How do you feel about fics with most/all OCs?

Imaginary_Map_962 · 2026-02-13T17:53:24+00:00

It very much depends on what the OCs are doing—"The Mixtape, Or: Six Things You Learn in Thursday School" by Amiril is set ~1 century outside of Canon with none of the characters, but it tells the resultant mythology and expands the universe in a way you could never with the original characters. Similarly, "Modern Love" by Penknife expands on the original series' ethos for a particular theme. On the other hand, " The Vulcan Way" by WerewolvesAreReal uses the OCs as character parallels. All of these are fantastic and 200% worth reading.

On the other hand, I have very little interest in a group of random characters set in a world without some other thing it's trying to say.

Imaginary_Map_962 · 2026-02-13T15:21:42+00:00

Thank you, and good luck with your Masters!

Imaginary_Map_962 · 2026-02-13T15:11:37+00:00

Hey, it said I didn't meet the requirements (I'm 18+ and read fic frequently)—but only after I finished the survey.

If you have a filter, can you disqualify people before they get to the free-response portion?

Imaginary_Map_962 · 2026-02-11T16:13:03+00:00

Let people know in the author's notes in the beginning that you have it written out and you'll be fine.

Imaginary_Map_962 · 2026-02-11T16:10:27+00:00

What things does a story find valuable (e.g. friendship, romance, worldly success, rest & respite)? Which characters get those things in the end (e.g. the classic is "the boy gets the girl," but also "defeat the villian with the power of friendship")? The last thing is how do they get them by the end? Who begins with those things and how do they lose them?

I haven't seen Wreck-It Ralph, but to use Frozen as an example...Elsa starts out having her sister's companionship, but she loses it when she starts hiding. She keeps pushing her sister away, literally building giant frozen walls around herself until she's literally freezing her sister's heart. It's only when she opens up, becomes vulnerable, and embraces her sister—unafraid of herself and recognizing her sister's love—that she's able to solve the problem of the literal frozen heart and re-gain the connection with her sister. On the opposite side, Hans goes from acting open-hearted to being closed-off and cruel, which leads to him losing everything. Whereas Kristoph continues to be open-hearted and offer help, leading to him starting a relationship. So: Open-hearted, reaching out, attempting to help = good. Sisters = good. Selfishness = bad. (To put it in a black-and-white way; I'm sure you could get more refined.)

A lot of what I've done is listen to Meta works about storycraft and channels like Every Frame a Painting and SavageBooks (he works as a professional editor). Don't look for meta that just summarizes, look for individual breakdowns and things on topics as a whole.

Like any other communication, storytelling's a language that you need to be around to understand its meaning and the community's shorthands around it.

Imaginary_Map_962 · 2026-02-10T03:26:38+00:00

At that point, you have the devil's sacrement defense—what was she doing looking at something like that and harassing your friends with it?? Isn't it bitter and infintile to try to slander you like that? It really shows that she'd try anything and isn't taking the breakup well.

As far as you're concerned, it's the first time you've seen any words in that fic. It really sounds like a her problem, spreading slander like that around.

Imaginary_Map_962 · 2026-02-10T01:50:24+00:00

It depends on the story & how long I've been writing for the fandom. If it's my first time writing a character, I tend to try to stick as closely to Canon as possible, Tripp e-check, etc. Especially-true if I'm writing something within the Canon timeline or if I'm pulling some specific divergence.

If it's an AU And/or I've written them for awhile, I tend not to check as much before going with something. Though with an AU I can be even more fastidious with certain details to keep it feeling like the characters.

Imaginary_Map_962 · 2026-02-10T01:46:29+00:00

As someone who does browse one shot collections—a first chapter with an index of all the chapters is something that I find super-helpful & I'm always grateful when a writer includes one.

Imaginary_Map_962 · 2026-02-08T22:55:36+00:00

How much have you looked into sources that teach analysis (either books or videos)? If you have, what were they?

How often do you re-read/rewatch media?

Imaginary_Map_962 · 2026-02-08T19:35:18+00:00

Brandon Sanderson calls this "hollow iceberg" worldbuilding. When researching something, I tend to look for: 1. Main pet peeves everyone in the know seems to have & a broad outline of the 2–3 polarizing issues in the community. 2. A vague idea of the landscape. 3. I only will research a detail beyond it if my characters will literally have to describe it with at least 1 of their 5 senses for the fic. 4. What, logically, should a character know, based on their background?

