Limits of Fanfiction - What is appropriate?

[Oddball]

I'm not entirely sure what you all are talking about anymore, but this topic ic making me hungry now.

[Mirage_GSM]

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.

Well, I don’t really spend much time on the Shimmie – or even in the fanart section of the forum – so whether or not there is more fanart of Suzu than of Iwanako is of exactly no interest to me when judging which character is more appropriate to use in a fanfiction. Besides since all of that material is non-canon, fanfiction authors are free to ignore it even if they’ve seen it and draw their inspiration from other sources (or even from within themselves).

Iwanako is, let's face it, just not a creatively fertile character.

There are only a few fics including her. You say that’s because the character has some inherent quality that makes it hard or even impossible to write a good story about her. I take the approach that it means it is a relatively fresh character whom it is easier to write an original story about.

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;…

Since I’ve read neither Twilight nor Luminosity I’ll refrain from commenting on this.

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…

I’d say that there are at most two or three stories on this forum that live up to this standard… Closure might be among them, even if it is more of an Epiloge than a route.

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.)

What’s more, it doesn’t even try to be a route. It’s a continuation of an existing route – what I called an Epilogue in the Library.

If you were, for example, to write a fic [about Hisao becoming an agent for the CIA] 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.

It will not feel like a KS route, certainly. Even by my standards something that completely changes the genre from romance to something else won’t be a route, since that implies that it is about a romantic relationship.
That doesn’t mean it won't feel like KS or that it can’t be fun to read. Hoitash’s H&K series and Helbereth’s Kenji files don’t even make an attempt of staying true to the genre but are still well written and bring a bit of diversity to the forums. Both stories use characters from KS and at least later on do a good job of keeping them recognizable. Sure, those stories could have been written with completely original characters in a completely original setting, but putting known characters in… unusual situations can be fun if done well – which it admittedly often isn’t.

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; …

I mentioned this in a few previous posts and thought I didn’t have to repeat it in every new one. KS canon thoroughly explores Hisao’s own feelings about his disability. What it doesn’t examine much is other people’s reaction to it – apart from a few odd stares from festival visitors of passersby in town, Hisao only has contact with other Yamaku students, their families and faculty – all of which are very accepting, because they either have a disability themselves or have been extensively schooled to deal with disabled people. (Don’t anyone dare to bring Jigoro as a counter-example
This is one thing that could be explored if Hisao were to date someone who doesn’t have a background like that.

does everything under the sun need to be explored?

No. The world won’t end if it isn’t, but neither will it if it is.

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.

Of course writing fanfiction provides a certain amount of audience. I estimate 95% of all people who do anything creatively also want others to see, hear or read what they’ve created. Without an audience there is no feedback, and without feedback it is very hard to improve, so I think this is perfectly legitimate. After all if you just wrote your own original fiction and put up a page somewhere you could probably count the number who read it on two hands.
Of course if they DO decide to write fanfiction, I expect them to make the effort to stay in character, get the setting right and so on… basically what bhtooefr said a few posts up. So this is NOT a blanket license to just change the names in your original fic and post it here.

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 you can’t mess with it.

Well, I guess SC will be able to provide a more detailed insight in the efforts to make the paths cohesive with each other, but what I do know is that here was no common timeline, and I don’t think they even tried to have the letter arrive on the same date. The letter arrived whenever it was convenient for the respective path.

I really think you have to take Hisao out of character in order to accomplish this task.

That’s where we disagree then.

…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.

I wouldn’t be so certain… I never read Huckleberry Finn, but there is an adaption of “The Count of Monte Christo” in a Science Fiction scenario, and - though I would have not thought it possible before I watched it – it is excellent.
There is also a SciFi adaption of “The Lord of the Flies” which does not quite reach that quality but is still good. There is a story that takes “Romeo And Juliet” to a Fantasy scenario. I haven’t seen it yet, but reviews I read are generally good.

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.

I completely agree, and I see it time and again on these very forums. People even link page views with story quality^^° Maybe that’s also one of the reasons why my comments tend to focus more on critic than praise: To cancel out some of that

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,... Anybody who says that writing fanfiction is easy isn’t doing it right.

Like I said above. I agree completely.

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. ...

