Mischievous Function

Story Time

"How so?"

"Well, like...the original creators of the show either already did everything they wanted with the characters or haven't done enough. Like, there's this one ship I was considering that's super vanilla and kinda boring and stereotypical, but a bunch of people like it for some reason, so I'm kinda forcing myself to write it. It's pretty hard, though—I think I've resorted to making the male character, like, an average visual novel MC in every way, and I think I actually gave the female character BPD."

"BPD? Why the heck?"

"I-I don't know, I need something to make these characters interesting. For mint's sake, Pin, no one wants to slog through a typical high school boy's and a typical high school girl's thousand-word cookie-cutter confession like you find in online fanfics for the 2,763rd time. Or—or maybe they do, and that's exactly the problem. Either way, it...it sucks."

"Oh...I see. Have you tried spicing up the relationship between the two?"

"What do you mean?"

"Like, add a hidden layer to it or have them do something unorthodox. Something weird and original that's never happened in a story before, you know?"

"Well, I think I made it so that the boy and girl's mutual friend tried to kill the girl out of jealousy...twice. But even then, both of those stories were centered on the mutual, and the only pieces I've written about the boy and girl themselves are...boring, stereotypical cookie-cutter drafts, hey, what a surprise."

"Hmm...oh! How about you add some meta-humor?"

"What's that?"

"You know, break the fourth wall a bit. Let the reader know that you're aware of these stupid tropes, and how you find it extremely frustrating that because of your desire to write high-quality stories with loved characters yet original plots, you find a typical cookie-cutter romance story difficult to write with already-established characters who are only a fraction of a certain piece of media's ensemble cast, resulting in them having very narrow and tropey personalities, if any at all."

"But what if whoever reads it finds it stupid? I mean, I feel like breaking the fourth wall for self-aware and self-deprecating humor is something I'd do a lot. They'd probably just laugh it off and skip the section entirely, defeating the purpose."

"Well...sucks for them, I guess. I mean, if the reader doesn't like it, they can just...write something themselves. There are plenty of places to get started writing online, so nothing's really stopping them. I feel like several fanfic writers out there have gotten started with writing because they were discontent with the current state of their fandom's literature and wanted to make it better."

"Yeah, that makes sense. It's a good thing we're in the real world, though—imagine how much of a trainwreck it would be if we were just some part of a fanfic."

"Oh, boy. Yeah, that would suck. There's so much going on in our lives all the time that whoever writes our fanfic would probably take, like, literal years between chapters."

"I know, right? And then it takes them even longer because people have actual lives. You know, friends and video games and other interests. And readers just don't seem to understand that."

"Yeah, I know! Have you seen some of those comments on fanfics where they were like, 'Is this book dead?' 'When's the next chapter?' and so on and so on, when literally all they have to do is click on the writer's bio to find that, yes, they're alive, and yes, they're working on their book, but writing well literally just takes that long."

"See, that's the thing—they don't really care about quality. Well...I think, anyway. It's very different being the writer and the reader. Readers just want something to read; if it's got words and their OTP, they'll read it."

"And even then, that first one's not a requirement. You ever seen fan comics?"

"Oh, yeah. But, like...writers, on the other hand...man, they treat one of their stories like their baby. You know? Caring for it, nurturing it, feeding it, making sure it develops well, ditching it for years and trying not to think about all of their life mistakes associated with it while they try to make as many new ones as they can—you get what I'm saying?"

"Yeah. Man, putting up with all that stuff...it really makes you wonder why writers do what they do."

"It does, doesn't it? I guess the feeling and satisfaction of completing something worthwhile that you can immediately share with the world is worth it for them, or something."

"Heh. Yeah, 'worthwhile.' Because we all know writing fanfics pays better than getting an actual job, and we all know fanfics are better pieces of writing than established authors who've been writing for longer than the fanfic writer's been alive."

"Ha! Right, yeah. I mean, have you seen how bad some of them can be? Some writers don't even know when to cut off one scene and transition into another."

"Really? Wow."

"Yeah. Even though the scene they're writing should be longer, some writers just cut off scenes and conversations abruptly and with no explanation, as if they somehow think that's a natural place for the scene to end or something."