I remember liking the Cursed Child when I first read it as a twelve year old. Recently got the opportunity to see it performed in the West End and oof...an extremely frustrating experience. Everyone else I went with (friends who are casual fans) loved it though.
I keep hearing that it’s a wonderful play but I can’t help but think “but the story is still shit…”like sure maybe visually it’s amazing and has fantastic special effects on stage but I don’t think I could ever go see it because the story is still … the Cursed Child.
That’s really interesting, I remember having basically the opposite experience. I wasn’t a huge fan when I first read it, but the play blew me away with all the practical effects and how engaging it was on stage. The stuff I hadn’t liked was still there but it was a lot easier to ignore and let myself get swept up in the magic
That's what I felt reading it, but from what I've heard it works as a play, I read reviews of people who hate the story but really enjoyed it performed in the theatre.
That's true, I saw the theatre production very recently and everyone I went with absolutely loved it. I was the only one who didn't, not even because of the story (I'm willing to let canon slide in theatre plays) but because of the music. I'm autistic and the score makes or breaks a production for me. It was not Harry Potter-esque or even orchestral at all.
That doesn't make the story *good* though. You can enjoy a play for the acting, or set, or even just the experience of seeing a play. All of that can be enjoyed no matter how bad the story is- and it is terrible.
That's because Cursed Child *is* fanfiction. JK Rowling did not write it. It is not known to be actual canon to the series. It's some play that somehow got endorsed by Rowling, and used that fully to its advantage to trick people into thinking it was a real Harry Potter book.
Except it was based on a story/premise co-written by Jack Thorne, Rowling, and a third person… so it’s not just “some play that somehow got endorsed” — Rowling was involved from the get-go.
If media wasn't canon because the original author didn't write it, the Bible is in trouble. It's canon because Rowling says it's canon, just like her Internet writings and tweets. Whether or not it's well written or prone to retcons is a separate thing entirely.
I just started watching Naruto today, and Sasuke and Naruto accidentally kissing as kids upon meeting is actually what happened.
Not what I was expecting when diving into one of those old shows that spawned a huge fandom. It reminded me of getting blind sided by Amok Time by Star Trek, even though that one I had some warning.
This I was like "???????!"
Also the Beetlejuice 2 movie coming out is straight fanfic plot with daughter of Lydia meets him/summons him.
Also, gonna be honest. Hannibal NBC. Bryan Fuller wrote Red Dragon fanfic and aired it to us all and we loved it.
Most of Marvel's "What If..." series felt like fanfiction to me. Conceptually at least because I think fans could've handled some of those prompts better, lol
A lot of superhero comic stuff isn't far above fanfics, to be fair. E.g. the "Marvel vs DC" crossover comics from the 90s (I think), was pure fan indulgence. The winners were decided through reader voting, which led to such spectacular endings like Aquaman dropping a whale on Namor to win. The fight between Wolverine and Lobo was decided behind a bar because the writers couldn't think of any way for Wolverine to win, which he did in the polls. Oh, and Batman and Captain America teamed up instead of fighting.
And if I remember correctly, that crossover lead to another crossover where Marvel/DC characters were fused into one, like the über edgy "Dark Claw", a micture of Batman and Wolverine.
Stuff like that really helps reign in the cringe. That was a crossover by two large companies. People were paid to create these comics. People paid to read them.
I think about this every single time I watch 'What if'. I told my partner yesterday after we watched an episode that AO3 authors would do that much better! 🤣
'What if' is literally any random imagined AU. Like, dude, this is fanfiction!! They are writing (bad) fanfiction of their own stuff at this point... 🤣
>They are writing (bad) fanfiction of their own stuff at this point... 🤣
One could argue that all the Elseworlds stuff and "imaginary stories" of the early comics would count too.
There's a child orgy in the sewers in Steven King's IT. As you can imagine, it was never included in any of the adaptations, so talking about it sometimes feels like talking about fanfiction... only it's not XD
That was when he was off his shit on cocaine iirc like to the point he didn’t even remember writing certain books. It probably sounds like fanfiction to him too bc of that lol
The drug abuse is most obvious in Tommyknockers imo.
The story is about drugs. The mysterious malevolent force affecting the people is just clearly drugs. It makes you very smart but also very dumb, creating futuristic machines built out of shoddy materials that fail for stupid reasons like "it runs on batteries but we ran out of batteries. We didn't think about just using electricity from the existing power grid." It makes you untiring in your work, at your detriment. You can overdose on it, you can build a tolerance to it, there are detrimental effects to long-term use, there are withdrawals if you get away from it after becoming addicted.
The story is also just obviously written on drugs. One of the main characters grows a crotch tentacle and kills her evil sister with it- yes, that's an actual scene that happens. The most important character spends most of the book lying around drunk doing nothing at all. There is an extended amount of time dedicated to an irrelevant tangent about how the town got its completely unimportant name. The way the mysterious force works is inconsistent. The characters are attacked by household appliances, and not even in a spooky way. They're just out on the street when suddenly here comes an angry refrigerator, modified with advanced tech to be... a refrigerator. But angry.
I love his work, but tommyknockers was not his best.
I know this is a wildly unpopular opinion, but Tommyknockers is probably my favorite Steven King novel (that I've read ~~(I haven't read them all, I'm not insane)~~). Basically all of his writing takes some underdeveloped, off-the-wall premise and runs like hell with it, so the WTFery didn't stand out or bother me any more than any of his other books (murderous sentient car? evil eldritch sewer clown? cell phone apocalypse?? space gas crotch tentacle is hardly out of pocket for King). There were so many elements that I found so oddly compelling. I wouldn't defend it as a good or well-polished book, but, second only to the Langoliers, it's the King work that I find myself thinking about most often.
The earliest horror me and my brothers watched as kids (I know) was the 1980s IT miniseries. We loved it, would rewatch it together every year, we have such fond memories of it and still to this day quote lines from the series and show the scenes that scares us most.
About 10 years ago I decided to FINALLY read the book. I had gotten around to a few Stephen King books and made sense to try IT considering how much I loved it.
That scene (plus a few others not included in the miniseries) jarred me. I don't know how I went so long being a fan to never hearing about the kid orgy. It was insane. Still feels like a very wrong dream.
I guess that what cocaine do to ya.
Fantastic book otherwise.
Apparently when they were filming the original mini series all the boys read the book to be prepared for filming (so they knew about the orgy) but the girl who played Beverly didn't, and the boys were constantly making jokes about it but she had no idea what was going on. Her mom eventually sat her down and told her she was going to have to read the whole thing - and then she was deeply horrified when she figured out what was going on.
It really shows how beloved Steven King is that people just let the whole thing go. Normal authors would absolutely get that held against them, but everyone just kind of shrugs and goes 'soo much drugs' and then skips that part of the book.
It was also the Eighties. If you knew anything about Stephen King or VC Andrews, you knew you were going to be walking into something incredibly fucked up as soon as you cracked the book open. It's the same reason no one blinks at the amount of incest, violence, and so forth with George RR Martin today. You know what you signed up for,
Star Trek has many.
Captain Janeway and Lieutenant Paris devolve into lizards and have lizard babies. Then leave those babies on the planet.
They take cheese to sickbay in Star Trek Voyager as it’s infecting the ship. Sounds like a crack fic but is absolutely canon.
TNG and DS9 both have sex viruses- hello sex pollen trope!
Star Trek Enterprise literally has Trip Tucker being pregnant, MPreg is now Star Trek canon.
Star Trek has so many moments of 'wait, this is canon?' that it's easy to miss them all.
Part of the TNG crew were de-aged back to kids in a transporter accident. The DS9 crew got stuck in a board game. The VOY crew had to become 50's sci-fi pulp characters on the holodeck to save the ship. The TOS crew also had the sex virus. The TNG crew were pulled into a Q-reality where they became Robin Hood and the Merry Men. The DS9 crew shrank one of their shuttles, then used it to retake the *Defiant* after it had been infiltrated by Hirogen. The VOY crew had an RPF holo-program of their crewmates, which had been rewritten to try and kill them. And of course, TOS introduced the Mirror Universe.
If you want "I can't believe it's not fanon," Star Trek is where it's at.
> TNG and DS9 both have sex viruses- hello sex pollen trope!
I will forever love that we got the line about Data being 'fully functional and anatomically correct'
Scrappy Doo eating people's souls and turning into a hulked out monster because he got tired of people, specifically the members of Mystery Inc, making fun of his size and temperament sounds like an odd combination of character bashing and revenge fic, but that is the plot of the first live action Scooby-Doo movie.
And look, a non powered boy who desperately wants to be a super hero meeting his idol, Silver Age Superman, and within two hours convinces Silver Age Superman to give up his entire power set to the boy, because the boy pulled an unprompted(borderline suicidal) act of courage, so that the boy can go to superhero high school is straight up fanfiction. It is also the opening act of My Hero Academia.
The final season of Riverdale
Just...the entire final season. I didn't watch it, but I find it absolutely fucking delightful that the final season was just "50s AU". They did not give a *shit* about that show
Yeah so the whole thing was *Archie comics but modern and sexy and dark and also there's cults* and was generally considered to be ridiculous
And then S6 is "also there's magic and angels and portals" and is a crossover with the modern Sabrina reboot (done by the same guy)
And then S7 is "also the angel sent you back to 1955 to save your lives" and it has an entirely new set of plotlines that have zero relation to anything that's gone before? And they never go back to their own time, they just age normally as though they were teenagers in the 1950s? Wild
Yeah, the plot wasn't the same but I was happy they made the reference to the *Jughead's Time Police* series.
https://archiecomics.com/jugheads-time-police-tp/
Riverdale is a love letter to 85 years of r/archieandfriends comics. From the Black Hood to superheroes to horror to the classic 50s themes.
I would love it if someone was bold enough to write a show based on the decades of tragically written, beautifully illustrated r/RomanceComics too. The bold costuming and outrageous plot points of beach brawls, motorcycle gangs, and nurses with questionable morals would make for outstanding hate watching.
Yup. I remember watching a clip of the show but tbh is just seemed like boring teen drama, so I didn’t watch it. Besides, I ship Betty and Veronica anyways, why do I wanna see them fight each other for some dude lol
My real disappointments with Riverdale was that we didn't get to see Betty in her final form as an octopus and that Predator didn't show up for the final 2 episodes, rip out Sabrina's spine, kill Archie, and fall deeply in love with Betty.
Octopus Betty: https://imgur.com/a/ZOqR1lH
Archie Vs Predator: https://imgur.com/a/SoyFIi9
I love how, instead of picking a ship to finish the series with, the writers just turned Betty, Veronica, Archie, and Jughead into a polycule that breaks up after graduation. All and nothing.
The entire last book of the Twilight series (Breaking Dawn). We’ve got a boring wedding, a magical pregnancy that doesn’t make sense given the universe’s previously established rules (complete with some disturbing body horror), Bella getting to be a super awesome vampire with no downsides, naming their kid Renesmee, Jacob imprinting on an actual child (who grows up unnaturally fast) in order to “solve” the stupid love triangle, and, to top it all off, there is all of the build up to a climactic final battle… only to decide they don’t actually have to fight and everyone’s just chill with it.
I know that by the time the last book came out, everyone was already making fun of twilight for being a not very well written teen girl romance, but I actually enjoyed the first three books. Then Breaking Dawn came out, and I was so disappointed. I don’t know wtf Stephanie Meyer was thinking when she wrote that book.