I never said that there are no bad ideas. It’s just that we have a different threshold for what kind of idea we consider to be workable. For example, having Hisao be scouted for a Hollywood movie or having one of the girls hired to fight aliens are things I also consider bad ideas for a KS story. Having Hisao start a relationship with a non-disabled girl is well within limits for me, though.

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.

This is something I pint out every single time it happens. Doesn’t help much I’m afraid

Let me at least try to explain why it is flawed while staying within the constraints of the metaphor…

Well, obviously I don’t exactly agree with all your analogy… Rather than pâté Iwanako is more like anchovies. It’s perfectly legitimate to put anchovies on pizza, but some people don’t like anchovies. I don’t like anchovies. You don’t like Iwanako. See? A much better analogy.
And I suppose since we’ve stretched the analogy beyond its breaking point already I might as well continue. Say monkey wants to make a pizza with anchovies. He is no accomplished cook, and the end result might not be all that palatable. But whether or not I like anchovies, I can walk him through the process of making pizza – regardless of what to put on top. I can remind him to put on the tomato sauce and the cheese and maybe even encourage him to add a few ingredients I do like.
Unlike making a real pizza, here the ingredients are free, no one will starve if he doesn’t want to eat a pizza with anchovies, and monkey will hopefully remember to put on tomato sauce and cheese no matter what other ingredients he chooses for his next pizza.

To continue with my analogy: Katawa Kijo adds imitation crabmeat and sauteed mushrooms

I’m not quite sure whether or not this is supposed to be a compliment (personally I like neither crabmeat nor mushrooms), but thanks anyway

[Guest Poster]

I'm not gonna join in on the food discussion, but I'd like to say that if it gets more abstract, my brain may reach the stage where Rin's paintings start making sense to me.

I did want to reply to the following exchange: (emphasis mine)

At least in Miki's case, I'd argue that she gets characterized in canon to at least five times the extent that Iwanako is. I might even argue that Suzu is better characterized than Iwanako, on the grounds that prior to the release of the game her identity was explored deeply in the fandom and in various semi-official artwork.

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.

Well, I don’t really spend much time on the Shimmie – or even in the fanart section of the forum – so whether or not there is more fanart of Suzu than of Iwanako is of exactly no interest to me when judging which character is more appropriate to use in a fanfiction. Besides since all of that material is non-canon, fanfiction authors are free to ignore it even if they’ve seen it and draw their inspiration from other sources (or even from within themselves).

Suzu isn't better characterized than Iwanako. All we officially know about Suzu is that she's in Hisao's class. The fact that she has narcolepsy is somewhat semi-canon and that's really all there is to it. Everything else is fanon...meaning it can be completely dismissed.

Iwanako, on the other hand, is discussed quite a bit in the VN. You learn several things about her by playing through the five routes. You learn more about her than, say, you learn about Hideaki. Of course, Hideaki is a character you get to interact with during the game, so whatever you learn about him is handed to you on a silver platter. The information about Iwanako, on the other hand, has to be pieced together bit by bit from Hisao's thoughts about her, meaning it's a whole lot more difficult for people to imagine her. Not impossible, but more difficult. That, and the fact that Iwanako never got a dialogue pic. I think if she got a dialogue pic instead of being merely viewed from the back, people'd have a lot less trouble characterizing her.

It's suggested that Iwanako is not a creatively fertile character and Suzu is because Suzu got plenty of fanart and fanfic, but that fanart and fanfic had to come from somewhere. Fanart and fanfics can inspire other fanart and fanfic, but there's got to have been an egg at some point that hatched the first chicken. If people used to give Iwanako the most bland personality imaginable, then maybe a contributing factor is the fact that Suzu was given screentime by the right people and Iwanako has been given considerably less so. In other words, the fault lies with the authors and not with the character lacking potential. Obviously, YMMV. But it only takes a handful of people to suddenly boost a character's characterization in the fanbase's mind. All they have to do is decide that the lack of inspirational fanart/fanfics isn't necessarily a roadblock to creating a compelling character. It just means you need to draw more upon your own imagination. Okay, that's not all that simple, but by no means impossible.