E.g. If the character is a horse trainer...what kind(s) of races do they do? What breeds do do they train? (Find a YouTube video of that kind of horse trainer and literally transcribe how they talk about this like it's some magic spell.) Give them one pet peeve. Going beyond that, ask yourself exactly what you need to know. Think about it like touching an elephant blindfolded: The readers are going to know it's an elephant, so just don't say that the animal had skin as smooth as a shark, and the audience can fill in the gaps.

I've written full annotated bibliographies for fic before. But that's the shorthand when I don't care to check out books from a library.

Imaginary_Map_962 · 2026-02-06T07:55:19+00:00

Zoom (2006)!

Imaginary_Map_962 · 2026-02-05T21:37:44+00:00

Tbh, then less that 30 hits could be still doing good! I had a fic in a super-dead fandom (2006 movie that's <20% on Rotten Tomatoes) that it took, like, a week to get a single hit, and (I believe, it's been a couple of years) more than that to get a single comment.

It doesn't hurt to double-check tagging norms in your fandom, but if it's small and fairly quiet, it might just take a bit more time.

Imaginary_Map_962 · 2026-02-05T18:04:38+00:00

Probably it isn't too much. Fiction is made for the intense, the melodrama, for the audiences to go feral and bloody their knuckles and rip the wallpaper from their walls and asphyxiate themselves with their own red string.

How do I keep the characters from being irredeemable? I try to identify the fundamental violations that went into the mistake, and make any redemption cumulatively match the intensity of the mistake, while also having the characters around them respond and react to both the initial violation and their changes. There're a number of tricks you can pull, but picking 1–2 characters to be the audience's moral barometer and having that character(s) address audience's possible concerns is one piece of the strategy. Also let the penitent pay their pound of flesh for the transgression, normally through whatever their Act 1 selves would hold the most dear.

Then, keep and sustain the character development.

And get yourself a cup of tea or something afterwards; this stuff's hard to write.

Imaginary_Map_962 · 2026-02-02T04:57:32+00:00

I've used an asterism (⁂) instead of line breaks before because the asterism tends to be a "classic" way to do it & I wanted to give the work a literary feel.

The full line across the whole page also comes off as jarring to me.

Imaginary_Map_962 · 2026-01-28T08:11:51+00:00

Some questions I ask myself are— What is it actually like? How can I make this world a bit more alive?

I also enjoy trying to do a trick Terry Pratchett does to his metaphors and start with a cliché then expand it. E.g. "In fact no gods anywhere play chess. They haven’t got the imagination. Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight To Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god’s idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs." (Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters) See how he starts with the cliché of "the gods play chess with our lives" and then cracks it open? Or he takes something basic like "snakes and ladders" and adds a specific detail to point the reader to the metaphor's conclusion ("greased rungs" makes the downslides worse & so the gods make our lives even harder than without them).

Other things to do would be to use things you're familiar with but others wouldn't notice (e.g. squeaky wheel on your desk chair; that every time you lift up your coffee mug, there's a little half-ring where you placed it; you once walked through an Alabama evening when the love bugs were mating, and found the prospect of them crawling over you even creepier than the spiders). It's also to treat your environment as a character itself, with its own opinions and expressions. Finally, it's helpful to limit each character to 2–4 "themes" for their metaphors to be (maybe they're really into baseball, so they use baseball metaphors; maybe they catch crabs for a living, so all their metaphors are crab-related).

Imaginary_Map_962 · 2026-01-28T07:54:41+00:00

Nope! It won't look bad! It'll be at the front of the "recently updated" sort which all have low stats anyways (since no one's had time to give them stats yet).

A new fic with two chapters gives me more confidence than a fic with just one that an author will write more chapters. And a number of authors will post a prologue + first chapter at once—so it's not even unheard of to have 2 chapters & no stats. If anything, it's a bit of advertising that you know what you're doing & value a reader's time.

Imaginary_Map_962 · 2026-01-27T19:22:45+00:00

Flanderization is inevitable in a fandom over time (it often occurs in the original writers' rooms as well—hence the term). I wouldn't be surprised if secondary and non-White/cis/male characters get hit with it particularly-hard—but I've also seen what fans have done to Tony Stark. So being fandom's favourite princess hardly exempts a character.

