Fanfiction: Where it works and where it doesn't

I have been playing games from the Touhou series recently, as well as watching the Spawn television series, and they have prompted an interesting reflection on my opinions on fanfiction and where I believe it is appropriate.

While I understand the appeal of fanfiction for many, I find little joy in it, the common questions posed by various works of fanfic (Coffee Shop AU’s, High School AU’s, Shipping, etc) are not things I desire the answers to, and the reliance on “tropes” for advertising fics in the modern subculture is directly inverse to my taste in media.

There is another discussion to be had, which I have had many a time in person, about the effect of fanfiction-to-print publishing and the lingering effects of trope based search engines and what it has done to the modern writing world, I will save that for another time so we stay on topic, needless to say I’m not a fan.

All this to say, I find myself enamoured by Touhou and its many, many spin-off fan games, and genuinely excited about the various situations that crop up in them, wondering how the characters would act. This, naturally, gave me pause. I wondered what the difference was, and after some reflection found it!

Archetypes

Commedia dell'arte is a form of Italian theatre originating in the 16th to 18th centuries, actors wore dramatically stylised masks that represented “stock characters”, archetypes widely recognisable to the common folk pulled from classical oral storytelling tradition. Scaramouche, the villainous braggart, Beltrame, the villager who pretends to be rich, Pantalone, a wealthy older man. These archetypes provide a solid foundation for audience expectations, characters do not need exposition or time to explain themselves, by creating a list of recurring characters with simple identities, the audience can jump into any story involving any number of them easily.

What Commedia dell’arte managed to do was essentially allow any theatre company to create fanfiction of the same set of characters, but in this case fanfiction feels incorrect, more like their interpretation of the characters.

We see this style of story (or rather set of characters) all over history, from classic Chivalric Romances of King Arthur to the anthropomorphised animals of Roman de Renard.

I bring this up because it’s the defining feature in what makes good fanfiction to me. Strong archetypal characters. It’s a reason comic books are so successful in their various runs by different authors. Comic characters like Batman, Superman or Spiderman do not feel tied to a story, they are modern archetypes, the brooding anti-hero, the superhuman saviour, the wise cracking acrobatic hero. Their original stories establish characters, sensibilities, thematic conceits, but their fundamentally simplistic structure allows for endless reinterpretation.

Archetypal can often mean simplistic or one-dimensional but what’s great about solid archetypes is that they are a foundation, not the end point, an interesting Spiderman comic is built on the writer's ability to interpret the common tropes of a Spiderman story and make something unique with them (tropes here being self contained within the established story’s framework, like the canon of the original narrative and how it influences later interpretations).

All this to say, Touhou to me feels as if it’s pulling from fundamental stories such as Brothers Grimm fairy tales with its cast of yokai and maidens. Establishing characteristics in the mainline series before allowing fans to create their own stories with said characters. I would liken it to playing with dolls, placing different pre-established characters into new scenarios and acting out how they would react.

A character like Sam Winchester from Supernatural is just too complicated and specific to the world of Supernatural for me to ever believe he could appear outside of the bounds of his story. But characters like Reimu, Marisa, Spiderman or Goku, they can go on many varying adventures in different settings without losing their core identity.

This was an illuminating discovery for me at least, I hope it was interesting for you :).