Dedicated followers!
Local youth are gung-ho about fan fiction and ensure they are always updated on the latest
By : soumashree sarkar
Update: 2015-06-19 00:45 GMT
It turns out that Voldemort is really Harry Potter’s uncle and would like nothing better than for the boy wizard to be challenged in life. Sherlock Holmes is, in fact, the same person as his sidekick James Watson and his adversary Jim Moriarty.
The notorious Cersei Lannister is in fact a well-disguised dragon herself. The world of fan fiction knows no boundaries and thanks to an increasing popularity in the spin off versions of popular fiction all over the internet, the Bengaluru young too have proven remarkably gung-ho about reading, writing and uploading fan fiction.
With convincing fiction (whether on television or print) come its fans and with a fandom comes fan fiction. While admirers of a particular series like Harry Potter, A Song of Ice and Fire and Sherlock Holmes have found occasions to grumble about the plot trajectory or their favourite characters dying, a large number of them have taken to writing their own version of the stories, with the background and characters intact.
City author Vishwas Mudagal is hopeful that this tradition would spark off talent in young authors. He says, “While I have read some good fan fiction surrounding Harry Potter, the truth is that most of them are notorious for being trashy — mostly because their quality does not matter to those who are reading it. But if someone is indeed mindful of the literary value of what they are writing, then composing fan fiction is a great way to start of on the path to getting published. Not just contemporary fiction, but epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are always getting re-interpreted by people who, you could say, are writing fan fiction!” With sites like fanfiction.org or archiveofourown.org supporting authors who write all kinds of spin off versions, the quality of fiction too has improved. Literature graduate student Rudrani Ganguly has studied trends in fan fiction closely. She says, “Some fan fiction are really well-written. A lot of novel-length fanfics in the Potter fandom, like Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, deserve to be books of their own. TV shows like Doctor Who are supernatural, too, have inspired hilarious fan fiction. By now, the fact that Fifty Shades of Grey was actually Twilight fan fiction is well known. Like every one who subscribes to these sites, I have often sought out fan fiction because I didn’t like something in the canon — a death, a pairing or an outcome, perhaps.”
Japanese anime, on the other hand, has spun off a devoted genre of fiction of its own, with fans who immerse themselves in layers of complicated facts. Shreya Bose, an avid reader, contributor and follower of the Japanese anime culture, says, “Asianfanfic.net is a mine of beautifully written anime fiction. While a lot of it is ridiculous, I expect fan fiction to be at least somewhat decently shaped. Naraku (the main villain from the animated series, Inuyasha) can’t simply fall in love for an adolescent and stop being evil. Just because its fan fiction doesn’t mean you can tamper with character consistency.”