I love Spider-Man, I love fanfiction, but it’s nearly impossible for me to enjoy fanfiction about Spider-Man. It feels like every one out there is about some infantilized teenage Peter Parker, and I hate it. It’s not that I have a problem with teenage Spidey, though I’ll be honest it’s not my favorite iteration, it’s just that most stories have him as the only teenager in the hero community, which ruins all of his best relationships. One of my favorite comic book friendships is that of Peter Parker and Matt Murdock, Spider-Man and Daredevil are great together, but most fanfic with them has Peter as this goofy innocent kid and Matt as this grizzled adult mentor type, which kind of sucks because they can be a real riot together as friends. I hate having Spidey cut off from all the other superheroes because of the age gap, and that’s not even touching how the Spidey being written in these fanfic is usually completely unrecognizable as Peter Parker. It’s tiresome and makes me want to avoid all marvel fanfiction in general, which sucks. That’s all.
I don’t actually have much interest in the Harry Potter fandom, not anymore. I think the entire series is overrated and that there are way too many Hogwarts AUs out there.
That being said, America would absolutely be sorted into Slytherin no matter what he likes to say about him being the Hero.
So Zuko spent almost three years looking for any trace of the Avatar before Aang came out of the ice. What if, alongside investigating the air temples for information about airbenders, he also tracked down spirit tales. The Avatar is the bridge between the spirit world and the human one, it would make sense that Zuko would consider any spiritual activity to be possibly Avatar related. I think a fun story would be about the misadventures Zuko and his crew get up to tangling with whatever spirits they end up coming across and having to deal with in their search.
This could either be a funny slice of life type story or a more serious one. One of the Avatar’s main duties is dealing with problems between spirits and humans, with him gone there’s probably been all sorts of things going wrong on that front. An interesting idea could be Zuko being forced to handle some of these problems just because he stuck his nose in it and realizing just how important the Avatar really is to the world. I’ve always though the Avatar isn’t nearly as important to human politics as they are to human-spirit relations. That could be a cool AU, with Zuko wanting to make sure Aang does his duties like he’s supposed to.
I don’t know, this is kind of just a stream of thoughts, but I think fics exploring the spirits of the ATLA world are really interesting and I love stories with Zuko’s crew, so combining the two would be awesome.
So the one thing about the Percy Jackson books is that there are way too many demigods and that the likes of Percy and Nico are both way overpowered compared to what you had in the old stories. So I had a thought towards each thing.
The reason there are so many more demigods is because as worship of the greek gods faded amongst mortals, the gods started to have more children to kind of balance it out and make sure they still had plenty of genuine worshipers beyond them just syphoning of power from the symbolism and stuff that came with following the heart of the west.
The reason Percy and Nico are so strong is because of how much Poseidon and Hades loves their respective mothers. The strength of the demigod is linked to the degree of affection their demigod parent had for their mortal parent. The more the god loved the mortal, the more powerful their child is. I think it was made pretty clear that Poseidon and Hades cared for Sally and Maria a lot more than other lovers. So yeah.
One of the most frustrating things about reading fanfic is finding a story that has a really interesting sounding premise, or is one of the very few about a rare ship, only for it to be really poorly written. This is even worse with small fandoms because you’re completely starved for content but what little you have isn’t any good. I don’t have the ability to look past grammatical errors and shitty dialogue to enjoy what good there does exist. So it’s there but I can’t enjoy it and I don’t really have any other options.
There’s also the frustration of stumbling across a really good story far too soon, when it only has one or two chapters. With official webcomics or a webnovel, there’s a schedule you can rely on for releases, but with fic, you’re stuck waiting in ambiguity until the writer posts. Though, at least this frustration is balanced out a bit by the feeling of excitement you get when you’ve got that email in your inbox giving you a new update. I love that feeling, brief as it is.
I hate the idea that Hook went to Neverland because of Emma, in fact I don’t really like how their entire relationship was established. They had way too little screen time to show anything properly building, the entire thing felt way too rushed. Which is unfortunate because I do actually like their dynamic as a couple. Anyway, Neverland, Hook didn’t go because of Emma, he went because of Neal/Baelfire and Milan. Henry is Milah’s grandson! Of course Hook wanted to save him, he’s a part of the woman Hook loved for three hundred years!
I don’t even know why I still care about this, I stopped watching OUAT after all the Frozen bullshit and it’s seriously problematic on a lot of levels, I’m not even sure I like any of it anymore.
One thing that’s always buggged me about Fairy Tail is that we never get an entirely clear idea of how much time is passing, like in a general sense. Sure some arcs we know for sure happen within a set amount of time between each other, like Tower of Heaven happens enough time after Phantom Lord and for long enough that the guild is completely finished by the time they get back. Since Tower of Heaven itself probably lasted around a week, at most, that means it had to happen a good few weeks, if not months, after Phantom Lord. However how much time has passed since Lucy joined the guild is never entirely clear, just kind of alluded to. We have to make a few logical assumptions to try and figure it out and rely on the info we get from the side story chapters that make up the filler episodes for context. None of which are completely trustworthy, of course, but it’s the best we got.
This has been bothering me ever since I decided to rewatch some of the earliest episode. Like, how much time passes, exactly between episodes 2 and 3? We know episode 2 has to happen either the next day or the day after the end of episode 1, depending on the travel time between Magnolia and Hargeon. Close in time, however you think of it, but who knows how much time goes by between episodes 2 and 3. Long enough that Lucy manages to find an apartment and get all moved in as well as develop something of a rapport with Natsu and Happy, they certainly seem closer by this point. However it’s still a short enough time period that Erza isn’t back from wherever she’s gone off too. I don’t know, it just kind of bothers me because when I think about it, most of the story arcs seem to happen so close together that you could arguably say not even a full year goes by between the first episode and Tenrou, which I don’t like, I just wish things were a little extended that the arcs take place over a longer period of time.
