Reaper Explains it All: Fanfiction
Some time ago Reaper showed the 1st draft of his spin off to an acquaintance who commented that it was possibly the best fan fiction she ever read. Reapers 1st thought was she must not fear death if She’s so casually insulting a reaper. Fortunately before Reaper sent her to meet her maker he realized this statement was not meant to be an insult.
Fanfic gets a bad wrap. And in Reapers opinion this is... justified. Now admittedly at this point Reaper’s stance on fan fiction is far less extreme, it seems necessary to break things down so let’s begin.
In Reapers Opinion the vast majority of fan fiction is really quite bad. Though it’s true if you know where to look and sift around for quite a while there’s a chance that you may find a diamond in the rough, generally speaking, if you’re on a fanfic sight you’re likely to encounter, glaring plot holes, basic characters, predictable plots, scenes copied straight out of a popular anime TV show, or movie, cliché after cliché, and of course fanfics most popular trope, entire stories created seemingly for the sole purpose of shipping two or three of the most unlikely characters. And though Reaper could go on about such things, its perhaps necessary to flip the script at this point.
Back when D was just a wee-reaper he remembers filling numerous notebooks with his stories. You see back in those days things like laptops and the internet were not the mainstream resources we know them as today. For a young writer there was nothing like the plethora of options we see today where people can share their projects with the world. and on that note Reaper addresses the common “insult” seen in the comment section of fanfic websites. “This must have been written by a 3rd grader.” “Jeez the author must still be in middle school!” etc. Well, if you ask Reaper that’s fantastic! Can you imagine a youngster typing away at their keyboard, tablet, and writing pages and pages just for the joy of writing? That’s something to be celebrated not mocked.
A negative occurrence that came along side our interconnected world is that everyone’s a critic. We believe just because someone posts a story, or video, it must have been for us, and if it doesn’t meet our standards then shame on them! When we think this way we miss a very simple explanation. Maybe these authors were not trying to write the next best seller. Maybe they just wrote this piece because it made them happy. And if it served its purpose who are we to berate it with insults. So, in Reapers opinion if you’re perusing the net for fanfic you might not encounter the most compelling, sophisticated, original piece of literature you read this week. But it’s much more likely you’ll find the works of an inspired young artist putting their best foot forward as they start down the path of a writer and that’s A-OK in Reapers book.