It's nice to draw inspiration from other fanfics/fanart, but that also stifles creativity. The part of fanon that has grown 'organically', through forum discussion, one-shots and fanart (rather than 'mechanically' through solid characterization in one or several high-quality fics) isn't always worth paying extreme amounts of attention to. It's often kind of superficial. A good example would be the extreme "pair the spares" that's taken place over the years. In other words:

- Yuuko and Kenji had a relationship.
- Meiko and the nurse have a relationship.
- Naomi and Natsume have a relationship.
- Hideaki and Akira had a relationship until the full version came out and mostly sank that ship. (which until then had quite a bit of popular support)

Obviously, pairing all the side characters with all the other side characters is kind of a natural tendency of most fandoms, but it does create a very closed-off universe and it's hardly inspired. People shouldn't be afraid to challenge, stretch and kick around fanon.

[bhtooefr]

Yuuko and Kenji, and Meiko and Nurse actually have more basis in canon than Natsume and Naomi. They're at least hinted at. (And I recall reading something from TheHivemind saying that he had to tone down the hints towards Meiko and Nurse...)

Natsume and Naomi are entirely based on one piece of art - by the devs, though - that showed them as gay, and next to each other. (The same art also showed Miki as not getting any lines, and being sad about that, though.) So, a hint, in some slightly higher priority than normal fanworks, but still fanwork level, work.

(I still think of all three of those relationships as happening, though. But, that doesn't mean that challenging them is a bad thing. I like exploring them, albeit tangentially, though.)

[Guest Poster]

And the "hinted at" rather than "shown" is what makes it work better in my opinion. The devs knew about the various ships, so they included copious amounts of teasing without actually confirming. Frankly, a confirmation of Yuuko and Kenji in the game would have dropped its quality for me. Regarding the Akira/Hideaki ship, the devs actually went out of their way to troll the readers by coupling Hideaki with Akira in both scenes where he's first introduced and having Akira act overly affectionate towards him. (ruffling his hair, teasing him about "you can sit on my lap during the car ride") In Shizune's route, you don't learn the actual connection between Hideaki and Akira until a full day later. I'd be very surprised if that hadn't been done on purpose.

[forgetmenot]

Re: Zombie fics.

Personally, I'm not really a fan of zombie stories. Like Mirage_GSM has stated in another post on the fanfiction board:

Zombies are an inherently stupid story concept. There's no way a zombie outbreak would last more than a few days even if it somehow came to pass.
Plus there's absolutely no merit in writing a story about it, since it's invariably going to be just gratuitious violence.

In general, I agree. But there's also the opposite end of the spectrum:

[Zombie stories] ...can be a great way to see people at they're [sic] most desperate. Is it scientifically plausible, or even possible? Probably not. But then again it's doubtful that we'll come across any more then five, or six other sentient species in mankind's existence, but a lot of people still like stuff like Mass Effect, Halo, Phantasy Star, FTL, and other Sci-fi series that say other wise. It isn't about what is scientifically possible. Its about what can make a setting for an interesting story.

Which brings us back to the topic of setting: If (and this is a big if) an author can accurately depict characters from one setting in another that's fundamentally different thematically (even impossible), should he/she? Is there merit to a story that may be darker — even downright morbid — in a fandom that's generally lighthearted as KS?

My opinion is yes. Whether or not this recent uprising (pun very much intended) of zombie fics will prove to be of a decent sort remains to be seen.

also inb4 With Apologies to Harlan Ellison

[bhtooefr]

I think zombie fics can count as fanfic.

But this is ridiculous.

/me points at his sig

[Mirage_GSM]

Which brings us back to the topic of setting: If (and this is a big if) an author can accurately depict characters from one setting in another that's fundamentally different thematically (even impossible), should he/she? Is there merit to a story that may be darker — even downright morbid — in a fandom that's generally lighthearted as KS?

It depends...
Doomish's "With apologies..." was VERY morbid, and while I personally don't like to read morbid stories, I have to admit that (at least the first half) was internally consistent, very well written and kept more or less in character.
However, I think that the whole premise of zombies can never be internally consistent - at least to this day I've never seen a concept that worked. The problem is not how zombies are created. That can be explained with magic, a virus or whatever.
To paraphrase the article I quoted in the other thead: "There's a reason [those stories] start [after civilization has already been wiped out], and not earlier. It's because the early part, where we go from one zombie [or even a couple hundred] to millions, doesn't make any sense."
Zombies are dumb, slow and will fall apart in a few days. To both eat and procreate they have to hunt humans who are both faster, more intelligent and in many cases armed.
I'll grant that with Yamaku's population of partially disabled people they might have a field daychasing down blind students or wheelchair users, but as a global or even regional threat they are simply too ridiculous. Even Hitchcock's "The Birds" are more terrifying as a potential threat to humanity.