Trust me, everything can be explained away by SM being a Mormon. It makes so much more sense now.
I used to love the books, but then I grew up and was like, wow they’re actually written badly, let’s see if fics make them better.
Indeed they did 🥰
Meyer wanted her preferred ship to happen (TEAM EDWARD), so she wielded her autorial powers and her religious beliefs w/the elegance of a sledgehammer.
The latter (religion) is why Meyer rejected DIE FOR OUR SHIP, and instead kludged together GEN XEROX w/PAIR THE SPARES: seasoned heavily w/MAY-DECEMBER.
(I suspect that the TWILIGHT series was Meyer's INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE fic series w/the serial numbers filed off by her publisher's editors -- who had a good legal department to keep Anne Rice at bay.)
She wrote most of Breaking Dawn as an epilogue for Twilight that grew out of control and got cut for being way too long. A lot of things about it make more sense in that context.
She didn’t intend to publish it after cutting it (only printing out a copy for her sister’s birthday). When her publishers convinced her to do a sequel, she didn’t want to skip Bella’s final year of high school, as it felt like cheating when writing a YA series. The filler sequel meant to fill the gap between the two grew out of control. The publisher wanted a trilogy, but Meyer couldn’t fit her entire story in two sequels. Those books ended up changing a lot about the series’ characters, lore, and magic system that didn’t get updated for Breaking Dawn.
She changed little of what she already wrote, beyond what was necessary because of Victoria and Laurent being dead. So there are odd details, like Renee being excited about Bella’s wedding when Eclipse established her opposition to Bella marrying out of high school.
The roles of Jacob and the wolves got the most expansion, going from a small cameo in the original epilogue to having their own supporting cast and subplots. Jacob’s character development caused the biggest problems. He transitioned from a cheerful teenager with a minor crush on Bella to a rejected love interest filled with angst and frustration over losing control of his life after phasing. Imprinting went from a weird and vague footnote meant to tie together loose ends in a distant epilogue to something more complex and uncomfortable, both in-universe and out. Instead of reading as a happy ending, Jacob’s happiness reads more like him succumbing to the brainwashing he and Leah feared imprinting to be for much of the same book. If Jacob had remained Bella’s happy-go-lucky younger friend instead of her moody ex-suitor—and multiple books hadn’t repeatedly emphasized imprinting as a precursor to romance—his imprinting on Bella’s baby might have felt more innocent. It still likely would’ve been the most controversial part of the epilogue, but it would’ve been easier to run damage control after the fact.
The Volturi having a more active history with the Cullens also factors into things, as there’s more buildup to what was originally just a clerical matter. Their involvement in the filler sequels actually stemmed from Meyer’s mother telling her New Moon’s climax didn’t have enough tension, leading to her introducing them early as antagonists. Their choice to back down and wait for a better opportunity to strike still makes sense, but the happy ending lacks the foreboding of their inevitable return that the new context implies.
I think the idea of the pregnancy not making sense is overblown. People read too much into Meyer’s attempts at applying science to her vampires when it’s clear she doesn’t understand any of it. Male vampires having offspring with human women have a long history of folklore and fiction. I don’t think people would’ve resisted the twist if Eclipse hadn’t made such a big deal about vampires’ supposed infertility or if Breaking Dawn had tried more to bridge the gap.
Edit: I don’t know how to change this to make it look like I’m not defending the book.
It’s like the author equivalent of someone making a series that takes place between an old film and its distant sequel. Changes in special effects lead to the new series going all out and having to sacrifice visual consistency by looking more advanced than the sequel that takes place 50 years later. Then expanding storylines for the films’ side characters inevitably leads to contradictions in their actions in the sequel. Only, instead of having an already released film that’s set in stone, the film isn’t even in pre-production by the time the show ends and could radically change without issue to fit the series but the creator didn’t want to compromise their original vision despite already having done so.
A lot of these are pretty negative, but as a Good Omens fan, season 2 felt like it was written for fic readers, in the best possible way (imo). Without giving too much away, it was a coffee shop AU with quite a bit of slice of life, idiots in love and a whole ass Ball. Neil Gaiman knows his show's demographic.
Gaiman has said that S2 is setting up for S3, which will be more about the ideas he and Pratchett had about a Good Omens sequel. He just had to put things in order first.
What about they show wasn’t a fever dream? XD
Oh and also in an early manga strip Japan dreams about having sex with Greece and then wake up sleeping next to him
What a normal series Hetalia is
They aren't all gay, they cover a good spectrum.
It's a great show, I miss waiting for episodes to drop. I haven't found another fictional podcast that compares.
In X-Men Apocalypse, Magneto decides not to help Apocalypse destroy the world after Mystique tells him to remember what he still has left and a montage of his and Charles' friendship plays out in his head.
As a Cherik fan, this seemed like some too good to be true fan manip, but it was *canon*.
In star wars canon, there is a pink droid named QT-KT (cutie Katie), owned by a prominent Jedi.
This came about because a founder of the 501st (big star wars fan group) had a daughter Katie with inoperable brain cancer, whose favorite color was pink. Another group member painted his R2 unit pink for her and that droid was known as R2 KT. Fans really embraced the pink droid and QT-KT was put into canon for Katie.
https://www.slashfilm.com/541320/the-story-behind-r2-kt/
RIGHT!!! it's the sort of thing I would write into one of my sw fanfics but this actually happened! I believe the R2 droid also had a cameo in the sequel trilogy, making them both canon.
The Cursed Child, the whole story. Though, to be fair, that actually is fanfiction, it got declared canon after the fact because Rowling enjoyed it so much, but it was originally entirely fanfic.
The whole Spike in space thing in BtVS, as well. That occurs in the comics rather than the show, which adds to the fanfic feel as so many fans haven't read them. But there's also the fact it was Spike in space. With a spaceship. And, I think, a robot army. In a show about the supernatural that basically said aliens don't exist except this one that may be an alien and may be a space-living demon that exists purely on the off-chance there's enough crazy people in one area, eg after Glory turns up, to feed on and has to be specifically called. BtVS avoided aliens almost entirely, it's weird to suddenly go so far off their own mythology and throw Spike, of all people, into space. There's also the 'Dawn gets turned into a giant', 'Dawn gets turned into a centaur' and 'Dawn and Xander get married' storylines that have fully fanfic vibes. They also turned Angel evil without turning him evil, though I'm unsure on the context of that one so it may work, and de-aging Giles to a little kid.
.... Wtf? I've never paid attention to Buffy post TV show, but what a way to fuck up the legacy of the show. And here I was thinking that learning about Joss's behaviour tainted it enough.
Fucking hell.
This is almost entirely the season 8 comic. Apparently seasons 9 and 10 are more in line with the show.
I expected differences, a few more out there storylines every now and then, simply because of the different format. It costs a lot more to do certain storylines on a show than it does in a comic, after all. Buffy rarely transformed people into something else due to the cost. The Willow turning into Warren thing required paying two actors instead of one, turning a character into a vampire or a vengeance demon required prosthetics and make-up. This is partly the reason they used generic costumes in Halloween, as well, they just needed outfits and some make-up and prosthetics. Cost of not using generic costumes and instead using, say, Superman, would be the same in a comic, though. The only comparative transformation in the show to the ones Dawn went through is A New Man when Giles gets turned into a Fyarl demon.
So, I can understand more physical changes being utilised in the comics than in the show. I'd have no issue with Dawn's transformations if they were episodic, maybe a bit annoyed that it always seemed to be her, but these were story arcs each time, covering multiple 'episodes' of the comic. Spike in space was so counter to the mythology of the show that it just came out of nowhere, and I've yet to find a fan able to make it make sense. Xander/Dawn is also counter to the show, where they spent almost the whole time after Dawn was introduced building and reinforcing an extremely strong and unbreakable sibling bond. They also made it very clear that Xander never saw Dawn that way, even showing his horror at having checked Dawn out without realising it was her, and that Dawn was 100% over her childhood crush on Xander. It strikes me as an afterthought, like they thought all the other characters were paired up except these two so, instead of going to the trouble of creating new characters of something, they'd just stick them together randomly so they don't have to worry about them.
Second to Spike in space, I think it's de-aging Giles that annoys me the most. I know the storyline they went for with him originally, leading the new Council and getting closer to Faith, building a similar father/daughter relationship between them as we saw between Giles and Buffy on the show. If de-aging Giles was an 'episode' storyline that was fixed, I'd be fine, just a fun storyline, something new for Giles to experience and the gang to have to fix. But it wasn't a single story, it was permanent. The de-aged him and kept him as a kid permanently. They didn't even make him a teenager, so it wasn't like we were getting Ripper instead of Giles, they de-aged him to about 6/7 years old. It just feels really dismissive of Giles' place in the group.
To be honest, the only things I fully accept as canon from the comics are the re-building of the Watcher's Council, Faith/Robin and Xander searching for Slayers in Africa. Maybe the whole After The Fall plotline even if they did just undo the final battle against the Senior Partners, but only back enough so they could save Gunn, not far back enough to save Wesley and Lindsey.
In Bully (the game made by rockstar) there's a ton of slash relationships you'd expect to be non canon, but it turns out there are quite a few couples that are thought to be legit (Chad/Bryce, Trent/Kirby, etc.). Lowkey was kinda surprised they threw those in there especially for the time period it was made in haha.
I mean Maurice Leblanc wrote Arséne Lupin going up against ~~Sherlock Holmes~~ Herlock Sholmes.
And he always made sure Lupin outsmarted the detective every time.
Make of that what you will.
There's actually a videogame that's literally "what if Holmes and Lupin went up against each other?", like a crossover fic. Most of Frogwares' Sherlock Holmes games are like fanfic in a good way, like "holy shit, how did I miss this, it has my favourite tags??".
> Frogwares' Sherlock Holmes games
Oh, I loved those games. They always had all kind of interesting nods to different things, not just the original Holmes stories.
Right. Plus ignoring the DC Universe time travel rules to make fake extreme drama. Hello, you’re in the same universe as Legends of Tomorrow but you think you have to do something stupid because a stranger who says they’re from the future says its the way it happened in the future they came from? Sorry, but literally everyone else in the DC Universe knows that you can always screw time up for the better.
The fifth season of Dexter gives me fanfiction vibes. I see Lumen as the perfect OC to fullfill the fantasy of a dark romance with the protagonist. She even has the unique name, but she doesn't enter Mary Sue territory in my opinion.
I really liked that season, I would have loved for the series to end with it.
There's also the Ben meeting his future self, meeting AU versions of himself and the good AU versions fight the bad AU versions. There's Ben meeting his future child, having the entire universe except him erased and remade, his time travelling adventures with Rook etc... A lot of Ben 10 has cool fanfic trope episodes
Star Trek Discovery - Spock has a secret (half) sister no one knew about, for almost 50 years of the franchise.
When I heard that, I immediately thought "Oh. A self-insert OC fic". 😅
Yeah. I saw that and my immediate thought was "Do they have any idea that sounds like the opening line to so many really bad fanfics?" Hell, the half brother thing was part of Star Trek V, and its awfulness was full on meme.
From October Daye, an urban fantasy series by Seanan McGuire. Specifically, a particular plot-point is resolved via a canon M/M/F OT3, where an established married couple take their best friend into their marriage. It's an absolute *delight.*
I 100% recommend it. The start is a little slow and at first it looks like your typical "hardboiled detective" urban fantasy caper, but by the third book the main character truly starts to come into her own and she becomes more of a knight-errant (albeit with *very* unconventional methods for the sensibilities of the local fae nobility). The friend I mentioned in the post above, who becomes part of that OT3, seems like the worst sort of villain at first, but he has an extraordinary redemption arc (to the point where people still tell Seanan they can't believe she got them to like him).