So I was feeling nostalgic for when this fandom was a thing and Harry Potter was still alright and I’ve decided to summarize an old fic idea I had back then.
It starts in a basic Hogwarts AU setting, with the Big Four in their friend group, plus Anna. Jack and Elsa are kind of a thing; Rapunzel and Eugene, and Anna and Kristoff, are fully dating; and Astrid and Hiccup are definitely not. It’s that thing where Hiccup does his best to avoid the rest of the teenagers from Berk, which in this world is a small magical island village off the coast of the UK. (Think where A Thing of Vikings has it located.) The basic dynamics of all those stories.
Anyway, something or other happens and the group of five friends end up performing a spell that goes wrong and they accidentally pull their counterparts from a different dimension to their world, plus whoever were in their immediate surroundings. Of course, I’m talking about their movie versions. This ends up with Hiccup and the gang (I’m thinking sometime after HTTYD 2 and ignoring 3 because I hate it), Merida and her three maybe suitors (I just imagine her dragging them into misadventures because I think that’s a fun idea and she needs friends), Rapunzel and Eugene (I’m working with the theory that she’s cousins with Elsa and Anna so they all know each other), Anna and Elsa and Kristoff (and maybe Honeymaren and Ryder, I go back and forth on whether to have Frozen 2 be a thing), and finally Jack Frost and Peter Pan (this comes out of no where but I really like the idea of Peter being a spirit and acting as Jack’s little brother figure since Jamie is long gone by this point).
All the movie versions exist in the same world, some post post apocalyptic one where at some point civilization collapsed and started over, this time with magic being far more abundant. Jack and Peter are something like 3,000 to 5,000 years old. They hide as soon as they get to the Hogwarts world because they were in the middle of a fight with some shadow spirits or something who make a break for it towards the Forbidden Forest, they’ll spend most of the story dealing with rounding them up and staying hidden while everything else is happening, maybe.
The story is mostly going to be about the clashing dynamic of the groups. Like the movie versions don’t really know each other as anything but fellow nation leaders (I also kind of imagine there being some hostilities between the Highlands and the Barbaric Archipelago to add tension), while the teenagers are all close friends. Hiccup’s relationship with the Dragon Riders is nothing like the strained relationship of his counterpart (and he and Astrid are married), same with Merida and her suitors. Everyone is just really different and I thought it’d be fun to play around with them meeting each other.
At some point, towards the end, Jack and Peter finally reveal themselves and they know how to get back to their world. This will have the biggest changes because unlike everyone else, they’re a different species from their counterparts and ridiculously older. There’s absolutely no romance between Jack Frost and Elsa. Also depending on if this includes Frozen 2, Elsa has maybe been helping Jack and Peter in her role as a bridge.
It’s a lot of vague ideas and a general sense of a plot that I will never write because it has way too big of a cast to balance and is beyond my abilities. But I do still think it’s a fun concept.
There’s a tendency in fanfiction that I’ve noticed to kind of de power Superman and Wonder Woman in favor of making Batman and the Batfamily look better. Part of this is probably because of the overwhelming amount of stories centered on Batfamily dynamics and that when writing shock and awe fics people want familiar characters to be their outsider pov, but it just doesn’t work right with Superman and Wonder Woman.
Another part of this is probably because of how the characters get presented in the comics, unfortunately both Superman and Wonder Woman have had to deal with a lot of flip flopping with their powers because the characters were made too powerful and the turn back to try and make them less overpowered has backlashed into making them too weak at times depending on the story. Not to mention how since Batman is part of the trinity that is the face of DC they want to make him equal to the other two within the canon, and it just doesn’t work. I don’t care how smart he is, Batman just cannot handle the problems Superman and Wonder Woman face, he’s only human.
I don’t know, it’s just a common occurrence for a popular character to try and have their real world popularity reflected in the comics, even when it doesn’t work, Batman and Spider-Man have that problem, the latter significantly more so than the former since Batman actually does play a pretty important role to the Justice League, just not quite to the point as he is represented, I think.
I like Spuffy as a couple, I intensely dislike Bangel, but I really like Angel as a character. Angel might actually be my favorite character, I just can’t stand him with Buffy, I think they bring out the worst in each other. My problem, why do so many Spuffy stories have to come with Angel bashing? They give plenty of evidence for why they don’t work together that doesn’t take from either character. Why do they have to turn Angel into this huge bully? Why can’t they just have Angel naturally mature away from Buffy? I get he had a lot of problematic behavior around her when he was with her, treating her like one of his former victims minus the killing at the end, but he hadn’t been around humans in decades, he didn’t know how to act around them. Angel’s show is all about him learning to be human, really, Buffy showed him that he could be redeemed, that’s why he’s so attached, but they don’t work. Also, what’s with everyone saying he lost his soul because he had took Buddy’s virginity? It was about her acceptance of him, he felt absolved by her so he could feel truly happy for a brief moment. After Angelus returned, Angel realized he could never be absolved by someone else, he just has to be better on his own and help people. I’m just frustrated by people feeling the need to detract from Angel as a character in order to boost Spuffy, Spuffy doesn’t need it, Spike and Buffy work as a couple on their own because they’re compatible people.