[Leaty]

Which brings us back to the topic of setting: If (and this is a big if) an author can accurately depict characters from one setting in another that's fundamentally different thematically (even impossible), should he/she? Is there merit to a story that may be darker — even downright morbid — in a fandom that's generally lighthearted as KS?

My opinion is yes. Whether or not this recent uprising (pun very much intended) of zombie fics will prove to be of a decent sort remains to be seen.

The zombie fantasy is terrible because it's just morbidity without maturity. It's dark, certainly (most of the time,) but it's also extremely juvenile. Now, if the source material is similarly juvenile (Adventure Time, G1 Transformers,) zombie plots can be alright, if not slightly stupid. But when you have something like Katawa Shoujo that exists on a higher tier of maturity (though many of its fans are themselves not quite at that tier,) introducing sophomoric plot elements like zombies can only constitute a downgrade of the source material.

There's nothing inherently wrong with a fanfic going considerably darker than the source material, but there are plenty of more grounded plots which could allow you to explore the characters in a tense setting without getting utterly ridiculous. You could, for example, subject Yamaku Academy to some kind of natural disaster, like a Typhoon Haiyan-type event, or a disastrous earthquake. You could even introduce terrorist elements along the lines of Aum Shinrikyo if you were so inclined. I find it hard to believe that any author writing a Katawa Shoujo zombie fic really wants to go through the effort of writing the characters in a serious crisis situation so much as they want to explore the zombie-slaying power fantasy and use Katawa Shoujo as the backdrop.

[monkeywitha6pack]

See I think thats a thing that depends on the audience of the source, not the source itself. If katawa shoujo's entire audience was juvenile and immature, Fictions that are immature and juvenile would be poplar, good in the eyes of the viewers and plentiful,

[Leaty]

See I think thats a thing that depends on the audience of the source, not the source itself. If katawa shoujo's entire audience was juvenile and immature, Fictions that are immature and juvenile would be poplar, good in the eyes of the viewers and plentiful,

People enjoy stuff that's above their maturity level all the time. I loved Silence of the Lambs as a child; that doesn't mean I was mature enough to fully appreciate it.

And I think that there are signs everywhere that many people who enjoy Katawa Shoujo really don't understand a lot of its nuance. You see that especially with a lot of people's reactions to Hanako's route.

[Lloyd Snow]

And I think that there are signs everywhere that many people who enjoy Katawa Shoujo really don't understand a lot of its nuance. You see that especially with a lot of people's reactions to Hanako's route.

What is it they say about truer words never being spoken?

[bhtooefr]

Although it doesn't work as well with the canon characters for timeline reasons, there's always using the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster (obviously needs the setting to be 2011-03-11 to use the actual disaster - I think that'd be a smidge too early to get any of the canon students BACK to Yamaku as staff, unfortunately, unless a 2 year degree would be enough).

If a story can be set there, Yamaku is on high ground, is probably inland, and has large facilities with on-site medical staff, well outside of the exclusion zone.

And, that also means anything set after that date, it's a factor.

[ProfAllister]

Well, in all honesty, I kind of miss there being someone who would reliably write stories that were dark, depressing or mildly disturbing (and doing it reasonably well). Sometimes it stretched the limits of believability, and you often needed to resort to some sort of "palate cleanser" afterward, but I do honestly feel that there is (potential) merit in skewing everything to such a harsh angle - when done well (which includes much of the general fan fiction quality/thematic principles that various posters have been alluding to).

On the subject of Zombies, I will agree that they're kind of played out, but I disagree that they're inherently unworkable. I'd also argue that the "after the end" setting isn't because it's the only option, but rather because it's the easiest option.