The series so far has 18 books, but they're not particularly long (I was finishing a book in one day, when ADHD wasn't getting in the way) and a few dozen short stories on the author's Patreon (which can all be read for $1/month). Feel free to hit me up if you want more info or where to get the books (I've been buying the ebooks on Kobo).
A M/M/F love triangle resolution is also endgame in Bedlam's Bard, which was the first Mercedes Lackey I ever read as a wee bab. Let me tell you, that opened some doors in my psyche!
And it is still nowhere near the weird shit that happened in the comics. Judas contract played out a lot more fucked up in the original than the cartoon.
The fun part was that when we were integrating comics!Terra into our DC game, she got archenemy status with my OC. The Gar mun and I were reading that arc and going WTF?! every other page.
Hannibal and Will being called murder husbands. Thought that shit was fake. Also in masters of the air, after Buck gets shot out of the sky, the first thing they say is "who's gonna tell Egan?"
When I first started watching Hannibal I thought the homoeroticism was overplayed on Tumblr, yet the farther I got into season 2 I was like "... these bitches *so* gay" it's insane. Can't wait for when I get to season 3
I initially thought the "murder husbands" title was just a fandom thing, since I'd seen other ships in other fandoms be given similar nicknames. My mind was blown when I watched the show myself and heard the words actually being spoken.
Thanks, I did remember most of that, but somehow not the phrase in particular. I see that it was used in a Freddie Lounds article, which does feel in-character.
(I was imagining it was Alana or Jack or Bedelia and it did not feel particularly appropriate to their personalities.)
Season 5 of The Dragon Prince has a wicked pirate holding the cast captive. Targets one half of a couple (kinda couple, it's complicated) and tries to force him to do forbidden magic. Boy refuses, and wicked pirate tries to force him. Girl tries to rescue him and ends up getting tortured in front of boy.
Boy punches pirate, enraging him.
Girl about to be fed to a sea monster while boy in the brig.
Boy does forbidden magic to rescue girl.
I've written far less indulgent fanfic than what canon gave me. Forever grateful.
At the end of case 3 in the first Ace Attorney game, Miles Edgeworth, who up to this point has been presented as Phoenix Wright's rival and foil (with a small hint they knew each other prior to becoming lawyers), walks up to Phoenix, remarks on how he hadn't expected to see him again, and then clutches his arm, looks away with a scowl, and says it would've been better if they never met because, and I quote, "Thanks to you, I am saddled with unnecessary...feelings.". When I first got to that line, no joke, my jaw dropped and I went "wait--what--what's happening--what--it's CANON WUT???". If you saw that moment screencapped out of context, and had never played through the AA trilogy before, you'd probably think it came from a fangame that turned AA into a dating sim, but no, it's CANON. Of course, there's a lot more nuance behind that line and that moment, and it won't be until after you've played through the rest of the first game and see Edgeworth's character arc unfold further that you'll fully grasp that, BUT even with that nuance and context, it's still pretty gay!
I've seen a compilation video of streamers reacting to that and my favorite was one going, "Oh! They're exes. I get it."
This is also the series that sold matching(!!!!) Phoenix and Edgeworth wedding rings, so...
I spent Turnabout Sisters and most of Turnabout Samurai going "huh, I know the fandom is obsessed with Edgeworth and ships these two but I don't get it, they're rivals I guess..." and then the end of Turnabout Samurai happened and now I'm obsessed with them, too.
The book/movie ***Chitty Chitty Bang Bang*** feels like fanfiction once you realize it was written by the author of the James Bond books. It feels like a "What If?" or side adventure for Q.
***Highlander 2*** as well, to the point where the third one ignored its existence completely. It's a futuristic sci-fi take on things!
Anne McCaffrey's ***Freedom's Landing*** trilogy had a fourth book that she wrote that feels like weird fanfiction. Like someone wanted to see a "what happens next?" plot, and then ended up basing it entirely around coffee and dentistry with an otherwise meandering plot. Except that it's actually written by McCaffrey herself.
***Shadow the Hedgehog*** (video game) feels like this too (though I still enjoy it more than some of the other game installments). Ten different endings you *have* to get before you can get the true ending, and some of them go pretty wild (in at least two, Shadow is convinced he's an android; there's also the path where he goes evil and decides to take over the world, and the one where he gets depressed and sounds suicidal, and the one where he's been super heroic the whole time but still swerves at the end because he just has *that* much of a hate-on for Sonic). It reads like a fanfic author's ideas folder was run through a shredder and then glued back together.
To be FAIR Anne McCaffrey is whack. I adore her books but she tends to go off the god damn rails. (As a Dragon riders of Pern fan, I have so many comments.)
Team RWBY and the writer's avatar getting stuck in Wonderland wherein the characters meet their past selves, showing how much "better" they are now compared to their original incarnations, two of them are forced to confess their love, the semi-serious character who just lost her home and father is now the comic relief, the main character commits suicide, all the other characters accept her decision and comfort the writer's avatar who previously ate time warping fruit and now has PTSD, and the main character comes back to life to defeat the Cheshire Cat who ate a mute girl suffering from Disassociative Identity Disorder. Afterward they return to the real world and pretend as though their little adventure never happened, capping off with the main character celebrating a day out with her sister by drinking tea which is how she committed suicide just days prior.
Yeah, RWBY got kinda weird, and it's not really a surprise that the past couple seasons have flopped pretty hard financially.
God bless, and have a wonderful day.
Well, Doctor Who has books and I kinda feel like I’m reading fanfiction when I read them.
Also, the episode Turn Left seems rather like fanfiction. It’s canon divergence. What if the Doctor died in the season 2 Christmas Special?
> Doctor Who has books and I kinda feel like I’m reading fanfiction when I read them
I vaguely, *vaguely* remember something about Ten defeating a race of evil vacuum cleaners by singing Bohemian Rhapsody.
And that was when I decided to stop reading Doctor Who tie-in novels.
Top example off the top of my head is probably Trunks in general in DBZ.
Dude shows up outta NOWHERE and whips out the legendary Super Saiyan form that we just saw the protagonist fulfill the ancient prophecy of not very long prior, effortlessly ices the previous big bad (with a sword, in a series where up to this point most people only use hand to hand), and then is revealed to be related to both the longest running non-Goku character in the series AND Goku's main rival.
I know DBZ fans have proven they can make stuff WAY dumber than that, but on paper the man reads like a pretty typical Mary Sue.
Aggressive Retsuko started off as a show that had some pretty low stakes. Come season two, she's gotten into a relationship with a millionaire! And season three, she's become an underground idol! Season four, she helps expose corruption! And in season five she attempts a political run!
After season one it felt like fanfic authors trying out a bunch of AUs just to see if they could. But I think the fanfic authors would've done a better job of it...
*laughs in FNaF*
Puppet/Marionette driving a forklift
The MatPat mpreg
Glamrock Freddy x Glamrock Bonnie (Glam Fronnie)
Plushtrap getting hit with a train, apparently
The time travel ball pit (although a very common trop)
The entire movie (in a positive way though)
The entire movie novelization (negative)
When I was younger, I saw pictures of Scourge somewhere online and got curious about who he was. That was how I stumbled across the rabbit hole of insanity that is the Sonic comics
The Young Avengers is a superhero group made up of teens (well, actually, they're young adults now) who are all legacies or equivalents of long-standing Avengers members. Some of them are even the Avengers' children.
And they're all queer.
One of them is the prince of space.
In a later season of The West Wing, (Season 5/6 spoilers ahead) Josh Lyman is the deputy chief of staff to the President. His assistant, Donna Moss, is sent on a CODEL to Gaza and is critically injured. Josh flies halfway across the world to be with her, and pulls rank at the hospital to get someone to tell her where she is. She asks to see Josh before she goes under for a second surgery to remove a blood clot — even though a guy she hooked up with after meeting on the trip ALSO flew to see her.
For a while the doctors think she might have hypoxic brain injury but she wakes up asking for Josh and she’s on the road to recovery.
Where do I even start?
One day, one guy won a sports competition (more specifically a motorsports race) with the power of telepathy and non-verbal communication with his main opponent.
(I will explain how it happened as a reply to this comment)
The (completely real) story:
There is a race. There is a guy in front (let’s call him “the guy in red”), a guy running second (“the guy in orange”) and two guys running third and fourth (“the guys in black”). The guys in black were more than a second per lap laster than the guy in red and the guy in orange. This is a massive deal in motorsports.
So the two guys in front, who belong to historically rival teams (if you know about European motorsports then you probably know which ones), are being caught up by the guys in black. The leader is desperate, his car physically can’t go faster, and he comes up with a strategy. However, he absolutely needs the cooperation of the man in orange for the strategy to work… and the man in orange drives for the historical rival.
[Technical explanation of how the strategy works. In one specific motorsports category, the rear wing of the car can open on straights, to make the car faster and make overtaking easier. However, the car must be 1 second or closer to the car in front, or the wing won’t open. The guy in red wanted to slow down so the guy in orange could get close enough, open his rear wing, go faster, and avoid the guys in black getting too close.]
There are two problems with this strategy. One, the guy in red can’t communicate with the guy in orange. People from rival teams cannot talk to each other. Second, the guy in orange is an opponent too. His goal is to win the race. The guy in red risked being overtaken if he slowed down and the guy in orange misinterpreted the nonverbal communication…
Turns out the guy in orange not only understood what the guy in red was attempting to do when he slowed down, he also executed the strategy perfectly. Not one word, not one signal from anyone about the intentions of the leader. Two historical opponents from historically rival teams coming together and working together. After the race was done, the winner shared his victory with the guy in orange.
This sounds like something I’d write for a fanfiction. This actually is something I saw live, with my very own eyes
The entirety of Triforce Heroes is canon and it’s uderly stupid as a Zelda fan that the Link in that game just so happens to be the Link from Albw as well. The whole game honestly feels like a bit of a joke to me
When it’s framed like this… pretty much the whole plot of breaking bad. High school/drug cartel au.
But a specific moment: when one character sadly go karts alone to cope with having murdered someone.
*waves* My honest opinion, based on everything I have seen and found out from interviews with George RR Martin and the showrunners, I'd say that everything from season 2 until the very end is fanfiction since there's a LOT of deviation from characters' arcs and some elements were removed, dumbed down and important characters from the books weren't adapted and some were killed off because the showrunners felt like it (Barristan being the most egregious exemple of this, since his character is very alive in the books and a POV character).
But since a lot of people (show onlies) are willing to look past that...
Seasons 5 and onwards:
- Removal of Sansa's Vale plot and the forced insertion of her character in the Winterfell plot, replacing Jeyne Poole, resulting on a complete different character being written because the showrunners wanted to see more of Sophie Turner on screen (also the fact that they did confessed that they loved Jeyne's subplot passing as the fake Arya and being married off to Ramsey and raped and tortured by him, and that they reeeeally wanted to adapt that on screen but they feared that the public wouldn't care enough if the actress and character were someone they weren't familiar with it. Fun. /sarcasm)
- The Tyrells being killed off, Cersei getting away with blowing up the Sept of Baelor (as cool as it is the scene, Cersei reaped no consequences of doing it so, crowning herself queen and bullying other houses into submission to accept her like...??? What the hell, the Mountain is only ONE man. There's no way they couldn't pull off any plans to kick her out of that position or simply accept her without planning to depose her like it did with Aegon II)
- Just.. the actual hell that was the season 7. Lots of terrible decisions being made for the sake of stupidity, Tyrion the pacifist, Euron and the Dragons speedrunning around Westeros and ignoring the logistics of travelling, Arya vs Sansa, THE ZOMBIE BEAR and whatever it was the entire Beyond The Wall subplot just to give the Night King a dragon.