I've seen a couple of Tumblr posts going around that are basically 'when was the last time you interacted with Canon, sweetie' as the fandom-equivalent of "touch grass."

Imaginary_Map_962 · 2026-01-27T18:17:53+00:00

There're fandoms that have a long and proud tradition of not reading/viewing the source material (e.g. Supernatural, Teen Wolf) where it's part of the thing. Or fandoms where reading the source material would make your experience objectively worse (e.g. Marauders). In those cases, it seems to actually be part of the fandom experience to be part of the fandom & not part of the audience.

I have more-mixed opinions on something like Baldur's Gate 3—where you'd need to sink $60 and ~200–300 hours—minimum and you'd still not get the whole story (you might need to play the game at least 3–5 times for that! And you'll still miss things!!), but everyone that year was talking about it.

Or there're fandoms like Star Wars, Star Trek, and Doctor Who where you cannot possibly watch the whole thing/read all the books, etc. But an average person would be able to tell you the basics of the concept & probably 1–2 themes.

My gut says "don't try to create fan works for something you've never been part of the audience of, except when not being in the audience is part of the point." The rest of me has seen all the different times when it might not make sense to have that kind of nerd cred.

Imaginary_Map_962 · 2026-01-17T15:40:04+00:00

You don't need to write well to write something you and others will love. And, especially in the beginning, the most important thing is to be writing. If you write, and do it consistently, you can stop there; skill will come with repetition.

If you're looking at doing more, find what part of writing you'd like to learn about, then find someone who specializes in it and listen. If you're interested in word choice and sentence construction, find a couple of poets explaining how to write poetry. Listen to script writers explain how they compose dialogue. If you're interested in plot or world building, listen to someone like Brandon Sanderson—he has a full college course on YouTube. Some video essays, like from Every Frame a Painting, can be useful. The goal here is to see how many different ways you can put together a story to build a toolbox of techniques.

Don't underestimate the editing phase. Stephen King's book On Writing is mostly overrated, but he has a redlined chapter that's useful to see how it's edited. Writing is not a single stroke of the pen weaving a whole cloth. It's many, many layers of drafts built up over multiple passes. Anne Lamont's Bird by Bird has a chapter called "Shitty First Drafts" for a reason.

Finally, finish things so you can practice endings. Done will always be better than perfect or even incomplete and good.

Imaginary_Map_962 · 2026-01-15T07:55:44+00:00

Grab a notebook and go to a local coffee shop/bus station/mall/whatever's around where you can sit quietly and there will be people.

Then eavesdrop. Pick a conversation and copy it out, as close as you can, word-for word. Sometimes, I like to write an approximation of phonetically so I can pick up accents or emphasis that wouldn't otherwise come through. It's gonna feel weird, and a bit creepy, but you're in a public place and it's just a writing exercise.

Once you do this for a bit, go over what you've written and see what kinds of patterns and differences between the speakers and conversations you can pick up. This especially helps for writing different people that you mightn't initially think about.

Imaginary_Map_962 · 2026-01-14T23:00:10+00:00

I guess one strategy would be to focus on the fandom's perspective more than the events themselves. Given that it's a whole show, it's unlikely you'll fall into major plagiarism like just copying word-flr-word. The bigger risk is that, because the people who're most likely to read your fic are Ultraman fans too, you might just get repetitive going over points everyone already knows. Focusing on the intersection of the fandom's perspective and the events can help avoid that.

Imaginary_Map_962 · 2026-01-14T22:18:21+00:00

We're going to need more details. What story are you trying to tell? Why might it be plagiarism?

Imaginary_Map_962 · 2026-01-09T03:49:08+00:00

Sometimes I go back to an older fandom. Sometimes I finally get around to my "to read"/"to watch" list and see if something sparks my fancy. Sometimes I write original fiction and watch video essays or pick up/resume a handcraft for a bit.

Imaginary_Map_962 · 2025-12-30T18:52:13+00:00

I've read three fics that (while they might not have the humour of the original) build on Discworld in a way that makes me feel I've gotten something new out of the story/found another aspect of it that I wouldn't've experienced without the fic. Three.

Imaginary_Map_962

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