02-08-2024: I Wrote My First Fanfic. Now it’s All Downhill from Here…
(Warning: There isn’t much of a warning besides some spoilers from Danganronpa Another and some smut being mentioned. Please take care before reading on.)
Today I did something brave. I posted my first fanfic on both Neocities and Tumblr. It’s not that long of a read as its only 1,434 words long, which means it’s only 6 pages long. The story itself is a AU mainly about my favorite character from Danganronpa Another, Kakeru Yamaguchi gives his wife, Katana Inori some flowers and enjoy a normal life where they don’t die in the killing game.
The funny thing about this is that I have written fanfics before; I just usually abandoned them after 2 chapters as I wanted to write long, AU series (if you’re wondering what series I was trying to write, it was from Total Drama). Like, I mainly have the story in my mind, ready to go. But the lack of writing skills, low confidence and suffering from executive dysfunction keeps me from committing the bit. When I usually abandon them, I never published them due to the fear of getting mocked because of my bad writing and then I get compared to the infamous My Immortal fanfic that dominated the fandom in the late 2000s’.
Another thing is that I never got into reading fanfics until January 2012 when I was browsing on my “new” iPhone 4 that my mom (it was actually hers’ but gave it to me as she bought a new iPhone 5 for herself) got me and I stumbled onto Fanfiction.net. That’s when my autistic mind blew over people writing fanfics about their favorite characters and writing them doing or saying things that they never did in their original media!
Prior to discovering fanfic, I made stories from my mind about my favorite characters doing things since I was 7 year-old and it will stay with me for days. But problem is that my writing skills aren’t that good as some of the authors I read on Fanfiction.net. And I also suffer from learning disabilities, such as I make many spelling and grammar errors to the point that until the 7th grade, spelling used to be my weakest subject in school. To this day, my bad spelling still trips me up to the point I wondered if anyone can understand my writing at all! For my safety from getting mocked from my bad writing, I decide to just only read the fanfics and not publish mine at all.
As for the media that I read the most fanfics was from Total Drama, my special interest at the time. I read the big ones such as Total Drama Comeback, Total Drama Chaos, Total Drama High Seas and Ridonculous Race Underdogs. You see that I mostly read fics where all the contestants come back in the next season to compete and see if they got farther than the last season they were in. Other fics that I read from the Total Drama Fanfiction section included fluff, hurt/comfort, kid fics, AU, High School AU (where they never compete in the show), drabbles. I even read my first smut from there and when I do read the smut at the time, I usually complaint that the male’s *ahem* private part were too big and that it doesn’t work that way in real life! It doesn’t help that majority of the writers (at the time) were teenagers who were never had sex ed. in school (but mines DID)!
But after The Ridonculous Race flopped and Cartoon Network cancelled the show in late 2015, the daily fanfics start to dry up on the website to the point that the last fanfic that I read in early 2017, JOKED if there’s anyone was still there! Afterwards, I left the site when Danganronpa became my special interest and was invested in their subreddit, back when it used to be small. It was then my Total Drama special interest died, along with reading the fanfics, which made me sad. But, I think it was for the best as I rather not stay around a dying fandom (at the time, that is...).
However, I didn’t stay away from reading fanfics for too long. On August 2017, I discovered Archive of Our Own, a better and mature version of Fanfiction.net and started reading Danganronpa fanfics from there. I read the usual fluff, hurt/comfort, drabbles and AUs (where the killing games and the Tragedy never happened). The smut there is so much BETTER than the ones from the Total Drama Fanfiction section due to the writers on Archive of Our Own are (mainly) adults, who actually learn about sex ed. and did research on how it’s done! Of course, it doesn’t stop the usual odd stuff and the troll fics from popping in, time to time. I didn’t read too much long fics there, but one of them Danganronpa Yukuza Arc, caught my attention and read it when it was updated.
Then in 2020, I moved on the Danganronpa Another series and read some of their fanfics there (which is smaller than the main series) and the only long fic that I read was Farewell to All Future, an AU that have all the cast from the first two games, attending Hope Peak’s Academy. In 2022, I got into the Fire Emblem: Three Houses series and started reading stuff from Archive of Our Own. Like with Danganronpa, I read the fluff, hurt/comfort, drabbles, AUs and some modern AUs, since the game takes place in the medieval times.
Even now, as I have a Bachelor’s Degree with Cum Laude, I’m still too scared to publish fanfic due to the occasional spelling and grammar errors that I made and that the plot is usually not good. Even if I want to publish fanfic on Archive of Our Own, there some racism going on behind the scene that made me, a black woman, uncomfortable to even publish there. And then there’s AI taking people’s writings, which make writers’ angry to the point they restrict their fanfics by forcing people to make an account in order to read it!
Thankfully, people are now more likely to be kinder to fanfic writers in general. Especially those who can write the plot and the characters better than the actual media that they came from! I also heard the fanfic community on Tumblr is welcoming and when Tumblr went on their porn banning stream in late 2018, they spared the smut writings for some reason! And plus the fandom on Tumblr are nicer anyways, which is why I feel safe publishing my first fanfic there. Even though it’s not going to many views or comments, it’s better than getting hate comments for bad writing or spelling!
I think in order to feel comfortable writing long fics (and not abandoning them); I need to practice writing small, one-shot fics. I think this solve my fear of writing and publishing fanfics. I’ll try to post it here (as it’s for archive reasons in case Tumblr goes down) and on Tumblr as much as I can (along with the other things that I mention in the my past blogs as my executive dysfunction keeps making me move from one thing to another). As for the fanfics, it’s mostly fluff, drabbles, AUs and maybe hurt/comfort. No smut as I’m not comfortable writing it without making mistakes that can anger some readers.
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