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fanbows:

@rainbowrowell reminding us why she’s our queen ?

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Sharing because I did in fact say all this – not because I feel ?-ly 

As someone who loves stories that are nothing but two interesting characters having long and rambling conversations, and is absolutely terrible at writing plots, I get where these tweets are coming from but…

When people say “it reads like fanfiction”, they usually means “this reads like bad fanfiction”.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said to myself “Man, I really wish I could just read something about this character dicking around on their off day” and finding fanfiction to that nature… only to find that it is a bunch of sentence fragments and Meaningful Capital Letters assembled into the shape of the same hackneyed plots as the last ten stories I’ve found, written in the first person by someone who doesn’t understand the constraints of first person writing, who might understand the inner workings of the character I’m interested in, but I can’t tell if they do or not because rather than write about the character I’m interested in they wrote about a completely different original character and then stretched the skin of the first character over and claimed it was the same character.

I wouldn’t mind books being more like good fanfiction, but books being written like bad fanfiction is how we get the lowest tier of sentence fragments and Meaningful Capital Letters written in first person by someone who doesn’t understand the constraints of first person young adult urban fantasy novels that go absolutely nowhere with anything (even though they promise that they have a ticking clock to apocalypse). I definitely want every novel to have a ticking clock, even if the only thing it’s doing is telling the time.

The Japanese light novel series Bakemonogatari is an urban fantasy series that basically consists of long rambling conversations about complex Japanese wordplay and cute anime girls who are troubled by vaguely Lovecraftian mythological creatures, but it’s one of the most successful light novel series ever. Because it promises precisely that and delivers on precisely what it promises. It’s really, really good.

When it was first posed to him that they adapt his book series into an anime television show, author Nisio Isin had no clue how they’d do it. Not because it was a theoretically complex undertaking, but the opposite. The second story, Mayoi Snail, is pretty much nothing but one long conversation about a multitude of topics between the main character, his girlfriend, and the titular cute anime girl as they meander around an otherwise abandoned playground.

How do you make an interesting animation out of that? But, somehow, they did it. By god, did they ever. And, most importantly, it’s a very faithful adaptation. The Bakemonogatari anime series is a fucking visual trip, even though it’s so sparse and barren there literally aren’t even any background characters (though later seasons, which actually had a budget thanks to the first seasons success, would turn that into a stylistic narrative tool). Hell, the first series wasn’t even able to fully animate itself, but they turned the missing parts into a visual aesthetic.

When Rainbow Rowell says that she wishes books were more like fanfiction, she’s probably thinking of a book a lot like Bakemonogatari’s first volume (which contains what are probably its three strongest and most evocative stories, including Mayoi Snail), and not something like Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (which isn’t a book, but does feel very much like bad fanfiction).

Fanfiction is also where a lot of a) innovation and b) representation happens that doesn’t to the same extent in mainstream published fiction. That’s another facet of fanfiction I would like to see reflected in publication.