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| The first three volumes of Emery's Pokemon Fanfic |
This week my popular culture and pedagogy course
is studying identity and fanfiction/ fanfic. Part of our lesson was to (no
surprise here) read and watch some fanfic. Here is a link to one of those
videos, Buffy vs. Edward—Twilight Remixed.
I love Buffy and have written on the show
several times, even a book chapter called Buffy vs. Bella, but that’s for
another post. After watching this clip, I visited fanfiction.net and tried to
find some fanfic from the Buffyverse in which Anya lives. I can’t say I found
anything satisfactory but the Buffy fanfic was better than the Minecraft fanfic
that I read through in the hopes of finding something for Emery.
It seems as if Minecraft has its own
fanfic books—Emery asked to get a copy of a one that I hope he’ll review in a later
post. Which made me realize he’s been a reader and writer of fanfic for a long
time. I think it started after he watched the movie Bolt. He came home and started drawing Captain Underpants-type work
with Bolt. (if you didn’t see Bolt,
it’s the Disney movie about the hamster). Then, he found out about Pokemon
fanfic from flipnotes (flipnotes are animated short films created on a Nintendo
DS). I had to then print out and read an epic-length story on a post-apocalyptic
Pokemon world, which wasn’t bad.
Which leads me to Rowell’s Fangirl. Freshman
Cath and her twin Wren, are college freshmen. Once there, they part ways as
each becomes involved with her own group of friends and acquaintances. Cath has
an ability for writing and enrolls in a upper level creative writing classroom.
She is also a very popular fanfic writer and has thoughsands of readers who
follow her sotry of Simon Snow, a Harry Potter like character, who falls in
love with his school rival, Baz. Cath soon learns that her creative writing
professor has no admiration for fanfic, and Cath becomes unable to find her own
voice, her own content for writing. Through in a couple of supportive friends,
a hunky guy or two, and a parent who needs help, and you have a pretty good
story.
It’s unlike Eleanor & Park in several
ways—it’s less dark, less risqué, and much longer. But still a quick read. My
graduate student saw the cover and immediately recognized the artwork from
Noelle Stevenson (you can check out her tumblr here).
Now, back to teaching. In
both my class and in Fangirl, the
idea of whether this type of writing deserves a place is writing is brought up.
I tend to take a similar stance to fanfic as I do to writing. If a kid’s
motivated to write, then what’s the harm in that?
On a completely unrelated
topic, did you child have a week of standardized testing? We did in Louisiana.
Couple of thoughts here:
ReplyDelete1. I really enjoyed Fangirl. I didn't expect it to be as different from E&P as it was (and E&P was one of the best books I've read in the last year) but I really liked it. Cath's roommate, Reagan, absolutely stole the book for me, though - found her utterly hilarious. The only part that didn't work for me was the fanfic - I ended up skipping a lot of the Simon sections toward the end.
2. I see zero harm in fanfic. If it moves a kid to write, then that's a good thing. (And Bolt was awesome. I'd totally read that fanfic.)
3. We are in between weeks of testing in Texas. They'll do the science and math portion after the Easter break.