Slacking off from my studies, I've come here to post this: The Gosu Arts and Techniques of Fanfiction writing, by yours truely.
Honestly, the stuff I see people churning out can be bloody retarded. I have seen great fics. I have good fiction, with a plot so well written it leaves you craving for more. I have seen these stories, these little kilobytes of information contain a better insight, a more indepth and engaging tale than the original itself.
Reading fanfiction is a daunting job, and shouldn't be attempted unless you want to be: 1. fall into a hopeless pit of dank addiction which you never really be able to get out of; 2. spent time sifting through the massive piles of fiction, dividing it into THE shit, or just plain o' shit. It's quite sad to see many fics falling to the plain shit section, because they basically have a crappy plot and/or they have horrible english.
Take Harry Potter for example. I hate the books with a fiery passion, but for some reason, I like the fanon. Strange, I know. So anyway, while on my epic quest (seriously epic, considering thereare 193417 fics in the HP section) to find a good read, I saw several things:
1. Anything fic with chapters that have below a thousand words are usually crap.
2. Trends happen. There was a trend of "harry-becomes-an-elementalist-or-some-stupid-crap-like-that" some time ago, and for a while you could see a few pages straight filled with these sort of trashes, drowning the good fics who started in trend in their stupidity.
3. People seem to have no creativity. At least, on FF.Net. I mean, c'mon, every "six-year-fic", or in other words, some great re-write by some random guy ends up like this: Harry mopes, then he snaps out of it, then he decides to become stronger by "training". Somehow, in one summer, he becomes g0su, and can basically own everyone. Through training, he also gains some sort of godly body, which every girl suddenly wants. Wait, there's more! Ginny also becomes hot, like a Greek Goddess, and thus through mutual lust, the two find "love". Add in some angst, some spice, and alittle oh-so-sick-sweet-love-crap, and there you go, a typical fiction.
Honestly, its completely stupid. Oh, did I forget to mention: somehow, Harry would have a birthday bash, which he has never gotten, and after years of building up his emotional walls the boy decided to go all crying and wussy-like in front of his friends and reveal his terrible past. Oh, how completely realistical.
This goes the same to Naruto fiction. Even if you go copy a basic ploltline, the least you could do was make it different. Like not the same. C'mon! In HP, I believed some guy posted a fanfic that had a Harry-going-to-Azkaban-but-innocent plot, and a Harry/Bellatrix pairing. Honestly speaking, it was a decently-written fic, but at least the plot was original. He twisted in a way that the Potter guy was the Lord of Azkaban (through some lame-o method, but we can forgive that), and added the Bellatrix pairing quite nicely. . . at least as nicely as it could go. I've never seen a realistical HP/BB pairing on FF.Net, so what the hell. Anyway, not half a week after the fucking thing was posted, pages of fanfics started to pop out, with HP becoming lord of something, usually Azkaban, and marries Bellatrix, despite the fact that she killed his closest family. Gosh, how completely original. In fact, even Naruto has better fiction, despite the more linear plot.
The one thing about fanfiction is that no matter how you twist it, unless its a crossover (which has special rules), you should always try to fit it in with the original universe. Evil!Harry and Demon!Naruto, or Killer!Kira is fine, but you must explain them carefully and not too technically. It ruins the fic, or at least to me it does, when you put stupid shit like a character named "anne" in Naruto, or somehow Bellatrix becomes lovely-dopey and "good" and regretful of her actions after like, what, 20 years of pure torture and death? That's a retarded transition.
Yup, I'm a crazy Fanfiction Reader. Maybe I'll write more on this. Scratch that, I will write more on this ;)
Now listening to: "Gifts and Curses" Yellowcard.
