Fanfic Influences

[Negrek]

Are there any fanfics out there that influenced the way you write today, whether they turned you onto a topic/genre/character or even just got you writing in general? Maybe a particular style or way of structuring a story that you had to try out for yourself? Doesn't have to be pokémon fanfic!

A lot of my tastes in reading/writing fanfic were definitely influenced by the time that I started out in the fandom. At the time journeyfics were really, really huge, and I couldn't get enough of them! It was also more common for people to have their own web sites for posting things like character bios and art, info about fakemon, and so on, and a couple that I really liked were Topaz Soarhire's (Tezza on these forums) On the Wings of Council and Obsidian Blade's Raven: Emerald Fist MS. I can only find Topaz's site, unfortunately, but at the time I loved visiting those sorts of places and dreaming about having a page for a fic of my own. The Quest for the Legends was also among the first journeyfics I read, which in a roundabout way probably had to do with me coming to Serebii in the first place. (I don't actually remember how I found the forums.)

Pokémorph fanfic also tended to be a lot more popular in those days and was a favorite genre of mine. Pink Parka Girl wrote great stuff back in the day, and she often had a lot of insightful things to say about the genre in discussion threads... thanks to her I'll probably never write a raichu pokémorph in my life, or probably only as a parody, heh. Farla's Ice was another big influence, in terms of style as well as content. It could be a tough fic to read, because it's written from an alien POV that describes things in an alien way, but I found it weirdly compelling anyway! There were a lot of other pokémorph fanfics that I read, but almost none of them got very far in... I actually don't think I've read a pokémorph story that actually went to completion, though I'm sure they're out there! I was a huge fan of Animorphs when I was a kid, so it's no surprise that I liked the genre, and I wanted to write one pretty much as soon as I found out the genre existed. Unfortunately I'd started in on OT fics first (though I suppose technically my first one was kind of TF)... maybe if I'd taken less than eight years to finish the one I was working on, I could have gotten in on them when more people were writing them!

Lastly, one writer who almost certainly had a big impact on my style of writing was Saffire Persian, who here on Serebii was known particularly for her use of second person, both for one-shots and in longer fics. Her one-shot "The Ties that Bind" is still a huge fave of mine, and reading her stuff definitely got me experimenting more with the second person and probably led to me choosing to use it for one of my chaptered stories.

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

My experience with fanfiction has been an odd one - "off and on again" would be an appropriate phrase. My first stint in fandom was way back in 2005-2007, and I read all sorts of things then, mostly pokémon and especially pokémorph fics. It's interesting that you mention the genre in relation to animorphs - the pokémorphs I'm talking about are pokémon-human hybrids rather than characters who can transform. It's intriguing and a little frustrating that the one term describes two very different things, but that's been the convention for a while, it seems.

I haven't read a pokémorph fic (of either variety) to completion either, and in my experience most of the old glut of morph stories suffered from a number of shared flaws, not least of which was the quality of the writing. The main thing I remember morph stories having in common was that the morphs would usually be human trainers captured by Team Rocket or some other criminal organisation, made into 'freaks' (but very cool and attractive abominations mind you) to be used as weapons, and then abused until they escaped. There was a popular MUSH I never had the nerve to sign up to with a similar premise save for that the morphs were made from transformed pokémon rather than humans.

I developed my interest in the genre in the first place because it followed naturally from reading fanfiction about Mewtwo - a favourite character of mine at the time. The stories might not have been sophisticated, but the subject matter was the transformation of identity, the loss/acquisition of 'humanity', genetic engineering and so on. All that stuff fascinates me. Inevitably, I wrote my own fanfic (to 120k word completion! Since deleted out of shame) which suffered from all the same cliches and melodrama as the stuff I read. By the time I finished writing it, I wanted to write something better, something that deconstructed the tropes of the genre.

The first edition of Different Eyes was that fic, an incomplete four-chapter work published in 2012. It wasn't great but it received a fair bit of praise. Unfortunately, strife online and offline and poor health stopped me from persevering with the project. However, I never lost the desire to eventually write a long, good, fully realised pokémorph fic. That's what I'm doing now, albeit very gradually! Obviously I've read plenty of published fiction as well and that's had a greater influence of me as a writer, but the single fanfiction project I'm working on now is a direct spiritual successor to the angsty, melodramatic, indulgent morph fics I was reading twelve years ago.

