why the Internet is Shit

F is for ...

Fan fiction

Despite once spending a short, few month period writing fan fiction when I was twelve, I now detest the stuff; rather than aiming for originality, wannabe authors instead take a palette of existing characters, relationships and locations, and then proceed to destroy them with unfounded attempts at original plots that they wildly hope will be similar enough to the actual thing they are parodying to appeal to more readers.

To estimate how widespread the fan fiction problem is, a simple search on Google is enough to suffice: searching for 'fan fiction', without even specifying what that fan fiction relates to, returns 'about 36,500,000' results. The top results, possibly quite obviously, is FanFiction.Net.

FF.Net is a haven for readers and writers of fan fiction. Given 8 categories, which are split into hundreds of sub-categories, writers can go with anything that want; want to write something about an obscure movie from forty years ago that only you have seen? Go for it.

The thing is, fan fiction has the opportunity to be good. Accomplished writers should easily be able to take something, duplicate the style and create credible experiences in these universes. The fact is, though, that most fan fiction isn't good; it's inferior, created by usually poor writers as a starting point, capitalising on aspects of things so overused and obvious that they become clichés. Accomplished writers don't touch fan fiction, because they've grown out of their basic, beginner roots and are now capable of working on their own things without taking existing property and just adding a new storyline to it. So it's kind of sad, in a way.

The other problem with fan fiction is that it is some kind of vessel for homoerotic fantasies of the rabid female (and in some cases, male) fans out there. Don't believe me? Let's take a look.

The Harry Potter book section of FF.Net is home to, currently, over 370,000 pieces of fan fiction. That's over 12,000 listing pages, 25 fics listed per page. That's with any rating applied; over 2,000 of these listing pages are solely M (mature) rated stories in the Harry Potter universe.

Refining the genre to romance, we see almost 1,500 of these pages relate to mature romance - likely of a sexual nature. That's almost 37,000 of these pieces of fan fiction, or a massive 10% of the Harry Potter fan fiction archive.

FF.Net also has a friendly feature to select specific characters you're looking for. Continuing with these previous settings, we'll change the characters to Harry and Draco. This returns almost 250 pages of results - over 6,000 pieces of fan fiction. I'm not going to read these to find out just how many are horribly homoerotic fantasies by teen girls, but I'm estimating it's a hefty amount of that.

Fan fiction: it is time you and your homoerotic subsections left the internet and allowed the rest of us to browse in peace.

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	The A-Z of Why the Internet is Shit F is for ... Fan fiction Despite once spending a short, few month period writing fan fiction when I was twelve, I now detest the stuff; rather than aiming for originality, wannabe authors instead take a palette of existing characters, relationships and locations, and then proceed to destroy them with unfounded attempts at original plots that they wildly hope will be similar enough to the actual thing they are parodying to appeal to more readers. To estimate how widespread the fan fiction problem is, a simple search on Google is enough to suffice: searching for 'fan fiction', without even specifying what that fan fiction relates to, returns 'about 36,500,000' results. The top results, possibly quite obviously, is FanFiction.Net. FF.Net is a haven for readers and writers of fan fiction. Given 8 categories, which are split into hundreds of sub-categories, writers can go with anything that want; want to write something about an obscure movie from forty years ago that only you have seen? Go for it. The thing is, fan fiction has the opportunity to be good. Accomplished writers should easily be able to take something, duplicate the style and create credible experiences in these universes. The fact is, though, that most fan fiction isn't good; it's inferior, created by usually poor writers as a starting point, capitalising on aspects of things so overused and obvious that they become clichés. Accomplished writers don't touch fan fiction, because they've grown out of their basic, beginner roots and are now capable of working on their own things without taking existing property and just adding a new storyline to it. So it's kind of sad, in a way. The other problem with fan fiction is that it is some kind of vessel for homoerotic fantasies of the rabid female (and in some cases, male) fans out there. Don't believe me? Let's take a look. The Harry Potter book section of FF.Net is home to, currently, over 370,000 pieces of fan fiction. That's over 12,000 listing pages, 25 fics listed per page. That's with any rating applied; over 2,000 of these listing pages are solely M (mature) rated stories in the Harry Potter universe. Refining the genre to romance, we see almost 1,500 of these pages relate to mature romance - likely of a sexual nature. That's almost 37,000 of these pieces of fan fiction, or a massive 10% of the Harry Potter fan fiction archive. FF.Net also has a friendly feature to select specific characters you're looking for. Continuing with these previous settings, we'll change the characters to Harry and Draco. This returns almost 250 pages of results - over 6,000 pieces of fan fiction. I'm not going to read these to find out just how many are horribly homoerotic fantasies by teen girls, but I'm estimating it's a hefty amount of that. Fan fiction: it is time you and your homoerotic subsections left the internet and allowed the rest of us to browse in peace.