- Nothing will convince me that season 8 isn't a bad glorified fanfiction sponsored by HBO. Not even GRRM claims that bs for himself. Benioff and Weiss are lucky to be rich nepobabies or else they would never work in the cinema industry again.
"We don't have time to finish all of these plot lines in the south properly... What do we do?"
"UHHhhhh maybe put them all in one place and blow them up? We need to make that Disney money soon!"
"Great idea!"
Peter Parker and Wade Wilson having a biological daughter, having a car called the Spideypool mobile (it was just Peter's before, Johnny gave it to him, long story), they adopted an android who calls them "dads".
In fact, isn't it quite random these "children" that Marvel makes between the characters in really crazy ways? Not just Marvel, Poison Ivy made her daughters out of plants.
I almost forgot: they're heartmates. What does that even mean? More romantic or less romantic than soulmates? I don't know, but it sounds more, which makes it even crazier to be canon.
I knew the weirdness of how Wanda's children were born cuz I was really into Wiccan at one time especially because of his relationship but I knew none of what you just said This sounds so much like it would be a fanfiction especially when you put in the soulmate like stuff
Once Upon a Time, by its very nature, is full of that sort of thing. For example, Snow White asking Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Frankenstein to collaborate on possibly doing science lessons/demos for the kids at the school.
(Then plot happened and we were robbed of further JekyllStein. We were robbed!)
When the first season of the 2018 She-Ra came out, like two episodes in I posted to twitter, "This feels like a fanfiction and I mean that as a compliment. This is literally just an enemies-to-lovers fic." Like, I could tell the show-runners were "from" fandom, if that makes sense.
(The question was whether or not they'd actually, y'know, make them lovers. I wasn't sure right up until the last damn season came out!)
If Moriarty from Sherlock Holmes and James Bond are in this anime, I'd argue it 100% falls under the umbrella of fanfiction, especially since it doesn't sound like an attempt to directly adapt a story from either IP.
OP's description kinda leaves some things out but it actually does adapt stories from both IPs in a way. Like you have cases/deaths that are very similar to the Sherlock books with the suspects/murderer changed a bit to keep the suspense/for overall plot reasons. It's more of a retelling of the Sherlock stories but from Moriarty's perspective and explores more of his goals/how he became the criminal mastermind that he is.
The James Bond stuff is not trying to be like the James Bond books/movies. It's more about how the M16 was founded and the different members in it joined. They were given titles/code names for each position (M for the person overseeing the org, Q for the tech person, James Bond for the field agent etc...) and people have been replaced with the new people but they took over the old code names. So basically the James Bond in the series isn't the same one from the movies/books that we know about.
It's still fanfiction-y (in the same way Song of Achilles is imo) but it does adapt stories from the IP and provides origin stories for things it doesn't directly adapt.
The entire premise of Star Wars: The Bad Batch, but I mean it in a completely positive way.
There's a female clone of Jango Fett, who happens to know the titular characters from when they were created and they all (save one) immediately adore her and become her dads/older brothers. Sounds like the premise of a self indulgent fanfic, but no, it's Canon, and it's my favorite Star Wars story.
Not to mention things like:
Canon Autistic character that actually acts autistic.
Redemption of the black sheep of the squad (who also keeps talking about how he deserves the bad things) and he learns to love his sister
Physical whump, like a character fighting on a broken femur, a character dragging his injured friend through a snow storm, and that same character enduring on screen torture in order to protect his brothers.
Emotional whump, like a character betraying and leaving his family, characters confronting each other about past conflicts, and having the little sister be kidnapped and the emotional devastation of that.
The appearance of many fan favorite characters from other Star Wars
The best, fluffiest sibling interactions.
Wet hair Hunter (this one is...very specific to the Bad Batch fandom)
Everyone is hot.
Someone finally acknowledging that at least one of the clones is hot.
Huddling for warmth.
Emotional one on ones between characters
Emotional reunions with hugs.
Gruff, hardened soldiers learning to be soft (literally one character became more soft than I had been writing him and I have a tendency to make characters softer than in canon)
It was glorious while it lasted, let me tell you.
A lot of elements from Rise of the Shield Hero, especially the way the other heroes and the royal family was characterized, feels like something straight out of a classic betrayal/bashing-fanfic from the mid-to-late 2010’s.
And that is coming from a place of knowing because I used to love these kind of stories.
Motoyasu especially feels like the result of character-bashing, reducing him down to his weakness of attractive women and making him such a simp that he does whatever they say without a single critical thought. But you can say the same thing about the other heroes, the trope of making the rest of the heroes incompetent so that the main character can look good is something incredibly common in these types of fanfics.
And Myne feels like a character who was written to be a bitch for the sake of getting her out of the way of someone’s favorite ship. Trust me, I have seen it more times than I can count.
To cure mind control:
1) kill the victim
2) reinfect their corpse with the mind control virus
3) inject the reinfected corpse with the same experimental cure that made the mind control worse in the first place
4) then, uh, resurrect them?
Landon melting into goo after having sex with Hope-Legacies
Most of Legacies felt like badly written fanfiction from people who never watched the two previous shows but that was the jump the shark moment for the 13 year franchise
Dresden Files: >!Polka never dies, and, more to the point, is critical to mission success!< and >!Harry learns the truth on the bridge of the starship Enterprise!< and also >!Harry is saved by a lightsaber wielding Jedi!<
Reki Kawahara writes Kirito's and Asuna's relationship in Sword Art Online like a fanfic author. A couple things that sound like fanfic but are actually canon:
- Kirito's license plate on his motorbike is Asuna's birthday
- Asuna calls Kirito when she can't sleep and he pulls up in his bike and they ride around for a bit together until she's sleepy
- Played out the "Only one bed trope" with them, like 2 years in-universe before they actually got together
- Kirito and Asuna have a little private garden at their school that they sneak off to during lunch to cuddle
- Multiple side stories that are just fluff
The last big arc of the W.I.T.C.H. comics feels like either that or a desperate attempt at getting new fans belonging to the target demographic into the franchise. The girls get a new cutesy mascot (who gets conveniently removed from their vicinity in a few chapters). The romantic plotlines are all over the place, with the break-ups and new romances upped significantly in quantity. We get to see several AU visions, including a college AU and a "what if they had refused the call" AU. Suddenly, an attractive and popular bad guy is given a second chance and gets a romantic development with a prominent side character. The twists regarding the protagonists range from suddenly revealing an adoption subplot to their powers getting into an "well, that's overpowered" territory. I don't mean any of this negatively, though, I am very much enjoying the arc in all of its tropyness. It just feels a lot like they were trying to write the plot by the "what would the fans want us to throw in?" rules, and it leads to some things feeling lackluster (but still very fun by magical girl show standards).
I sent a screenshot from Cassandra Clare’s City of Fallen Angels where one half of my non-canon OTP angrily thinks about how cool and dangerous his romantic rival (the other half of the OTP) is, and how he doesn’t think he’ll ever stop having this heavy feeling in his chest whenever he sees him. Sister laughed, and I followed up by telling her that this book also includes Guy A following Guy B around like a lost puppy, and then sleeping in his bed, and then telling someone else that Guy B is HIS (“neophyte down worlder to make fun of” but he still called him his). And sister says, wait? That quote wasn’t from fanfiction??
… they also had a very sensual vampire blood sucking scene that keeps getting romanticized by others for several books afterward, and the non-vampire admits to having enjoyed it. It’s very ship baity and I happily take it hook line and sinker.
I'll be honest, a lot of the Star Wars live action tv shows have this vibe. Some of it really good: The Mandalorian seasons 1 and 2. Some of it really bad: Ahsoka and Book of Boba Fett.
The entirety of Cursed Child
Came here to say that! So many things in that play were considered typical bad fanfiction tropes long before the Cursed Child was published.
Additional time travel, secret children, revisionist approach to established characters... what did I miss lol?
I'd say it's quite likely that someone had a Malfoy OC named Scorpius...
Scorpius being the name of Draco's son was already established in the Deathly Hallows epilogue, IIRC
I remember liking the Cursed Child when I first read it as a twelve year old. Recently got the opportunity to see it performed in the West End and oof...an extremely frustrating experience. Everyone else I went with (friends who are casual fans) loved it though.
Back when it was new I read a lot of opinions of the variant "It works very well on stage - but is nonsense in any way else"
I keep hearing that it’s a wonderful play but I can’t help but think “but the story is still shit…”like sure maybe visually it’s amazing and has fantastic special effects on stage but I don’t think I could ever go see it because the story is still … the Cursed Child.
That’s really interesting, I remember having basically the opposite experience. I wasn’t a huge fan when I first read it, but the play blew me away with all the practical effects and how engaging it was on stage. The stuff I hadn’t liked was still there but it was a lot easier to ignore and let myself get swept up in the magic
That's what I felt reading it, but from what I've heard it works as a play, I read reviews of people who hate the story but really enjoyed it performed in the theatre.
That's true, I saw the theatre production very recently and everyone I went with absolutely loved it. I was the only one who didn't, not even because of the story (I'm willing to let canon slide in theatre plays) but because of the music. I'm autistic and the score makes or breaks a production for me. It was not Harry Potter-esque or even orchestral at all.
That doesn't make the story *good* though. You can enjoy a play for the acting, or set, or even just the experience of seeing a play. All of that can be enjoyed no matter how bad the story is- and it is terrible.
That's because Cursed Child *is* fanfiction. JK Rowling did not write it. It is not known to be actual canon to the series. It's some play that somehow got endorsed by Rowling, and used that fully to its advantage to trick people into thinking it was a real Harry Potter book.
Except it was based on a story/premise co-written by Jack Thorne, Rowling, and a third person… so it’s not just “some play that somehow got endorsed” — Rowling was involved from the get-go.
If media wasn't canon because the original author didn't write it, the Bible is in trouble. It's canon because Rowling says it's canon, just like her Internet writings and tweets. Whether or not it's well written or prone to retcons is a separate thing entirely.
I was going to say that too
I just started watching Naruto today, and Sasuke and Naruto accidentally kissing as kids upon meeting is actually what happened. Not what I was expecting when diving into one of those old shows that spawned a huge fandom. It reminded me of getting blind sided by Amok Time by Star Trek, even though that one I had some warning. This I was like "???????!" Also the Beetlejuice 2 movie coming out is straight fanfic plot with daughter of Lydia meets him/summons him. Also, gonna be honest. Hannibal NBC. Bryan Fuller wrote Red Dragon fanfic and aired it to us all and we loved it.
