User blog comment:KillaHawke1/Fan Fiction: Cancerous plague of unoriginality or great companion?/@comment-25073641-20160512155710

It depends actually. Just for the sake of sounding smart, I'll tell you there are two kinds of fan-fiction:

Derivative – this kind of fan-fic utilizes the same setting and characters from which the story was derived, hence its name.

For example, there's a derivative Hunger Games Fiction some random stranger wrote. The writer will use Katniss as his/her fan-fic's protagonist, and spruce up the story by including the secondary characters into the plotline and choose the country of Panem as the setting — the only things that will change are the story (albeit deviated from the main material or completely original), interactions of said characters, some other storytelling elements, etc. etc.

I have no idea why they do this though. This just doesn't make any sense to me. Maybe they can't sketch out their own believable characters and don't have the creative abilities formulate a proper plotline, so they rely on the main material's elements, which are I assume well-received and fairly established, so they could get some sense of stability. I don't know...

IMO, this derivative fan-fic thing is the great bane of fan-fic's existence, as it only displays little creativity and uniqueness to its readers, or nothing at all. I don't like it personally, for obvious reasons, but I'm not sure about outhers.

Explorative – Now I'll be honest: this is what I'm trying to do all my life.

Explorative fan-fic expands the story or lore of the selected main material to a wider extent by incorporating elements (characters, storylines, etc.) which are not found from which the fan-fic is derived. Most of the time, explorative fan-fics cast a different set of characters, a different story, a different point in time (a few years ago or a century after), but is still set in the same universe as the main material.

For example, I have written an explorative fan-fic of The Purge, which in fact I did once (only to fail miserably). Instead of setting the story in Los Angeles, the place where The Purge: Anarchy takes place, I set the story in New York, or San Diego, or Chicago. Instead of having a man with a dead son, a daughter of a dying father and two lovers as the protagonists of my fan-fic, I choose a reckless teenager, a broken WWII veteran, and a corrupt abusive politician (I swear I once tried to write about these guys; it's hard.) Do you see it?

This is what I really like about explorative fan-fiction. Not only it lets you freely expand the story/lore of your main material, it also doesn't bind you to a certain limit most derivative fan-fics suffer from, and as the cherry at the top of the chocolate cake, it also lets your creativity fully flow out. This is my kind of fan-fic.

Did I sound intelligent on that one?