Mirage_GSM wrote:I’ll give you Miki, but the only quasi canon information about Suzu is her name her disability and her club. Rika and Saki get a bit more from the April fool’s post.
Prior to the release of the game, though, Suzu had oodles of fanart and a lot of appearances in the early fanfic, so there was a wealth of NON-canon material with which one could have drawn inspiration. Before the game was even released, I could have told you a clear picture of what I thought Suzu was like; Iwanako's never had that. I think she's in approximately as many shimmie pics as she's in fanfics, and most of those were written post-release. I would also argue that Iwanako's portrayal in almost every fic I saw her in before I got serious with
MTB gave her the most bland personality imaginable. Iwanako is, let's face it, just not a creatively fertile character.
Mirage_GSM wrote:Well, there is a character in that class whose name is Ritsu (for example). The route about her wasn’t finished, but what is there wasn’t too bad either. It didn’t have too much in common with the source anime.
This is beginning to go off topic, but it's a can of worms I'd just prefer not to get into in my reading and in my writing. I feel like involving them makes the setting feel less down-to-earth. Obviously it's not always terrible but it's never good, either.
Leaty wrote:If you write a pseudo-route, you are catering to what is actually a very specific desire; the desire of somebody who has finished all of KS to experience more of that game.
Mirage_GSM wrote:The same could be said about fanfiction in general.
You're making this sound more broad than it really is.
Luminosity is a
Twilight fanfiction, but it by no means constitutes an extension of the
Twilight experience; it is a polemic reimagining of the series that postulates what the story would be like if Bella Swan were a logical human being rather than an unmitigated moron. To that end, it actually has a smaller reader base than it deserves, given how good it is, because Twilight fans aren't going to like what it does with the plot and
Twilight haters aren't bold enough to see for themselves how much of a brilliant salvage operation the story does.
Stories that heavily thematically diverge from the source material might cater to the desire to experience more of it
indirectly (and some don't cater at
all,) but in the majority of that fanfiction, the experience is adulterated to some degree. Now, a bit of adulteration isn't that bad (obviously, I would personally argue that a
lot of adulteration is rarely if ever
good,) but to me, what makes a pseudo-route a pseudo-route is that it is the purest form of KS fanfiction. A good pseudo-route reads like reading Katawa Shoujo itself, whereas a good general fanfiction is usually only like reading about
Katawa Shoujo. Even
Sisterhood doesn't read like
Katawa Shoujo plays; it switches to Hanako and Lilly's perspectives (for the better, but it could have been for the worse.)
Leaty wrote:If you were, for example, to write a fic where Hisao goes to Hogwarts how are you even going to make that feel like a
Katawa Shoujo fanfic? I submit that no matter how strictly you maintain his canon characterization, that fic will never feel like a
Katawa Shoujo fic.
Mirage_GSM wrote:It would be a crossover and crossovers notoriously have problems maintaining the feel of either of their parent stories.
You got me on a technicality. A story about Hisao becoming an agent for the CIA isn't a crossover and it would still have the same problem.
Mirage_GSM wrote:a story about Hisao dating a non-disabled person would still be about (or could still be about – of course it depends on the writer) coping with a disability and also explore things so far rarely touched upon by KS fanfiction.
This, to me, is weaksauce. Hisao's own pathos (well, from his heart attack, anyway) has already been very thoroughly explored, even in canon, and to assert that Hisao's presence in a fic legitimizes it as an insightful exploration of
KS' themes strikes me as disingenuous. I'm also not sure what things you're talking about that are rarely touched upon by
KS fanfiction; does everything under the sun need to be explored? I'm of the opinion that you don't need to go to the grocery store when there's plenty to work with in the cupboard.
Mirage_GSM wrote:I'd like to provide a quote from Thoreau: " . . . instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them."
That quote implies that the quotee does not enjoy weaving and selling baskets. I’d like to think that most authors around here are writing because they enjoy doing it.
Enjoying writing is one thing, but I'm convinced that a ton of writers who have a story they'd like to tell wind up deluding themselves into believing the
only way this story can exist is as a fanfiction of something else. I don’t believe that many of these authors have ever even considered that perhaps a more expeditious way of telling the story they're excited by is to write original fiction, and of those that do, I
am convinced that many of them realize that this
is the case but decide to write it as a fanfiction anyway, either out of laziness or out of a desire to deceive fans of the source material into providing a ready-made audience.
No matter how inspired you are by a work of fiction, when you get the impulse to write a fanfiction, the very first question you absolutely
must ask yourself is, “does this
need to be a fanfiction?” If it doesn’t, maybe you need to critically reexamine your motivations.