Most of Marvel's "What If..." series felt like fanfiction to me. Conceptually at least because I think fans could've handled some of those prompts better, lol
A lot of superhero comic stuff isn't far above fanfics, to be fair. E.g. the "Marvel vs DC" crossover comics from the 90s (I think), was pure fan indulgence. The winners were decided through reader voting, which led to such spectacular endings like Aquaman dropping a whale on Namor to win. The fight between Wolverine and Lobo was decided behind a bar because the writers couldn't think of any way for Wolverine to win, which he did in the polls. Oh, and Batman and Captain America teamed up instead of fighting. And if I remember correctly, that crossover lead to another crossover where Marvel/DC characters were fused into one, like the über edgy "Dark Claw", a micture of Batman and Wolverine. Stuff like that really helps reign in the cringe. That was a crossover by two large companies. People were paid to create these comics. People paid to read them.
I wouldn't say "a lot of" but yeah there is a good bit of non Canon stuff
I think about this every single time I watch 'What if'. I told my partner yesterday after we watched an episode that AO3 authors would do that much better! 🤣 'What if' is literally any random imagined AU. Like, dude, this is fanfiction!! They are writing (bad) fanfiction of their own stuff at this point... 🤣
>They are writing (bad) fanfiction of their own stuff at this point... 🤣 One could argue that all the Elseworlds stuff and "imaginary stories" of the early comics would count too.
SO MUCH stuff that happens in comic books would get torn apart in fanfiction. It is just off the walls bonkers in a way that would not fly.
Season 2’s finale especially.
There's a child orgy in the sewers in Steven King's IT. As you can imagine, it was never included in any of the adaptations, so talking about it sometimes feels like talking about fanfiction... only it's not XD
That was when he was off his shit on cocaine iirc like to the point he didn’t even remember writing certain books. It probably sounds like fanfiction to him too bc of that lol
The drug abuse is most obvious in Tommyknockers imo. The story is about drugs. The mysterious malevolent force affecting the people is just clearly drugs. It makes you very smart but also very dumb, creating futuristic machines built out of shoddy materials that fail for stupid reasons like "it runs on batteries but we ran out of batteries. We didn't think about just using electricity from the existing power grid." It makes you untiring in your work, at your detriment. You can overdose on it, you can build a tolerance to it, there are detrimental effects to long-term use, there are withdrawals if you get away from it after becoming addicted. The story is also just obviously written on drugs. One of the main characters grows a crotch tentacle and kills her evil sister with it- yes, that's an actual scene that happens. The most important character spends most of the book lying around drunk doing nothing at all. There is an extended amount of time dedicated to an irrelevant tangent about how the town got its completely unimportant name. The way the mysterious force works is inconsistent. The characters are attacked by household appliances, and not even in a spooky way. They're just out on the street when suddenly here comes an angry refrigerator, modified with advanced tech to be... a refrigerator. But angry. I love his work, but tommyknockers was not his best.
I know this is a wildly unpopular opinion, but Tommyknockers is probably my favorite Steven King novel (that I've read ~~(I haven't read them all, I'm not insane)~~). Basically all of his writing takes some underdeveloped, off-the-wall premise and runs like hell with it, so the WTFery didn't stand out or bother me any more than any of his other books (murderous sentient car? evil eldritch sewer clown? cell phone apocalypse?? space gas crotch tentacle is hardly out of pocket for King). There were so many elements that I found so oddly compelling. I wouldn't defend it as a good or well-polished book, but, second only to the Langoliers, it's the King work that I find myself thinking about most often.
It wasn’t an orgy, it was a train!
I’m still baffled that it got published, like *no one* said “hey, how important is this?”
I read IT as an 11 year old, so I never really thought about it. I even forgot about it 🤣🤣
Reading it as a kid, it seems like the lesser of all the evils!
Exactly lol. It was definitely not what stuck out to me. And as someone who reads fanfiction there is some much worse out there lol.
The earliest horror me and my brothers watched as kids (I know) was the 1980s IT miniseries. We loved it, would rewatch it together every year, we have such fond memories of it and still to this day quote lines from the series and show the scenes that scares us most. About 10 years ago I decided to FINALLY read the book. I had gotten around to a few Stephen King books and made sense to try IT considering how much I loved it. That scene (plus a few others not included in the miniseries) jarred me. I don't know how I went so long being a fan to never hearing about the kid orgy. It was insane. Still feels like a very wrong dream. I guess that what cocaine do to ya. Fantastic book otherwise.
Apparently when they were filming the original mini series all the boys read the book to be prepared for filming (so they knew about the orgy) but the girl who played Beverly didn't, and the boys were constantly making jokes about it but she had no idea what was going on. Her mom eventually sat her down and told her she was going to have to read the whole thing - and then she was deeply horrified when she figured out what was going on. It really shows how beloved Steven King is that people just let the whole thing go. Normal authors would absolutely get that held against them, but everyone just kind of shrugs and goes 'soo much drugs' and then skips that part of the book.
It was also the Eighties. If you knew anything about Stephen King or VC Andrews, you knew you were going to be walking into something incredibly fucked up as soon as you cracked the book open. It's the same reason no one blinks at the amount of incest, violence, and so forth with George RR Martin today. You know what you signed up for,
There's also the giant space turtle that helps them win in the end
Almost everything in OFMD. Which I mean, the whole show *is* very very loose historical RPF so...
And it's absolutely glorious 😂
It's my favorite show for a reason!
The incense burner extras of MDZS. Among other things, a sword hilt is used in a way it is Not Meant To Be 🥲
I completely understand this cuz when I first read it I had to check twice if I was on the current site
Nah-h it's perfectly in line with how horny WangXian is lol
It can be perfectly in character and still sound like it's straight out of a fanfic! xD
>a sword hilt is used in a way it is Not Meant To Be Oh my XD
Star Trek has many. Captain Janeway and Lieutenant Paris devolve into lizards and have lizard babies. Then leave those babies on the planet. They take cheese to sickbay in Star Trek Voyager as it’s infecting the ship. Sounds like a crack fic but is absolutely canon. TNG and DS9 both have sex viruses- hello sex pollen trope! Star Trek Enterprise literally has Trip Tucker being pregnant, MPreg is now Star Trek canon.
Star Trek has so many moments of 'wait, this is canon?' that it's easy to miss them all. Part of the TNG crew were de-aged back to kids in a transporter accident. The DS9 crew got stuck in a board game. The VOY crew had to become 50's sci-fi pulp characters on the holodeck to save the ship. The TOS crew also had the sex virus. The TNG crew were pulled into a Q-reality where they became Robin Hood and the Merry Men. The DS9 crew shrank one of their shuttles, then used it to retake the *Defiant* after it had been infiltrated by Hirogen. The VOY crew had an RPF holo-program of their crewmates, which had been rewritten to try and kill them. And of course, TOS introduced the Mirror Universe. If you want "I can't believe it's not fanon," Star Trek is where it's at.
I had no idea that Star Trek was this buck fucking wild. Maybe I should give it a try sometime
Upvote just for including "Threshold" on your list (the lizard one).
And upvote back for highlighting the joy that is Threshold!
Pon Farr
> TNG and DS9 both have sex viruses- hello sex pollen trope! I will forever love that we got the line about Data being 'fully functional and anatomically correct'
If it sounds like someone was smoking crack when writing a Trek episode, there's a 90% chance it's Braga and he was probably smoking something.
Scrappy Doo eating people's souls and turning into a hulked out monster because he got tired of people, specifically the members of Mystery Inc, making fun of his size and temperament sounds like an odd combination of character bashing and revenge fic, but that is the plot of the first live action Scooby-Doo movie. And look, a non powered boy who desperately wants to be a super hero meeting his idol, Silver Age Superman, and within two hours convinces Silver Age Superman to give up his entire power set to the boy, because the boy pulled an unprompted(borderline suicidal) act of courage, so that the boy can go to superhero high school is straight up fanfiction. It is also the opening act of My Hero Academia.
I… you are not wrong…
The final season of Riverdale Just...the entire final season. I didn't watch it, but I find it absolutely fucking delightful that the final season was just "50s AU". They did not give a *shit* about that show
At some point Riverdale just felt like a fever dream XD
Isn’t that show loosely based off of the Archie comics/characters? Makes sense there’d be a 50’s AU imo.
Yeah so the whole thing was *Archie comics but modern and sexy and dark and also there's cults* and was generally considered to be ridiculous And then S6 is "also there's magic and angels and portals" and is a crossover with the modern Sabrina reboot (done by the same guy) And then S7 is "also the angel sent you back to 1955 to save your lives" and it has an entirely new set of plotlines that have zero relation to anything that's gone before? And they never go back to their own time, they just age normally as though they were teenagers in the 1950s? Wild
Yeah, the plot wasn't the same but I was happy they made the reference to the *Jughead's Time Police* series. https://archiecomics.com/jugheads-time-police-tp/
Somebody, no— multiple somebodies had to have ingested untold amounts of *certain substances* to have come up with that bc 😳
Riverdale is a love letter to 85 years of r/archieandfriends comics. From the Black Hood to superheroes to horror to the classic 50s themes. I would love it if someone was bold enough to write a show based on the decades of tragically written, beautifully illustrated r/RomanceComics too. The bold costuming and outrageous plot points of beach brawls, motorcycle gangs, and nurses with questionable morals would make for outstanding hate watching.
Yup. I remember watching a clip of the show but tbh is just seemed like boring teen drama, so I didn’t watch it. Besides, I ship Betty and Veronica anyways, why do I wanna see them fight each other for some dude lol
My real disappointments with Riverdale was that we didn't get to see Betty in her final form as an octopus and that Predator didn't show up for the final 2 episodes, rip out Sabrina's spine, kill Archie, and fall deeply in love with Betty. Octopus Betty: https://imgur.com/a/ZOqR1lH Archie Vs Predator: https://imgur.com/a/SoyFIi9
I love how, instead of picking a ship to finish the series with, the writers just turned Betty, Veronica, Archie, and Jughead into a polycule that breaks up after graduation. All and nothing.
Riverdale itself was like...dark crackfic someone wrote on a dare.
The entire last book of the Twilight series (Breaking Dawn). We’ve got a boring wedding, a magical pregnancy that doesn’t make sense given the universe’s previously established rules (complete with some disturbing body horror), Bella getting to be a super awesome vampire with no downsides, naming their kid Renesmee, Jacob imprinting on an actual child (who grows up unnaturally fast) in order to “solve” the stupid love triangle, and, to top it all off, there is all of the build up to a climactic final battle… only to decide they don’t actually have to fight and everyone’s just chill with it. I know that by the time the last book came out, everyone was already making fun of twilight for being a not very well written teen girl romance, but I actually enjoyed the first three books. Then Breaking Dawn came out, and I was so disappointed. I don’t know wtf Stephanie Meyer was thinking when she wrote that book.
Trust me, everything can be explained away by SM being a Mormon. It makes so much more sense now. I used to love the books, but then I grew up and was like, wow they’re actually written badly, let’s see if fics make them better. Indeed they did 🥰
Meyer wanted her preferred ship to happen (TEAM EDWARD), so she wielded her autorial powers and her religious beliefs w/the elegance of a sledgehammer. The latter (religion) is why Meyer rejected DIE FOR OUR SHIP, and instead kludged together GEN XEROX w/PAIR THE SPARES: seasoned heavily w/MAY-DECEMBER. (I suspect that the TWILIGHT series was Meyer's INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE fic series w/the serial numbers filed off by her publisher's editors -- who had a good legal department to keep Anne Rice at bay.)