I can't recall most of the morph fics I read back then, and the ones I do have since been deleted, but the seemingly-defunct Pokémorph MUSH still has an accessible wiki, at least. I read other stuff too, including The Quest for the Legends way, way back in the day. I should probably read that some time. The only pokémon fanfic that I didn't have the heart to clear out from my FFN favourites when I purged my account was the excellent No Antidote, about a team of pokémon whose trainer suffers a neurological breakdown. Another significant influence in ~2006 was Pokémon Rebirth: Ultimatum which apparently has since been rewritten and completed and so I really should go back and check it out. It didn't have any pokémorph characters when I was reading it, but it apparently does now! It did have a number of hard-done-by characters created through genetic engineering though, most notably a human character who was once a pokémon. The imagery of a pokémon floating in a life support tank, gradually transforming into a human being, a true person yet not born but created - that really stuck with me.

There's certainly more I'm not adequately remembering.

 

[Cutlerine]

I wonder if I'm in a minority here when I say I don't really have much in the way fic influences? My very first fanfic (which was for this fandom, despite what I'm about to say) was a faux-detective-noir black comedy thing directly inspired by a novel I'd just read, and I think 99% of the fic I've produced since has followed a similar pattern: I'll start thinking about a cool thing a novel I read or game I played did, and then I'll go, well, there's a thing that could happen in the pokémon world that would let me perform that same trick but with the emphasis shifted in an interesting direction. Possibly that's because up till relatively recently, I didn't read that much fic; now that I have, I think I can see the odd thing here and there -- and again, the main things I take are techniques or structures; I remember stumbling across the (venerable even then) You Awaken in Razor Hill sometime in my teens, which several years later led to my own CYOA fic, A Leash of Foxes, and then there are other fics from which I've stolen devices like rotating narration through the various members of a team of pokémon (which is from diamondpearl876's Survival Project and Phantom Project, and which has ended up in a fic I haven't hammered into shape well enough to post yet).

But for the most part -- yeah, I came to fic writing moderately late, and to fic reading later still. It's fascinating to see others here referring to some shared sense of the history of trends and whatever in the creative side to this fandom, because despite having been in it for the better part of a decade, I ... honestly have no sense of these things at all. I'm learning more from reading this thread than I picked up online over the past ten years. That, uh, probably says something about me.

 

[Marika_CZ]

I wonder if I'm in a minority here when I say I don't really have much in the way fic influences?

Heh. Welcome to the club
I am the same because I only started writing and reviewing recently and before that I wasn't even into fanfic in general. As a result I am influenced way more by my favorite pro authors of general fiction (most of them being popular writers of our era).

There is one aspect where fanfiction here is influential more than world of AAA books. And that is anything related to Pokemon specifically. Since I have been here, I stumbled on concepts that I came to like that I didn't even consider/know about before, e.g.:

• the morphs
• universe where Pokemon can talk and generally act like humans while living in human world
• crossover between mainstream Pokemon world and PMD world
• "regions" not being separate Pokemon world but rather countries like the RL ones

I could definitely see myself writing a fic one day with some of these in mind.

 

[NebulaDreams]

I read quite a few Pokemon related fanfics/comics a few years ago like Alterity by Mewitti (DA) and No Antidote by FalconPain (FFN) which opened my eyes to the kind of stories fanfiction could tell that the original series couldn't, but my biggest influence is I Am Lucario by Lupyne (FFN), which I still hold in high regard to this day. It poses a lot of interesting questions such as how Pokemon interact in an urban environment, how the education system works and all sorts of other worldbuilding tidbits that I wouldn't have thought about before if it wasn't for that. Add a cast of likeable characters, a peaceful slice-of-life atmosphere and some kickass fight scenes and you have one of my favourite stories of all time out of both fanfiction and original fiction.

