User:Quirel

And I'm Quirel, the guy who writes Not All Who Wander.

To start off... it's kind of funny that I ended up here. You see, there's two kinds of fanfiction. The first kind, the far more popular kind, is remixes. Peggy Sues, self-inserts, crossovers. That kind of fanfiction is all about taking elements from a story and giving them a good shakeup, adding new elements and seeing how that would change the course of events. This is a lot like how songs get cut up in Youtube remixes.

This kind of fanfiction is so common, in fact, that the best way to predict what stories will produce a lot of fanfiction is to look for a story that is amenable to this remixing. Look for an accessible story with likeable characters, especially an audience surrogate. Look for a story with powers that can be swapped out or rules-lawyered. Most of all, look for a story that leaves the audience less than satisfied. That's very specific. Look for a story that's flawed. A story that is good enough to gather an audience and keep them hooked, but has any number of mistakes that the audience wants to see fixed. The ideal story would probably be serial fiction that gives the audience plenty of time to get invested, but has flaws because the writer is writing it one chapter at a time and makes mistakes because of it.

So the fact that three of the biggest generators of fanfiction, AFAIK, are Worm, Harry Potter, and Naruto shouldn't be too surprising.

I got into fanfiction for an entirely different reason. Back in 2006, there were a grand total of two Halo games and three novels, plus a graphic novel if you could find it in your local bookstore. That's it. There was a hunger for more fiction, and more fiction seemed to be coming down the pipeline. Halo 3 was getting close to release, Halo Wars was known to be in development, Eric Nylund was working on Ghosts of Onyx, and Microsoft was actively seeking to make a Halo movie. That was a fantastic time to be a Halo fan, but if you wanted more content, you had to wait or make it yourself. And I've always been an impatient person.

I tried to write more Halo fiction, staying true to the character of what had come before. I wasn't successful, but I did a much better job than one might expect from a first try. And it's strange, but Halo seems to have inspired more of this kind of fanfiction than the fixit fics. Many stories are about OCs or the continued adventures of Master Chief, and there is a whole Halo fanon wiki with a strict canon-adherence policy. That wiki was founded, by the way, to stop Halopedia users from writing fanfiction on the Halo wiki.