Mirage_GSM wrote:So if the devs could get away with such minor changes, I don’t see why fanfiction authors shouldn’t.
I look at the same problem completely differently. I see that the devs made a handful of mistakes when making the different paths cohesive with each other, so the only areas in which the prospective pseudo-route author should allow a similar divergence is in one of those
exact areas where the devs made mistakes. If it doesn’t have something to do with Iwanako’s letter or the date of Tanabata (though I disagree that the latter is actually in contention,) you can’t mess with it.
Also, there’s a lot of difference between doing something on accident and doing something on purpose. That’s like filling your fanfiction with plotholes because there was a plothole at some point in the source material.
Mirage_GSM wrote:“Success is determined by those whom prove the impossible, possible.” (James W. Pence)
“When writing the only thing that limits what is possible is your imagination.” (Mirage_GSM)
I
really think you have to take Hisao out of character in order to accomplish this task. I can
imagine Hisao acting out of character, but I certainly wouldn’t want to
write it.
forgetmenot wrote: What's best suited to fanfiction is whatever meets the three criteria above. Everything else (e.g. what makes a good and compelling story) is another discussion entirely.
bhtooefr wrote: Fanfic just has to incorporate elements of the original work - the characters or setting. And, it has to do that in a believable way. Otherwise, IMO, it's fair game.
See, I personally don’t think there’s a lot of merit to the “egalitarian” model of fanfiction. Yes, if we want to, we can define fanfiction so broadly that just about anything can fit under it, and then based on that definition we could become a hugbox where everybody belongs and nobody is challenged on the validity of their concept, but I don’t really think that results in a productive environment, and I don’t think that anybody really improves as a writer in that setting.
And I do think this can be confusing, because I think that this idea doesn’t necessarily apply to other derivative works of art—if you want to rearrange a Beethoven composition into a prog rock song, or sample a bluegrass song in your hip hop album, it’s quite likely you’ll wind up with something really cool, but if you want to write a sequel to
Huckleberry Finn where Huck is a space cowboy, you’ll probably wind up writing something utterly asinine and artistically bankrupt. Fanfiction is unusual and tricky, and I think the rules it follows are similarly unusual and tricky.
Frankly, one of the reasons why fanfiction isn’t well-respected as an expressive outlet is
because of its anything-goes culture; fanfiction is treated as easy, a crutch, as a sandbox for untalented or inexperienced writers to play around in. All too often, an irredeemably terrible fic will be gushed over by members of a very young audience who frankly haven’t developed particularly sophisticated tastes (do not target this audience, they like everything,) which more often than not results in the author becoming hardened to the idea that his work needs a lot of improvement. This creates kind of a greenhouse effect where people who
do know better become unwilling to offer constructive criticism in the first place, which just leads to terrible authors increasingly believing their terrible work is good, because the only comments on their work are neutral or positive, and eventually you have a literary hugbox on your hands.
Where I’m concerned, fanfiction is
harder in a lot of ways than writing an original story; you have to be willing to know your source material backwards and forwards, you have to have an understanding of the source characters well enough that you can write them
in character, you have to mine the source material for plot possibilities that were never taken advantage of by the writers, you have to explore the
themes of the source material in a creative and compelling way, you have to understand the voice of the author if not know how to emulate her style entirely... Anybody who says that writing fanfiction is easy isn’t doing it right.
You can invoke the Fiction Identity Postulate as much as you want, and insist that there are no bad ideas because a talented enough author could make
anything work, but that’s honestly kind of reductive and silly. A skilled enough lawyer could get a Not Guilty verdict for the most obvious of criminals, and a skilled enough chef could make cow bungholes taste like calamari. To suggest that all ideas have equal merit because they could all be palatable as long as a hypothetical demigod came along and acted upon them seems like really fallacious reasoning, because for the most part these Superheroes Of The Art don’t exist, and even if they did, they’d probably be more eager to act upon their own, considerably
better ideas.
So yeah, I subscribe to a “elitist” model of fanfiction, rather than a “egalitarian” model, because I toil like hell over my writing and I really think it shows, and I don’t think it would if I didn’t put as much thought into it as I do. If that means I’m being “pretty damn ridiculous,” then
Mean Time to Breakdown is ridiculous, because that’s the mindset I write it under.
bhtooefr wrote: Actually, I wonder if a fic that incorporates the morals of KS without the characters or setting would work as a fanfic... Probably not.
And we come to my
other problem with this overly broad definition of fanfiction, which is that, under this definition, a story about Mutou joining the JSDF and becoming a fighter pilot constitutes
Katawa Shoujo fanfiction, but a story about a teen with multiple sclerosis being forced to attend a school for the disabled in Greenwich, Connecticut isn’t. Even though the latter is significantly more like
Katawa Shoujo than the former.