I played around with a few ideas for a while but never found the right one until now. The Curious and the Shiny shares some plot points with I Am Lucario (the fact that Pokemon can learn to speak human is heavily featured in that fic as well), but it's also a melting pot of other fantasy influences such as Temeraire (one of the characters, Accendare, is named after a dragon from that series), The Kingkiller Chronicles (the use of a story within a story and the slice-of-life approach to fantasy) and Berserk (Curio's design is a little similar to Guts, after all). I also designed Curio in a way that was contrary to how I saw a lot of Lucario characters being portrayed in fics. While they're usually shown to be loyal to their trainers and soft-spoken, Curio is brash, generally doesn't care about what people think of her and wears her independence like a badge of honour. Joseph Joestar from JoJo: Battle Tendency might've played a part in developing her personality as well.

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

NebulaDreams mentioned Alterity just now and I wanted to quietly recommend that since I've been enjoying that recently. Too recently to have much of an influence on my own fanfiction yet, but still!

I also wanted to loudly recommend Victory Fire, which is one of the most impressive pieces of pokémon fan content I've ever enjoyed. Time will tell what kind of influence it will have on me, but I anticipate the biggest is that it has persuaded me that many pokéfic tropes I've enjoyed in the past can be done not just well, but brilliantly, and I shouldn't hold myself back from using them just because I have the impression that they've been done badly too many times or anything.

 

[Kutie Pie]

Ahahaha this is quite a trip down memory lane. I have like three, maybe four or five different Serebii inspirations that pretty much pushed me into fan fiction, and looking back at them, I have to chuckle here and there because some of the fics in hindsight aren't all that great xD. But they're inspirations in some form or another, though far as I know they didn't inspire my writing style but they definitely were in the subject matter: Mewtwo and/or Mew. Some of you who have been from way back then may be aware of who they were.

I believe the first MewShipper I ever came across was pokeplayer1984, though I think the first fic of his I read was Misty's Miracle, but the first instance of him being a MewShipper that I saw was Trials of the Pendant. Not good in the very slightest, but when I first joined in 2006, pokeplayer was the first person I ever held a conversation with, a very good guy and very supportive. Sadly, he ended up getting banned from Serebii when I went AWOL back in 2007/8-ish, so I wasn't able to get back in contact with him again. He popped up in my radar once maaaany years ago when he uploaded/updated something on FFN, but then he disappeared, and it looks like for good. So regardless of his writing quality, I can't deny that he inspired me.

Zerodius was the second MewShipper I came across, and he was the polar opposite of pokeplayer. Wrote very dark fics, Rejected being his biggest project and an actual inspiration for Forsaken in tone. I recently went back to reread it out of boredom, and while his grasp on grammar and pacing was flimsy and on top of it being much more sexual than I remembered it being (that's what I get for reading it as a young teenager lol), he had a really good idea in the works, and it's a real shame he just ended up leaving. He's rarely on DeviantArt, which is the best place I can contact him, but last we talked a few years back, he expressed interest in rewriting the fic, though I'm not sure if that day will ever come. He also had quite a bit of a one-shot collection going on that I think tended to play as tie-ins to his main story while still being stand-alone, but it seems like a few of them are forever lost to the void if he didn't delete them himself.

Knightblazer was only on I think for a year or two, but he had his own little take on MewShipping as well, and also wrote a bit of one-shots himself. Ash I think is great for a stand-alone (and now that I'm much more familiar with Hellsing than I was back then, I can totally see the inspiration now), but my favorite of his was Moment of Peace which he says in the beginning won first prize in some shipping/romance fic contest held at the time, which is totally awesome. Never talked to him outside of a couple of reviews, but he ended up disappearing as well.

Brian Powell (now Brian Random) is different in that he was just big on writing Team Rocket-centric comedy one-shots, but he was a very friendly, very prolific reader and reviewer, and he gave much helpful advice and support to up-and-coming fic writers. I really appreciated his insight, and his fics were very nice to unwind with.

And then there's Saber (I believe it's Saber) who wrote what looked to be your typical journeyfic, but it had Mewtwo and Mew using the main protagonists as hosts/disciples/pawns or something to prepare them for going into battle/war with each other. I wish I could remember the title, and I'm not entirely sure if it actually was completed, but I remember being rather entranced with it. If I can find it again, I'll have to do a re-read and see if it holds up and if it's what I remember.

That's mainly just for the Pokémon fics. I have inspirations for Digimon, but this is long and I'm rambling enough as it is, maybe I'll post here later about that, I dunno.

