Fanfiction is for losers

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This is going to be another rant. I've been thinking about the incredibly uncool stigma fanfiction has.

I'll say this right away - I know it's never going to be cool. In my spare time, rather than going out and meeting people or playing sports, I stay in a single room and type stories based on computer games and space movies, and hope that the strangers who read them will leave a review. It's extremely nerdy.

But!

Did you see the movie Terminator: Salvation recently? How about Star Trek? Did you ever see Jaws 3 or 4? Alien Ressurection?

Those scripts are one step away from what we do - and that's a big budget. They were no better than the good fanfics (Jaws 3 and 4 were far worse), they were made as tributes by gushing fans who use too many references (I'll Be Back, CGI Arnold, The photo and tapes of Sarah Connor etc etc etc.) The Director of Terminator 4, one McG, even uses a catchy net-like pseudonym instead of his real name. He also did 'Charlie's Angels'.

That's a fanfiction writer, right there. Not even a very good one. He just gets paid millions for it.

These are movies made as expansions to classic nerd favourites that the directors and writers loved. They were not written by the same writer as the original, directed by the same director, or had the original cast (except for Spock's brief role in the new Trek and Sigourney Weaver embarassing herself in Alien 4.)

These are good mov..... Star Trek was a good movie and we all loved it. But please remember that it's just a fanfiction script that happenned to be written by rich, succesful writers and got picked up by JJ Abrams.

There are hundreds of better Star Trek sequels, spin-offs and reboots which nobody noticed when they were online and which weren't comissioned by a studio. Certainly, there are billions of piss-poor fics in which two random characters meet, have terrible out-of-character dialogue and then have sex.
But then, Star Trek had a random, out of character coupling too - remember? I loved that scene, but if I were reading a fan script in which Spock and Uhura kiss in a lift after Vulcan exploded, I would have instantly discarded it and handed over a critical review.

I don't know what my point is here. I must sound very angry and impotent, like a yapping, chained-up dog barking at cats across the street.

I'm just saying. 20% of fanfiction I read is really good. And 60% is better than Joss Whedon's script for Alien 4.

So stop making fun of us, internet. You're hurting our feelings.

(And I LOVE Joss Whedon. He's like a god to me. If I live to be a hundred I will never equal 'Firefly', 'Hush', 'Once More With Feeling' or 'Dr Horrible'. He is a god.)