The consequence of that is that we got a ton of absurd shit like stories about new students coming to Yamaku who have no business being there because they’re half-Mongolian, half-Inupiat, but somehow they can speak Japanese perfectly and they transfer to Yamaku because apparently their home country doesn’t have any schools for the disabled at all. Except “Yamaku” doesn’t look anything
like Yamaku, because the author is either unable or unwilling to actually research what life/education in Japan is like, so they wind up writing it exactly like whatever school they go to at home, even though that makes no sense whatsoever.
If these authors based these characters closer to the environment they’re familiar with, and made OCs similar to the people they actually knew in real life, they could still tackle the themes they found interesting without pissing off/annoying every reader who would otherwise offer constructive criticism. And their stories would be more cohesive, more genuine, would arguably be more interesting to readers (certainly more interesting to
me,) and they’d walk away from the experience with a positive attitude and more confidence in themselves as a writer, even if the fruit of their labors wasn’t
strictly fanfiction.
monkeywitha6pack wrote: I saw leaty say my writing was ludicrous literacy noodling and I apologize leaty.
I would really like to take a third swing at this and get you to understand this, because I think you’re going to keep thinking I’m a bitch unless I can get you to see what I’m saying. You might think so anyway, and that’s mostly fine, as long as it’s for the right reasons.
This is noodling. You see how she just plays random Nintendo shit on her violin and has a lot of fun with it?
That is totally okay. That is not only a good way to have fun, it’s also a good way to
learn. I have no problem with people doing this. None. And when you just horse around with a fanfic and have a lot of fun, you are doing the literary equivalent of what that girl is doing on her violin. You are just throwing around ideas and experimenting with wordplay and (hopefully) slowly getting better at formatting, spelling and punctuation. I have
never called that “ludicrous.” That is
healthy.
However, I tried to warn you that
if this was your intention (and I only suggested it
could be,) you would probably not attain much of an audience. And this is true! That girl with the violin is noodling on a YouTube video, not in a crowded concert hall. Writing solely for the sake of fun and improvement rarely results in a product with any kind of staying power or broad appeal and often results in an incomprehensible, jumbled mess. Also, without working on your fundamentals, it’s quite possibly the noodling wouldn’t even be fun for you.
monkeywitha6pack wrote:But what mirage and Lloyd said is true. It may not be a Big Mac but some people like burgers and mirage saying it may not turn into beef Wellington but it can turn into pizza and some people like pizza.
I think you’re deriving an inappropriately high amount of encouragement from Mirage’s take on the Beef Wellington Metaphor. Let me at least try to explain why it is flawed while staying within the constraints of the metaphor.
You’re cooking for the first time, and you want to make the people you’re serving really happy. You’re looking through your refrigerator and you find pâté de foie gras (Iwanako) and duxelles inside. With filet steak and a puff pastry, a very skilled chef could make a wonderful Beef Wellington with these ingredients. But you already know you don’t know how to prepare Beef Wellington, so you say “Fuck it, everybody likes pizza, I’ll make pizza.”
But rather than putting the pâté and duxelles away, you keep them on the counter and you insist that you’re just going to make pâté pizza. This will really go over well with the people you’re serving, you reason, because nobody’s ever done pâté pizza before. Of course, you’ve never really made
pizza before, but you know that it’s much easier than preparing Beef Wellington.
I’m the person walking into the kitchen and telling you “hey, pâté is actually kind of gross unless you really know what you’re doing with it, I really don’t think you should play around with it and I definitely don’t think that it belongs on pizza. I really don’t think you would like it. Maybe you should just make a normal pizza?”
Then Mirage comes in, and he says, “hey, if you want to make a pâté pizza, go right ahead. I’d much rather eat something new than eat Vienna sausages for the seventy-first time. And it might be really tasty!”
Upon hearing this, I shake my head and say “um, but he’s never even made
pizza before, shouldn’t we walk him through that before he tries to make it with pâté? I mean, the pâté would get overpowered by the pizza sauce and cheese and everything.”
Then Mirage says “Well, who says he even needs pizza sauce and cheese? All you really need to have a pizza is a flat, round crust, anyway. You don't know what he's going to do, all you've heard is his
idea.”
To which I respond, “Um, that’s not really a pizza in the conventional sense, though, is it? Maybe we should just spread the pâté on a cracker then; it’s a lot easier.”
Mirage shakes his head and says, “No, I think Monkey has a good idea, and I want to see how it turns out.”
And then the kitchen suddenly collapses and all three of us die.
delta wrote:I can indeed confirm that KS is an NYPD Blue fanfic, please adjust your writing accordingly peace out