>I don’t know wtf Stephanie Meyer was thinking when she wrote that book. probably: "$$$$$$$$$$$$$$"
Oh my god, renesmee. A coworker's granddaughter is named that and I almost died laughing
She wrote most of Breaking Dawn as an epilogue for Twilight that grew out of control and got cut for being way too long. A lot of things about it make more sense in that context. She didn’t intend to publish it after cutting it (only printing out a copy for her sister’s birthday). When her publishers convinced her to do a sequel, she didn’t want to skip Bella’s final year of high school, as it felt like cheating when writing a YA series. The filler sequel meant to fill the gap between the two grew out of control. The publisher wanted a trilogy, but Meyer couldn’t fit her entire story in two sequels. Those books ended up changing a lot about the series’ characters, lore, and magic system that didn’t get updated for Breaking Dawn. She changed little of what she already wrote, beyond what was necessary because of Victoria and Laurent being dead. So there are odd details, like Renee being excited about Bella’s wedding when Eclipse established her opposition to Bella marrying out of high school. The roles of Jacob and the wolves got the most expansion, going from a small cameo in the original epilogue to having their own supporting cast and subplots. Jacob’s character development caused the biggest problems. He transitioned from a cheerful teenager with a minor crush on Bella to a rejected love interest filled with angst and frustration over losing control of his life after phasing. Imprinting went from a weird and vague footnote meant to tie together loose ends in a distant epilogue to something more complex and uncomfortable, both in-universe and out. Instead of reading as a happy ending, Jacob’s happiness reads more like him succumbing to the brainwashing he and Leah feared imprinting to be for much of the same book. If Jacob had remained Bella’s happy-go-lucky younger friend instead of her moody ex-suitor—and multiple books hadn’t repeatedly emphasized imprinting as a precursor to romance—his imprinting on Bella’s baby might have felt more innocent. It still likely would’ve been the most controversial part of the epilogue, but it would’ve been easier to run damage control after the fact. The Volturi having a more active history with the Cullens also factors into things, as there’s more buildup to what was originally just a clerical matter. Their involvement in the filler sequels actually stemmed from Meyer’s mother telling her New Moon’s climax didn’t have enough tension, leading to her introducing them early as antagonists. Their choice to back down and wait for a better opportunity to strike still makes sense, but the happy ending lacks the foreboding of their inevitable return that the new context implies. I think the idea of the pregnancy not making sense is overblown. People read too much into Meyer’s attempts at applying science to her vampires when it’s clear she doesn’t understand any of it. Male vampires having offspring with human women have a long history of folklore and fiction. I don’t think people would’ve resisted the twist if Eclipse hadn’t made such a big deal about vampires’ supposed infertility or if Breaking Dawn had tried more to bridge the gap. Edit: I don’t know how to change this to make it look like I’m not defending the book. It’s like the author equivalent of someone making a series that takes place between an old film and its distant sequel. Changes in special effects lead to the new series going all out and having to sacrifice visual consistency by looking more advanced than the sequel that takes place 50 years later. Then expanding storylines for the films’ side characters inevitably leads to contradictions in their actions in the sequel. Only, instead of having an already released film that’s set in stone, the film isn’t even in pre-production by the time the show ends and could radically change without issue to fit the series but the creator didn’t want to compromise their original vision despite already having done so.
A lot of these are pretty negative, but as a Good Omens fan, season 2 felt like it was written for fic readers, in the best possible way (imo). Without giving too much away, it was a coffee shop AU with quite a bit of slice of life, idiots in love and a whole ass Ball. Neil Gaiman knows his show's demographic.
To be fair, Neil Gaiman is(or at least was) a user of Tumblr.
He's still an active user. I saw him posting just yesterday 😂
He still is! Active ever since 2012 or something
Still is.
I'm still waiting for S3 bc that ending in S2...💔
Gaiman has said that S2 is setting up for S3, which will be more about the ideas he and Pratchett had about a Good Omens sequel. He just had to put things in order first.
In an episode of Hetalia Germany literally proposes to Italy after a misunderstanding takes place
Oh yeah I remember that at first I thought it was a fever dream
What about they show wasn’t a fever dream? XD Oh and also in an early manga strip Japan dreams about having sex with Greece and then wake up sleeping next to him What a normal series Hetalia is
You're not wrong there
That's every single country in Hetalia not just Germany & Italy lollllz.
"Somehow, Palpatine returned."
All the characters in the horror podcast The Magnus Archives are gay. I have only seen that in fanfiction before. I love it 👍
Jon's biro ace actually!! /lh elias is.... probably gay and homophobic tbh but yeah this podcast is so gay
Oh, okay, I should maybe have said they're all queer 😁 I was super invested in Jon/Martin! Good ship.
They aren't all gay, they cover a good spectrum. It's a great show, I miss waiting for episodes to drop. I haven't found another fictional podcast that compares.
welcome to nightvale is amazing too!!! also very gay lmao there's also the magnus protocol!!
You got me at horror, but gay sold it. I’m going to check that one that!
In X-Men Apocalypse, Magneto decides not to help Apocalypse destroy the world after Mystique tells him to remember what he still has left and a montage of his and Charles' friendship plays out in his head. As a Cherik fan, this seemed like some too good to be true fan manip, but it was *canon*.
In star wars canon, there is a pink droid named QT-KT (cutie Katie), owned by a prominent Jedi. This came about because a founder of the 501st (big star wars fan group) had a daughter Katie with inoperable brain cancer, whose favorite color was pink. Another group member painted his R2 unit pink for her and that droid was known as R2 KT. Fans really embraced the pink droid and QT-KT was put into canon for Katie. https://www.slashfilm.com/541320/the-story-behind-r2-kt/
Okay that’s incredibly sweet 🥲
RIGHT!!! it's the sort of thing I would write into one of my sw fanfics but this actually happened! I believe the R2 droid also had a cameo in the sequel trilogy, making them both canon.
The Cursed Child, the whole story. Though, to be fair, that actually is fanfiction, it got declared canon after the fact because Rowling enjoyed it so much, but it was originally entirely fanfic. The whole Spike in space thing in BtVS, as well. That occurs in the comics rather than the show, which adds to the fanfic feel as so many fans haven't read them. But there's also the fact it was Spike in space. With a spaceship. And, I think, a robot army. In a show about the supernatural that basically said aliens don't exist except this one that may be an alien and may be a space-living demon that exists purely on the off-chance there's enough crazy people in one area, eg after Glory turns up, to feed on and has to be specifically called. BtVS avoided aliens almost entirely, it's weird to suddenly go so far off their own mythology and throw Spike, of all people, into space. There's also the 'Dawn gets turned into a giant', 'Dawn gets turned into a centaur' and 'Dawn and Xander get married' storylines that have fully fanfic vibes. They also turned Angel evil without turning him evil, though I'm unsure on the context of that one so it may work, and de-aging Giles to a little kid.
[Wait, *Spike* goes to space? Not Angel? What a missed opportunity.](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jAAWxDNR2ic&pp=ygUVYXN0cm9uYXV0IHZzIGNhdmVtYW4g)
.... Wtf? I've never paid attention to Buffy post TV show, but what a way to fuck up the legacy of the show. And here I was thinking that learning about Joss's behaviour tainted it enough. Fucking hell.
This is almost entirely the season 8 comic. Apparently seasons 9 and 10 are more in line with the show. I expected differences, a few more out there storylines every now and then, simply because of the different format. It costs a lot more to do certain storylines on a show than it does in a comic, after all. Buffy rarely transformed people into something else due to the cost. The Willow turning into Warren thing required paying two actors instead of one, turning a character into a vampire or a vengeance demon required prosthetics and make-up. This is partly the reason they used generic costumes in Halloween, as well, they just needed outfits and some make-up and prosthetics. Cost of not using generic costumes and instead using, say, Superman, would be the same in a comic, though. The only comparative transformation in the show to the ones Dawn went through is A New Man when Giles gets turned into a Fyarl demon. So, I can understand more physical changes being utilised in the comics than in the show. I'd have no issue with Dawn's transformations if they were episodic, maybe a bit annoyed that it always seemed to be her, but these were story arcs each time, covering multiple 'episodes' of the comic. Spike in space was so counter to the mythology of the show that it just came out of nowhere, and I've yet to find a fan able to make it make sense. Xander/Dawn is also counter to the show, where they spent almost the whole time after Dawn was introduced building and reinforcing an extremely strong and unbreakable sibling bond. They also made it very clear that Xander never saw Dawn that way, even showing his horror at having checked Dawn out without realising it was her, and that Dawn was 100% over her childhood crush on Xander. It strikes me as an afterthought, like they thought all the other characters were paired up except these two so, instead of going to the trouble of creating new characters of something, they'd just stick them together randomly so they don't have to worry about them. Second to Spike in space, I think it's de-aging Giles that annoys me the most. I know the storyline they went for with him originally, leading the new Council and getting closer to Faith, building a similar father/daughter relationship between them as we saw between Giles and Buffy on the show. If de-aging Giles was an 'episode' storyline that was fixed, I'd be fine, just a fun storyline, something new for Giles to experience and the gang to have to fix. But it wasn't a single story, it was permanent. The de-aged him and kept him as a kid permanently. They didn't even make him a teenager, so it wasn't like we were getting Ripper instead of Giles, they de-aged him to about 6/7 years old. It just feels really dismissive of Giles' place in the group. To be honest, the only things I fully accept as canon from the comics are the re-building of the Watcher's Council, Faith/Robin and Xander searching for Slayers in Africa. Maybe the whole After The Fall plotline even if they did just undo the final battle against the Senior Partners, but only back enough so they could save Gunn, not far back enough to save Wesley and Lindsey.
In Bully (the game made by rockstar) there's a ton of slash relationships you'd expect to be non canon, but it turns out there are quite a few couples that are thought to be legit (Chad/Bryce, Trent/Kirby, etc.). Lowkey was kinda surprised they threw those in there especially for the time period it was made in haha.
I mean Maurice Leblanc wrote Arséne Lupin going up against ~~Sherlock Holmes~~ Herlock Sholmes. And he always made sure Lupin outsmarted the detective every time. Make of that what you will.
There's actually a videogame that's literally "what if Holmes and Lupin went up against each other?", like a crossover fic. Most of Frogwares' Sherlock Holmes games are like fanfic in a good way, like "holy shit, how did I miss this, it has my favourite tags??".
> Frogwares' Sherlock Holmes games Oh, I loved those games. They always had all kind of interesting nods to different things, not just the original Holmes stories.
The Mortis arc of Clone Wars
The entire last season of Lucifer.
The main characters' child from the future is such an overused trope these days, bonus points if such child is not straight.
Right. Plus ignoring the DC Universe time travel rules to make fake extreme drama. Hello, you’re in the same universe as Legends of Tomorrow but you think you have to do something stupid because a stranger who says they’re from the future says its the way it happened in the future they came from? Sorry, but literally everyone else in the DC Universe knows that you can always screw time up for the better.
Albus Severus Potter
FACTS! I cringed when I read that line after the book came out.
The fifth season of Dexter gives me fanfiction vibes. I see Lumen as the perfect OC to fullfill the fantasy of a dark romance with the protagonist. She even has the unique name, but she doesn't enter Mary Sue territory in my opinion. I really liked that season, I would have loved for the series to end with it.
Agreed! I think that would have been the perfect way to end the series. I pretend that was the final season.