Obviously, there's the initial question of what sort of zombies you're looking at. For a basic definition, we'll consider zombies anything that has one of two properties (preferably both): a) Composed of (or resembles) dead tissue brought to "life"; b) will (or instinct) compromised and enslaved to a new set of primal urges or the will of some sort of controller

Admittedly, this definition is not perfect, as its broad nature includes some things that are clearly not zombies (such as individuals afflicted with particularly horrific diseases), but it's probably the closest we can get to a definition of something that is so definitively "I know it when I see it."

Cause: Essentially, this falls on the scale from "soft" to "hard." "Soft" is the H.G. Wells style "It works because it does. Now shut up and let me tell my story." "Hard" tends to be the Jules Verne style "Well, you see, it works because [20 pages of technical scientific discourse that at least sounds plausible]." Generally speaking, "soft" is associated with magic, "hard" is associated with science, but this isn't always the case.

Transmission: Generally, zombies on the "soft" side have limited or nonexistent methods of spreading. A wizard raising a zombie army doesn't "infect" per se, but turns the fallen into more puppets. The "zombie army" also rarely ends in an apocalypse, because they're more or less designed to be defeated by the heroes. A cursed locality generally has the whole "if you die here, you become a zombie," which also tends to have minimal apocalypse implications. Pushing into the "hard" territory, the most common form is a vector-borne disease, where the infected are themselves the vectors. This is the classic "Get bitten by a zombie, become a zombie." Some extend this to a low-contagion contact transmission, where exposure to contaminated substances can lead to infection if it manages to bypass the skin. Much less common, but not unheard-of, is respiratory transmission, which is also the most likely to spread rapidly (and cause an apocalypse).

Resilience: There's quite a range here. The classic dead bodies reanimated by magic tend to be the toughest, because they don't have to worry about falling apart or becoming disabled - as long as they can do something, they will, unless there's literally nothing left to hold them together (and, considering animated skeletons, even potentially beyond that). Moving more in the "hard" direction, they tend to have heightened strength and endurance by virtue of removing limiters (such as pain), performing superhuman feats comparable to someone hopped up on adrenaline. The tradeoff in the "hard" settings is that they're still normal human bodies, so still break, still fall apart, often have a need to eat (rather than just a compulsion), and can be disabled/killed by damaging the central nervous system - in short, they have rules, and those rules mean they have (non-arbitrary) weaknesses. On the other hand, the magically animated zombies tend to be more of the slow, shambling, inexorable forces, while the disease zombies are often stronger than humans, faster than humans, and have at least a basic animal intelligence.

Once you've established these three elements (and, in all honesty, the first isn't that important), it's simply a matter of figuring out if the rate of attrition (i.e., the ratio of infection to loss) is favorable. If it is (accounting for the ability of humanity to deploy countermeasures), then the likelihood of apocalypse approaches 100% (especially if you're giving a generous definition of "apocalypse"). So for the narrow category of zombies examined in that article, an apocalypse is unlikely. If you're talking zombies more akin to those from "The Last of Us" ("Hard," Animated Corpses, Quasi-Respiratory Transmission, Reinforced Structure), apocalypse is almost guaranteed.

Obviously, most people don't put that level of thought into it, which tends to hurt the end product. But a zombie apocalypse isn't inherently nonsensical.

Which then brings us to the next objection: Leaty's claim that a zombie story is inherently juvenile. The easy smart-ass response is that people could say that about a cripple-porn game. What matters is how you approach the subject matter. And I would disagree that a "real" event is necessarily a better way to approach this - the whole point of speculative fiction is often an elaborate argument by way of analogy. The issue is that, ironically enough, the people best equipped to give a zombie story the weight and maturity it deserves are among the least likely to ever consider writing such a thing. Anything can be a juvenile adolescent power fantasy (Hisao gets more sex in any of the routes than many people can hope for in their own high school experiences, for example).

In the end, it comes down to what I've said before: before you write anything, you should be able to give a satisfactory answer to the question "Why?" At the very least, your answer of "because it would be totally sweet to see Hanako in a bloodstained uniform and dual wielding katanas" will inform prospective readers of what to expect.

[Oddball]

I just think zombie stories are overdone. Everybody does zombies. As long as you're willing to bring in monsters, why not do something original?

You never see a Wendigo Apocalypse. That's a monster that goes around eating people and turning them into pother monsters. Why not use that?