 

[Negrek]

It's interesting that you mention the genre in relation to animorphs - the pokémorphs I'm talking about are pokémon-human hybrids rather than characters who can transform. It's intriguing and a little frustrating that the one term describes two very different things, but that's been the convention for a while, it seems.

I haven't read a pokémorph fic (of either variety) to completion either, and in my experience most of the old glut of morph stories suffered from a number of shared flaws, not least of which was the quality of the writing. The main thing I remember morph stories having in common was that the morphs would usually be human trainers captured by Team Rocket or some other criminal organisation, made into 'freaks' (but very cool and attractive abominations mind you) to be used as weapons, and then abused until they escaped. There was a popular MUSH I never had the nerve to sign up to with a similar premise save for that the morphs were made from transformed pokémon rather than humans.

Yeah, it's super weird that the same term was used for those two very different things. These days I think it's more common to call pokémon-human hybrids "hybrids" or "gijinka," and "pokémorph" more for stories that involve morphing, but from what I recall it used to be applied to both equally.

And yeah the vast VAST majority of morph fic was some variant on people being experimented on by an evil organization who then escape and go on the run and/or fight back with their fellow experiments. I can't lie, I'd totally be into that in the hands of a good writer, but it's disappointing how few people tried to do something different with the concept. Dragonfree's Morphic is about hybrid-style morphs and goes in a bit of a different direction, although there are still people out to get the morphs, if that's something you'd be interested in.

I wonder if I'm in a minority here when I say I don't really have much in the way fic influences? My very first fanfic (which was for this fandom, despite what I'm about to say) was a faux-detective-noir black comedy thing directly inspired by a novel I'd just read, and I think 99% of the fic I've produced since has followed a similar pattern: I'll start thinking about a cool thing a novel I read or game I played did, and then I'll go, well, there's a thing that could happen in the pokémon world that would let me perform that same trick but with the emphasis shifted in an interesting direction. Possibly that's because up till relatively recently, I didn't read that much fic; now that I have, I think I can see the odd thing here and there -- and again, the main things I take are techniques or structures; I remember stumbling across the (venerable even then) You Awaken in Razor Hill sometime in my teens, which several years later led to my own CYOA fic, A Leash of Foxes, and then there are other fics from which I've stolen devices like rotating narration through the various members of a team of pokémon (which is from diamondpearl876's Survival Project and Phantom Project, and which has ended up in a fic I haven't hammered into shape well enough to post yet).

It's always interesting to me that there are a lot of people who write fanfic but don't (or didn't) read much! It's neat that some of dp876's work inspired you to try switching pokémon POVs in your story; there's a lot of cool stuff you can do with that.

And then there's Saber (I believe it's Saber) who wrote what looked to be your typical journeyfic, but it had Mewtwo and Mew using the main protagonists as hosts/disciples/pawns or something to prepare them for going into battle/war with each other. I wish I could remember the title, and I'm not entirely sure if it actually was completed, but I remember being rather entranced with it. If I can find it again, I'll have to do a re-read and see if it holds up and if it's what I remember.

That's Pokémon Revelations: Cross of Fates! It's finished, but the sequel never got completed. Definitely an important piece of SPPf fanfic history right there!

I'm tickled by the enthusiasm for Alterity and PMD: Victory Fire in this thread, since those are a couple of my favorite fancomics, too. (Plus I think Victory Fire's nearly done? It's always cool to see big projects like that get completed.) Another comic I've enjoyed for a few years now is Moképon, which is kind of a parody of the games and pokémon journies in general.

I don't think comics have had much of an influence on writing, though. Usually they just get me fired up to make comics, which is a problem because I have no artistic ability and am already super slow about updating my fanfic.

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

Yeah, it's super weird that the same term was used for those two very different things. These days I think it's more common to call pokémon-human hybrids "hybrids" or "gijinka," and "pokémorph" more for stories that involve morphing, but from what I recall it used to be applied to both equally.

Yeah, back in the day 'pokémorph' meant whatever. I'm hard pressed to find any hybrid fic these days but for some reason it never occurred to me to go looking for it under that term. 'Gijinka' means something else, though, as far as I'm aware. Humans with pokémon characteristics rather than basically-furries. Hey, any hybrid fic recs? Would genuinely love to find some good hybrid morph fic.