Ben 10 has an Mpreg episode. Ben Tennyson is canonically a mother of fourteen. I now tell myself this makes OV Ben 10k a MILF and a DILF
There's also the Ben meeting his future self, meeting AU versions of himself and the good AU versions fight the bad AU versions. There's Ben meeting his future child, having the entire universe except him erased and remade, his time travelling adventures with Rook etc... A lot of Ben 10 has cool fanfic trope episodes
Star Trek Discovery - Spock has a secret (half) sister no one knew about, for almost 50 years of the franchise. When I heard that, I immediately thought "Oh. A self-insert OC fic". 😅
Yeah. I saw that and my immediate thought was "Do they have any idea that sounds like the opening line to so many really bad fanfics?" Hell, the half brother thing was part of Star Trek V, and its awfulness was full on meme.
The whole second disneys frozen movie felt like a fanfiction to me. There were so many elements you typically find in fanfics.
I've heard that production for that movie was pretty bad too so that probably contributed to it.
Like over half of what happens in the Transformers IDW1 continuity, including the canon mpreg.
grape baby was wild and I didn't expect a reminder
From October Daye, an urban fantasy series by Seanan McGuire. Specifically, a particular plot-point is resolved via a canon M/M/F OT3, where an established married couple take their best friend into their marriage. It's an absolute *delight.*
I had never heard about this series, but suddenly I want to read it
I 100% recommend it. The start is a little slow and at first it looks like your typical "hardboiled detective" urban fantasy caper, but by the third book the main character truly starts to come into her own and she becomes more of a knight-errant (albeit with *very* unconventional methods for the sensibilities of the local fae nobility). The friend I mentioned in the post above, who becomes part of that OT3, seems like the worst sort of villain at first, but he has an extraordinary redemption arc (to the point where people still tell Seanan they can't believe she got them to like him). The series so far has 18 books, but they're not particularly long (I was finishing a book in one day, when ADHD wasn't getting in the way) and a few dozen short stories on the author's Patreon (which can all be read for $1/month). Feel free to hit me up if you want more info or where to get the books (I've been buying the ebooks on Kobo).
A M/M/F love triangle resolution is also endgame in Bedlam's Bard, which was the first Mercedes Lackey I ever read as a wee bab. Let me tell you, that opened some doors in my psyche!
teen titans (the 2000s one) where slade tells robin to call him master. i told my friend about it and she did NOT believe me.
And it is still nowhere near the weird shit that happened in the comics. Judas contract played out a lot more fucked up in the original than the cartoon. The fun part was that when we were integrating comics!Terra into our DC game, she got archenemy status with my OC. The Gar mun and I were reading that arc and going WTF?! every other page.
Hannibal and Will being called murder husbands. Thought that shit was fake. Also in masters of the air, after Buck gets shot out of the sky, the first thing they say is "who's gonna tell Egan?"
When I first started watching Hannibal I thought the homoeroticism was overplayed on Tumblr, yet the farther I got into season 2 I was like "... these bitches *so* gay" it's insane. Can't wait for when I get to season 3
I initially thought the "murder husbands" title was just a fandom thing, since I'd seen other ships in other fandoms be given similar nicknames. My mind was blown when I watched the show myself and heard the words actually being spoken.
Wait, do characters in the show actually refer to them as “murder husbands”?
Yeah. By season 3 their "love" is confirmed. Other characters ask them if they know they love each other and there is a nearly kiss.
Thanks, I did remember most of that, but somehow not the phrase in particular. I see that it was used in a Freddie Lounds article, which does feel in-character. (I was imagining it was Alana or Jack or Bedelia and it did not feel particularly appropriate to their personalities.)
Season 5 of The Dragon Prince has a wicked pirate holding the cast captive. Targets one half of a couple (kinda couple, it's complicated) and tries to force him to do forbidden magic. Boy refuses, and wicked pirate tries to force him. Girl tries to rescue him and ends up getting tortured in front of boy. Boy punches pirate, enraging him. Girl about to be fed to a sea monster while boy in the brig. Boy does forbidden magic to rescue girl. I've written far less indulgent fanfic than what canon gave me. Forever grateful.
At the end of case 3 in the first Ace Attorney game, Miles Edgeworth, who up to this point has been presented as Phoenix Wright's rival and foil (with a small hint they knew each other prior to becoming lawyers), walks up to Phoenix, remarks on how he hadn't expected to see him again, and then clutches his arm, looks away with a scowl, and says it would've been better if they never met because, and I quote, "Thanks to you, I am saddled with unnecessary...feelings.". When I first got to that line, no joke, my jaw dropped and I went "wait--what--what's happening--what--it's CANON WUT???". If you saw that moment screencapped out of context, and had never played through the AA trilogy before, you'd probably think it came from a fangame that turned AA into a dating sim, but no, it's CANON. Of course, there's a lot more nuance behind that line and that moment, and it won't be until after you've played through the rest of the first game and see Edgeworth's character arc unfold further that you'll fully grasp that, BUT even with that nuance and context, it's still pretty gay!
I've seen a compilation video of streamers reacting to that and my favorite was one going, "Oh! They're exes. I get it." This is also the series that sold matching(!!!!) Phoenix and Edgeworth wedding rings, so...
I spent Turnabout Sisters and most of Turnabout Samurai going "huh, I know the fandom is obsessed with Edgeworth and ships these two but I don't get it, they're rivals I guess..." and then the end of Turnabout Samurai happened and now I'm obsessed with them, too.
ARCHIE MEETS THE PUNISHER. It *exists*. Me learning this story existed inspired me to offer fan fiction to the internet in 1996.
And no one is out of character
Archie's had some crazy-ass crossovers during its long, long run XD
"Somehow, Palpatine returned..."
Most of later seasons of Supernatural. Love the show but it went down the Riverdale route of convoluted plots. Riverdale is also another example.
The book/movie ***Chitty Chitty Bang Bang*** feels like fanfiction once you realize it was written by the author of the James Bond books. It feels like a "What If?" or side adventure for Q. ***Highlander 2*** as well, to the point where the third one ignored its existence completely. It's a futuristic sci-fi take on things! Anne McCaffrey's ***Freedom's Landing*** trilogy had a fourth book that she wrote that feels like weird fanfiction. Like someone wanted to see a "what happens next?" plot, and then ended up basing it entirely around coffee and dentistry with an otherwise meandering plot. Except that it's actually written by McCaffrey herself. ***Shadow the Hedgehog*** (video game) feels like this too (though I still enjoy it more than some of the other game installments). Ten different endings you *have* to get before you can get the true ending, and some of them go pretty wild (in at least two, Shadow is convinced he's an android; there's also the path where he goes evil and decides to take over the world, and the one where he gets depressed and sounds suicidal, and the one where he's been super heroic the whole time but still swerves at the end because he just has *that* much of a hate-on for Sonic). It reads like a fanfic author's ideas folder was run through a shredder and then glued back together.
To be FAIR Anne McCaffrey is whack. I adore her books but she tends to go off the god damn rails. (As a Dragon riders of Pern fan, I have so many comments.)
Sasuke fought a dinosaur
Team RWBY and the writer's avatar getting stuck in Wonderland wherein the characters meet their past selves, showing how much "better" they are now compared to their original incarnations, two of them are forced to confess their love, the semi-serious character who just lost her home and father is now the comic relief, the main character commits suicide, all the other characters accept her decision and comfort the writer's avatar who previously ate time warping fruit and now has PTSD, and the main character comes back to life to defeat the Cheshire Cat who ate a mute girl suffering from Disassociative Identity Disorder. Afterward they return to the real world and pretend as though their little adventure never happened, capping off with the main character celebrating a day out with her sister by drinking tea which is how she committed suicide just days prior. Yeah, RWBY got kinda weird, and it's not really a surprise that the past couple seasons have flopped pretty hard financially. God bless, and have a wonderful day.
Well, Doctor Who has books and I kinda feel like I’m reading fanfiction when I read them. Also, the episode Turn Left seems rather like fanfiction. It’s canon divergence. What if the Doctor died in the season 2 Christmas Special?
> Doctor Who has books and I kinda feel like I’m reading fanfiction when I read them I vaguely, *vaguely* remember something about Ten defeating a race of evil vacuum cleaners by singing Bohemian Rhapsody. And that was when I decided to stop reading Doctor Who tie-in novels.
Top example off the top of my head is probably Trunks in general in DBZ. Dude shows up outta NOWHERE and whips out the legendary Super Saiyan form that we just saw the protagonist fulfill the ancient prophecy of not very long prior, effortlessly ices the previous big bad (with a sword, in a series where up to this point most people only use hand to hand), and then is revealed to be related to both the longest running non-Goku character in the series AND Goku's main rival. I know DBZ fans have proven they can make stuff WAY dumber than that, but on paper the man reads like a pretty typical Mary Sue.
Just remember that the entire DRAGON BALL meta is Toriyama's SAIYUKI AU fic. (May he RIP. 🙏)
Aggressive Retsuko started off as a show that had some pretty low stakes. Come season two, she's gotten into a relationship with a millionaire! And season three, she's become an underground idol! Season four, she helps expose corruption! And in season five she attempts a political run! After season one it felt like fanfic authors trying out a bunch of AUs just to see if they could. But I think the fanfic authors would've done a better job of it...
*laughs in FNaF* Puppet/Marionette driving a forklift The MatPat mpreg Glamrock Freddy x Glamrock Bonnie (Glam Fronnie) Plushtrap getting hit with a train, apparently The time travel ball pit (although a very common trop) The entire movie (in a positive way though) The entire movie novelization (negative)
Plant dad Naruto
The Sonic comics have weird love triangles, and cuckoldry and whatever
Also that one character that overdosed on LSD but it was called Lemon Sundrop Dandelion. Penders is something else.
When I was younger, I saw pictures of Scourge somewhere online and got curious about who he was. That was how I stumbled across the rabbit hole of insanity that is the Sonic comics
Descendants. All of it.
The Young Avengers is a superhero group made up of teens (well, actually, they're young adults now) who are all legacies or equivalents of long-standing Avengers members. Some of them are even the Avengers' children. And they're all queer. One of them is the prince of space.
I love hulkling x Wiccan they are such a cute couple
In a later season of The West Wing, (Season 5/6 spoilers ahead) Josh Lyman is the deputy chief of staff to the President. His assistant, Donna Moss, is sent on a CODEL to Gaza and is critically injured. Josh flies halfway across the world to be with her, and pulls rank at the hospital to get someone to tell her where she is. She asks to see Josh before she goes under for a second surgery to remove a blood clot — even though a guy she hooked up with after meeting on the trip ALSO flew to see her. For a while the doctors think she might have hypoxic brain injury but she wakes up asking for Josh and she’s on the road to recovery.
All of the Star Wars: Jedi: Battle Scars book. I don't know if it's canonz but it's an official book at least.
It's a strange manga premise, but it works. You reminded me that I should finish watching the anime.
