It occurred to me today, for an inexplicable reason, that it is possible, in a hypothetical sense, that if my twin brother and I were Anime characters or fictional heroes, fangirls would write twincest fan fiction about us. And that was a disturbing thought to begin my afternoon with.
There is a saying one of my old and morally questionable friends came up with: “Incest is best, it’s a game the whole family can play”. But how would you like it if you were a twin and people wrote twincest fan fic about YOU?
As a twin the whole notion of twincest fan fiction offends me. Least not because there is the reality that some fangirls have fantasies of pairing two twin brothers into a gay relationship even if they’re straight. The Twins Against Twincest Crusade begins here, and I hope one day twin brothers will not be objectified by young women who need to get out more.
I could say more about the matter, but that would get in the way of writing more about other aspects of fan fiction which I do and don’t agree with. I just needed to start with a humorous bandwagon to get your attention. To be sure, I highly recommend supporting Twins Against Twincest Pairings if you are a twin sibling, but because we are rare genetic occurrences I will open the support train’s doors to people who do not have a twin brother or sister but believe the wrongful sexual exploitation of twins in fan fiction needs to end now.
But let me continue with one of the more positive things I have to say about fan fiction. It is a great place to begin your writing career, and many a good writer has started writing by penning down an imaginative story between the fictional characters created by another person. I myself have written a small amount of fan fiction, most famously my remarkably innocent fan fic The Trouble With Kaorin which was a Sakaki/Kaorin pairing based on the Anime Azumanga Daioh.
I simply wrote the fan fic not out of some bizarre fantasy or Mary Sue/Gary Stu complex, but as an interaction between two characters which explored what would happen if Kaorin told Sakaki abouut her feelings for her and she said “yes” in her own way. It’s not clear in the Anime whether Sakaki would have said “yes” or “no”, and by no means did I intend to assert my version of canon over the director of the actual Anime. I just wrote it for some fun, and reviews of it say it’s a rather cute story. I wrote it as a younger man, and it’s by no means perfect, but I decided to give you the link to it so you could see my contribution to the Fan Fiction world.
When speaking about Fan Fiction, and you have written it yourself, you have to be honest. Honest because having written some yourself, to criticise others for what you have done yourself would be hypocritical. But I don’t have a problem with the idea of fan fiction in itself as a writing exercise that helps develop prose skills, it’s just that I don’t like twincest pairings. I like fan fiction that has a point to make, meaning, an exploration of characters. I am not one to read crack pairings except when I am in desperate need of some LOLs in a state of unbearable depression. You might not agree with my little fan fic, but it could equally be argued that yours is disagreeable to me. There is the conflict of interests and fandoms in the fan fiction sphere that leads to a lot of discomfort for everybody unless civil and well reasoned fan fiction etiquette is practiced.
There are some awful fan fics out there, but there is the potential for very good ones. The problem is that established writers are snobbish towards fan fic, and ignore its potential as equally interesting a fan artform as doushinji, or fan manga. The difference between doushinji and fan fiction is at the same time subtle and obvious. Doushinji, or fan manga, is created by visual artists who are very skilled at drawing the characters and writing the story in a visual form. And millions of people enjoy this artform. And in my mind, for all the quirkiness of the artform in the situations people put the characters in, it is far more admired than fan fiction as an artform. This is because prose is very different to fan manga, everything has to be described in words rather than images. And doushinji has the upper hand over fan fiction in the ring because it more accurately depicts the experience of Anime and Manga as a visual medium.
I have read some doujinshi translated, and I enjoyed it much more than a lot of fan fics. Why? Because doujinshi tells a story in a way that is closer to what the original Anime shows and Manga the work was based on, even if the situations are absurd, at least it gives a closer experience, since you’re reading manga instead of reading prose about characters.
But at the same time, fan fiction is helpful as an artform to people without the visual artistic skills doushinji artists have. You can create it cheaply and it can be posted on the web easily. Yet this artform works better with fandom of prose novels and TV shows, not Manga and Anime. This is because Manga and Anime are artforms which have a complex construction of how events are depicted visually, quite different to what you can do with prose, as I have already said about getting a closer experience.
I am not so much opposed to fan fiction in itself as to what people do with it. As a writer I would be more than happy to have people write fan fiction about characters I’ve created and worlds I designed. Yet wouldn’t it be so much better if fan fiction could be true to the original artworks that fan fics use as sources? In that sense, I would not like so much prose fan fic written about the worlds which I have written and illustrated in my books, as to have a sort of Western graphic novel doushinji created as fan fiction for it. It would be so much truer to what I do. And at the same time, doushinji is a much more rich experience for Anime and Manga fans than a prose story written about the characters.
15 comments ↓
I’m not sure that the problem is snobbishness towards fan fiction so much as the blunt facts that
Everyone knows it takes practice to draw well, but fewer people recognise the practice and effort required to write well, both on the small scale of sentence construction and on the larger scale of storytelling (I’m not too bad at the former, but I’m no storyteller). With the ease of posting that the internet offers, and without the motivation of commercial interest, there’s little incentive for fan fiction writers to improve their skills. And so we get a lot of fan fiction writing which demonstrates love for the original work, but no love of writing itself.
Strangely, in previous eras literary characters seem to have been much more open-source than they are today: no one would accuse Virgil of writing mere fan fiction, but he did his fair share of inspired borrowing.
Haven’t heard from you in a while, IKnight.
You make a reasonable argument, and brought up something fascinating: past open source characters.
What sort of practice was there in the past of this writing method?
I am going to hug you, and then I’m going to add you to my blogroll (assuming I don’t get distracted in the next five minutes) <3
You’re so ridiculously right about the whole twincest thing. I mean, I can semi-tolerate yaoi, and I can semi-tolerate some incest, but twincest’s just… ughhhhh.