And yeah the vast VAST majority of morph fic was some variant on people being experimented on by an evil organization who then escape and go on the run and/or fight back with their fellow experiments. I can't lie, I'd totally be into that in the hands of a good writer, but it's disappointing how few people tried to do something different with the concept. Dragonfree's Morphic is about hybrid-style morphs and goes in a bit of a different direction, although there are still people out to get the morphs, if that's something you'd be interested in.

Yeah, my take on that was garbage, given I was 12 at the time. My current take on morphs is a little further from the typical beats of the 'genre' I think. Pokémon, not humans, are the subjects of the project. Plus, the organisation doing it isn't absurdly sinister. Just mildly sinister!

I'm not aware of any good fics with the classic premise. I read Morphic some years back and I enjoyed it, but as I recall it's very much a deconstruction of the concept of morphs rather than a story about 'functional' morphs.

 

[Negrek]

Morphic is the only hybrid rec I can give, unfortunately, and you're right that it's more of a deconstruction than anything. Unfortunately I was usually looking for the more shapeshifter-y style fics... There was a nice hybrid story here on the forums yonks ago, but it didn't get far in and then the author scoured it from the face of the internet, so I've really got nothing. =/ I'd definitely also be interested if anyone else happens to have any hybrid recs!

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

@Negrek I just spent some time today searching for hybrid fics. There were truly scarce pickings, but I did find a handful of the fics that previously influenced me to some extent, or at least I remember reading. None I'd want to recommend, especially as even the most promising ones were abandoned near to their conclusions for whatever reasons. I think that hybrid fics are a dead 'genre' and I choose to be encouraged by the implication that my own project stands very much alone. Nevertheless, the reality is saddening.

 

[Ambyssin]

I kept seeing this thread and neglecting to post anything in it because I wasn't entirely sure what to say. Lemme fix that...

Re: Victory Fire. I discovered the webcomic a bit after I started writing and it was a really enjoyable read so I'm glad to see it get some love from others.

As far as personal influences go, there are only two fics that come to mind. The first is actually one of the first fics I ever read: Paper Mario: The Temple of the Sun. It served for the inspiration as to what my fic is on the ground level: taking the basic elements of a spin-off series and applying them to an original plot that acknowledges the canon events of the series, but takes place in a unique location. It also does a lot of bait-and-switch and heavy deconstruction of things that fans of Paper Mario games come to expect. I wound up adopting that tactic, too. I'm still not sure how intentional it was on my part. ^^;

For something more specific to Pokémon (which I've only looked at more recently) I have PMD: Defenders of Warmth. Again, it was a bit of an inspiration in that it has multiple human characters and was a Gen V-centric PMD story created before Gates to Infinity was a thing. It uses a continent far removed from the ones of the canon games, but still acknowledges those events while telling its own story and highlighting 'mons from Gen V. I opted for a similar approach, creating a place that's far-removed from the canon continents and is populated by the 'mons of the Alola Dex.

 

[Manchee]

I used to write a lot more back in 2008-2012 (when I joined up to when I went to college), and that period was heavily influenced by Destiny Journeys: Healing of Hearts, written by Mix. It was like a retelling of DPPt mixed with a lot of drama and Avatar: The Last Airbender. But the retelling part is what got me, and what made my first large attempt at fan fiction be a retelling of RSE mixed with some supernatural influences. It was a really fun time and I'm proud of what I wrote, but I know that for a while a lot of my style was influenced by how Mix wrote. I saved a copy of the fic before she deleted it, but I've never gone back and reread it because I'm afraid that my writing will fall back to when I was a teenager.

The sad part is that I haven't really written fan fiction (or anything creatively outside of that, actually) for the past six years. I've tried here and there, but it's difficult for me to 1) be inspired enough, and 2) have the time between grad school and working to pay for grad school. Recently, though (back in January), I read Cutlerine's Arbitrary Execution and that really got me back into wanting to write again. Since finishing that, I've been slowly making progress reading Ghost Town and Go Home, also by them, and I appreciate the realness that it brought to the Pokémon world through these fics. It makes fic writing feel more grown-up, and I enjoy that because now I feel like I can attempt to tell some fun stories that I wouldn't be able to in regular fiction writing. Unfortunately, I haven't read much by anyone else because I just don't have the time (and not a lot has caught my interest), but that's where I'm at right now.