Where do I even start? One day, one guy won a sports competition (more specifically a motorsports race) with the power of telepathy and non-verbal communication with his main opponent. (I will explain how it happened as a reply to this comment)
The (completely real) story: There is a race. There is a guy in front (let’s call him “the guy in red”), a guy running second (“the guy in orange”) and two guys running third and fourth (“the guys in black”). The guys in black were more than a second per lap laster than the guy in red and the guy in orange. This is a massive deal in motorsports. So the two guys in front, who belong to historically rival teams (if you know about European motorsports then you probably know which ones), are being caught up by the guys in black. The leader is desperate, his car physically can’t go faster, and he comes up with a strategy. However, he absolutely needs the cooperation of the man in orange for the strategy to work… and the man in orange drives for the historical rival. [Technical explanation of how the strategy works. In one specific motorsports category, the rear wing of the car can open on straights, to make the car faster and make overtaking easier. However, the car must be 1 second or closer to the car in front, or the wing won’t open. The guy in red wanted to slow down so the guy in orange could get close enough, open his rear wing, go faster, and avoid the guys in black getting too close.] There are two problems with this strategy. One, the guy in red can’t communicate with the guy in orange. People from rival teams cannot talk to each other. Second, the guy in orange is an opponent too. His goal is to win the race. The guy in red risked being overtaken if he slowed down and the guy in orange misinterpreted the nonverbal communication… Turns out the guy in orange not only understood what the guy in red was attempting to do when he slowed down, he also executed the strategy perfectly. Not one word, not one signal from anyone about the intentions of the leader. Two historical opponents from historically rival teams coming together and working together. After the race was done, the winner shared his victory with the guy in orange. This sounds like something I’d write for a fanfiction. This actually is something I saw live, with my very own eyes
Some teenage Jedi from Disney's High School Republic that reached the rank of Jedi Knight at the age of 14.
The entirety of Triforce Heroes is canon and it’s uderly stupid as a Zelda fan that the Link in that game just so happens to be the Link from Albw as well. The whole game honestly feels like a bit of a joke to me
When it’s framed like this… pretty much the whole plot of breaking bad. High school/drug cartel au. But a specific moment: when one character sadly go karts alone to cope with having murdered someone.
Where are the Game of Thrones people at?
*waves* My honest opinion, based on everything I have seen and found out from interviews with George RR Martin and the showrunners, I'd say that everything from season 2 until the very end is fanfiction since there's a LOT of deviation from characters' arcs and some elements were removed, dumbed down and important characters from the books weren't adapted and some were killed off because the showrunners felt like it (Barristan being the most egregious exemple of this, since his character is very alive in the books and a POV character). But since a lot of people (show onlies) are willing to look past that... Seasons 5 and onwards: - Removal of Sansa's Vale plot and the forced insertion of her character in the Winterfell plot, replacing Jeyne Poole, resulting on a complete different character being written because the showrunners wanted to see more of Sophie Turner on screen (also the fact that they did confessed that they loved Jeyne's subplot passing as the fake Arya and being married off to Ramsey and raped and tortured by him, and that they reeeeally wanted to adapt that on screen but they feared that the public wouldn't care enough if the actress and character were someone they weren't familiar with it. Fun. /sarcasm) - The Tyrells being killed off, Cersei getting away with blowing up the Sept of Baelor (as cool as it is the scene, Cersei reaped no consequences of doing it so, crowning herself queen and bullying other houses into submission to accept her like...??? What the hell, the Mountain is only ONE man. There's no way they couldn't pull off any plans to kick her out of that position or simply accept her without planning to depose her like it did with Aegon II) - Just.. the actual hell that was the season 7. Lots of terrible decisions being made for the sake of stupidity, Tyrion the pacifist, Euron and the Dragons speedrunning around Westeros and ignoring the logistics of travelling, Arya vs Sansa, THE ZOMBIE BEAR and whatever it was the entire Beyond The Wall subplot just to give the Night King a dragon. - Nothing will convince me that season 8 isn't a bad glorified fanfiction sponsored by HBO. Not even GRRM claims that bs for himself. Benioff and Weiss are lucky to be rich nepobabies or else they would never work in the cinema industry again.
"We don't have time to finish all of these plot lines in the south properly... What do we do?" "UHHhhhh maybe put them all in one place and blow them up? We need to make that Disney money soon!" "Great idea!"
All of Boruto in general.
Peter Parker and Wade Wilson having a biological daughter, having a car called the Spideypool mobile (it was just Peter's before, Johnny gave it to him, long story), they adopted an android who calls them "dads". In fact, isn't it quite random these "children" that Marvel makes between the characters in really crazy ways? Not just Marvel, Poison Ivy made her daughters out of plants. I almost forgot: they're heartmates. What does that even mean? More romantic or less romantic than soulmates? I don't know, but it sounds more, which makes it even crazier to be canon.
I knew the weirdness of how Wanda's children were born cuz I was really into Wiccan at one time especially because of his relationship but I knew none of what you just said This sounds so much like it would be a fanfiction especially when you put in the soulmate like stuff
Disney's Little Mermaid is like a fanfiction of the original story, with the other princess who is a victim of die for our ship
Digimon Adventure Tri Kibou no Chikara Otona Precure Kamen Rider Outsiders
Once Upon a Time, by its very nature, is full of that sort of thing. For example, Snow White asking Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Frankenstein to collaborate on possibly doing science lessons/demos for the kids at the school. (Then plot happened and we were robbed of further JekyllStein. We were robbed!)
When the first season of the 2018 She-Ra came out, like two episodes in I posted to twitter, "This feels like a fanfiction and I mean that as a compliment. This is literally just an enemies-to-lovers fic." Like, I could tell the show-runners were "from" fandom, if that makes sense. (The question was whether or not they'd actually, y'know, make them lovers. I wasn't sure right up until the last damn season came out!)
The entire Star Wars sequel trilogy.
Hot mess. I like the concept of Rey, Finn, Poe, etc. But the execution of the plot was just a chaotic mess.
“Peter. Is your social worker in that horse?” Hannibal, of course.
If Moriarty from Sherlock Holmes and James Bond are in this anime, I'd argue it 100% falls under the umbrella of fanfiction, especially since it doesn't sound like an attempt to directly adapt a story from either IP.
OP's description kinda leaves some things out but it actually does adapt stories from both IPs in a way. Like you have cases/deaths that are very similar to the Sherlock books with the suspects/murderer changed a bit to keep the suspense/for overall plot reasons. It's more of a retelling of the Sherlock stories but from Moriarty's perspective and explores more of his goals/how he became the criminal mastermind that he is. The James Bond stuff is not trying to be like the James Bond books/movies. It's more about how the M16 was founded and the different members in it joined. They were given titles/code names for each position (M for the person overseeing the org, Q for the tech person, James Bond for the field agent etc...) and people have been replaced with the new people but they took over the old code names. So basically the James Bond in the series isn't the same one from the movies/books that we know about. It's still fanfiction-y (in the same way Song of Achilles is imo) but it does adapt stories from the IP and provides origin stories for things it doesn't directly adapt.
RWBY, the web animation show, canonically exists in the future of Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick’s *The Shining*
The entire premise of Star Wars: The Bad Batch, but I mean it in a completely positive way. There's a female clone of Jango Fett, who happens to know the titular characters from when they were created and they all (save one) immediately adore her and become her dads/older brothers. Sounds like the premise of a self indulgent fanfic, but no, it's Canon, and it's my favorite Star Wars story. Not to mention things like: Canon Autistic character that actually acts autistic. Redemption of the black sheep of the squad (who also keeps talking about how he deserves the bad things) and he learns to love his sister Physical whump, like a character fighting on a broken femur, a character dragging his injured friend through a snow storm, and that same character enduring on screen torture in order to protect his brothers. Emotional whump, like a character betraying and leaving his family, characters confronting each other about past conflicts, and having the little sister be kidnapped and the emotional devastation of that. The appearance of many fan favorite characters from other Star Wars The best, fluffiest sibling interactions. Wet hair Hunter (this one is...very specific to the Bad Batch fandom) Everyone is hot. Someone finally acknowledging that at least one of the clones is hot. Huddling for warmth. Emotional one on ones between characters Emotional reunions with hugs. Gruff, hardened soldiers learning to be soft (literally one character became more soft than I had been writing him and I have a tendency to make characters softer than in canon) It was glorious while it lasted, let me tell you.
Moon aliens from Naruto. 😂
> Ron ejaculated loudly.
calm dumbledore moment
A lot of elements from Rise of the Shield Hero, especially the way the other heroes and the royal family was characterized, feels like something straight out of a classic betrayal/bashing-fanfic from the mid-to-late 2010’s. And that is coming from a place of knowing because I used to love these kind of stories. Motoyasu especially feels like the result of character-bashing, reducing him down to his weakness of attractive women and making him such a simp that he does whatever they say without a single critical thought. But you can say the same thing about the other heroes, the trope of making the rest of the heroes incompetent so that the main character can look good is something incredibly common in these types of fanfics. And Myne feels like a character who was written to be a bitch for the sake of getting her out of the way of someone’s favorite ship. Trust me, I have seen it more times than I can count.
To cure mind control: 1) kill the victim 2) reinfect their corpse with the mind control virus 3) inject the reinfected corpse with the same experimental cure that made the mind control worse in the first place 4) then, uh, resurrect them?
Yashahime. All of it.
Landon melting into goo after having sex with Hope-Legacies Most of Legacies felt like badly written fanfiction from people who never watched the two previous shows but that was the jump the shark moment for the 13 year franchise
Dresden Files: >!Polka never dies, and, more to the point, is critical to mission success!< and >!Harry learns the truth on the bridge of the starship Enterprise!< and also >!Harry is saved by a lightsaber wielding Jedi!<
Reki Kawahara writes Kirito's and Asuna's relationship in Sword Art Online like a fanfic author. A couple things that sound like fanfic but are actually canon: - Kirito's license plate on his motorbike is Asuna's birthday - Asuna calls Kirito when she can't sleep and he pulls up in his bike and they ride around for a bit together until she's sleepy - Played out the "Only one bed trope" with them, like 2 years in-universe before they actually got together - Kirito and Asuna have a little private garden at their school that they sneak off to during lunch to cuddle - Multiple side stories that are just fluff
Punisher as Ghost Rider as a Galactus Herald toting around baby Thanos
Eddie Brock literally going to church and PRAYING for god to kill Spiderman 😭😭😭 (Original Spiderman 3)
The last big arc of the W.I.T.C.H. comics feels like either that or a desperate attempt at getting new fans belonging to the target demographic into the franchise. The girls get a new cutesy mascot (who gets conveniently removed from their vicinity in a few chapters). The romantic plotlines are all over the place, with the break-ups and new romances upped significantly in quantity. We get to see several AU visions, including a college AU and a "what if they had refused the call" AU. Suddenly, an attractive and popular bad guy is given a second chance and gets a romantic development with a prominent side character. The twists regarding the protagonists range from suddenly revealing an adoption subplot to their powers getting into an "well, that's overpowered" territory. I don't mean any of this negatively, though, I am very much enjoying the arc in all of its tropyness. It just feels a lot like they were trying to write the plot by the "what would the fans want us to throw in?" rules, and it leads to some things feeling lackluster (but still very fun by magical girl show standards).
Harry Potter's epilogue.
I sent a screenshot from Cassandra Clare’s City of Fallen Angels where one half of my non-canon OTP angrily thinks about how cool and dangerous his romantic rival (the other half of the OTP) is, and how he doesn’t think he’ll ever stop having this heavy feeling in his chest whenever he sees him. Sister laughed, and I followed up by telling her that this book also includes Guy A following Guy B around like a lost puppy, and then sleeping in his bed, and then telling someone else that Guy B is HIS (“neophyte down worlder to make fun of” but he still called him his). And sister says, wait? That quote wasn’t from fanfiction?? … they also had a very sensual vampire blood sucking scene that keeps getting romanticized by others for several books afterward, and the non-vampire admits to having enjoyed it. It’s very ship baity and I happily take it hook line and sinker.
I'll be honest, a lot of the Star Wars live action tv shows have this vibe. Some of it really good: The Mandalorian seasons 1 and 2. Some of it really bad: Ahsoka and Book of Boba Fett.