Thank you for coming right out and saying that and not caring who you offended.
I guess before copyright arrived on the scene there was nothing stopping anyone from doing anything with someone else’s characters. I was thinking specifically of the classical mythology developed through a tradition of oral storytelling (the idea of passing a story down, and adding modifications, inherently carries the message ‘yes, you may use these characters).
Of course, people who were using mythological characters wouldn’t have thought of canons in the way that we do when we talk of ‘the Star Trek canon’, because legends and mythological characters are shared: that’s how they become mythology.
The example I mentioned in my first comment was Virgil’s Aeneid, which riffs happily on Homer’s work in a very creative way. And people have continued (ab)using that mythology to this day (Saint Seiya).
I suppose Lovecraft’s characters and settings are essentially free-to-use, as he encouraged other people to appropriate them (and they did). I also suppose we should take into account authorised sequels written after an author’s death, though I’ve never found one which was as good or better than the primary works (the new Dune books, for example, have been terrible).
None of the above are regarded as fan fiction, but if you put a talented and well-practiced author in front of a book with interesting characters, and made him or her write some fan fiction, I bet you’d get something equally creative and exciting.
Dude, if I was a twin and people wrote twincest fics about me and my male counterpart ((which I have always wanted)) I’d be practically giddy. And it’d probably happen.
Just because you hate twincest doesn’t mean you can ruin it for the others though. And protesting won’t stop them. Fangirls will be fangirls, you know?
Heh. I don’t really see why you are opposed to it. People will have imaginations no matter what you do. So you may as well accept people’s imaginations and fantasies, including fangirl’s, and twincest.
P.S: I have a twin brother, myself.
hey, i am with you on this. it frustrates me reading about twincest too. they ruin it for some people.=(
You speak of the “wrongful sexual exploitation of twins” in fan fiction- and I respect your opinion (most of the time I dislike twincest myself)- but what of anime or manga where such a relationship is already hinted at or featured?
Taking Ouran High School Host Club as an example, the Hitachiin twins are very close and hint at things to their customers. Is it really strange if those situations were extended and written into fan fiction when it is part of the main series?
And what of official series where actual twincest is a fact already? The main characters of ‘Futari Yuugi’, for example, participate in twincest. Would you object to fan fiction with twincest for series like these?
But, hey, thanks for posting your opinion. Most people are afraid to do so.
I kind of see how you would dislike like being paired by your own flesh and blood. I really don’t understand the whole thing with writing real life people paired together. It is rather, sick. I can kind of see twincest fanfics happening on anime characters though. Really I just go for regular pairings none of that twincest/incest crap. You’d be surprise what crazy fangirls write. I actually found out fangirls paired Zack and Cody from The Suite Life of Zack and Cody together. I kind of got sick off of only that. I would ignore it completely. Fangirls do it to get their giggles. I am a fangirl but I agree with you on twincest is bad.
Well, I found this site by looking the word ‘ twincest’ up on google. I write fanfictions, mostly about twins. Yes, twins. I do it because I love writing and fr other personal reasons. Get over it. You should be happy though, fangirls don’t write willy nilly about some random couple, no, they find the one that has more of a plot and relationship. Think about it.
You make a good point but you kind of contradict your self with the “fanfiction is the aurthor’s own expression” and “shouldn’t write twincest”. Im a Yaoi fan but i do know some aurthors go a little over board with their writeing when it comes to Yaoi but it is still something they created because they liked it. i say if you dont like twincest then just dont read it all fanfictions authors put warnings in either their summaries or in the disclaimer. if you dont like dont read. twincest is just a fetish some people have if they want to write or read it dosent matter its their choice. it is called FANfictio for a reason FANS write what THEY want if they dont want to follow the original storyline then they dont have to its the authors choice.
[...] Yaoi Twincest fans, listen up. Some of you may have found contradictions in one of my early articles, but I wrote that a LONG time ago. You want to hear my more recent views on that particular [...]
Going against twincest in fanfiction is a bit ridiculous. Yeah, it might objectify twins, but reggeaton objectifies women and you don’t see crusades on that do you? Just don’t read it, and don’t feel like an object yourself, and everything should be fine.
Also, twincest, at least for most authors I personally know, is the most sublime for of relationship, because who knows you better than your own twin? To us, it’s a perfect, beautiful relationship, sex or no sex.
I don’t really see what the big problem is, I see don’t see “Twincest” as this huge disgusting thing. I want to know why you even care what us teenagers write about twins.
Now that’s not to say I can’t see where your coming from, I know I don’t really have any interest in sleeping with my older sister. But even so, I am not disgusted with someone writing about two sisters getting it on.
The people who write “Twincest” are the same people who write those fluffy cute things that have no plot what so ever and make me want to puke.
One thing, it isn’t like we’re telling you we want all twin boys to have sex with each other. We just have a (maybe:) unhealthy fascination with young gay men….who just so happen to be twins. It’s not something we set out to do, take the Kaulitz Twins for example (don’t know em? look em’ up).
I read a lot of Kaulitz Twins slash, and not because they are Twins, but because they are very good looking and just so happen to hang all over each other.
Now with Anime characters I don’t know how anyone could care about that, they aren’t real….not real people….so it doesn’t really matter in the first place.
Anyway like I said I don’t know why you care, you seem to me to be a little bit sensitive, I would like to know why you are so sensitive about this subject.
[...] for a video game designed to teach dating social skills to socially disabled people, nor was it the ever controversial anti-twincest post I made for personal reasons but had to deal with a bunch of co…understood where they were coming from but I still didn’t agree with [...]
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