Saturday, November 24, 2007

The Horrors of Fan Fiction

The blogger sits down at his computer. Faced with yet another week of no content on his blog, he wracks his brain for something, anything, related to the nerd way of life. After his fifth Rum and Coke, it hits him.

"I’ll write a blog entry about fan fiction!" he says.

Clearly, he is desperate. A desperate blogger for desperate times. He calls his only ally in these dark times, Wikipedia. Wikipedia isn't in a good mood, but tells the blogger what he wants to know:

"Fan fiction is normally described as 'fiction about characters or settings written by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creators', however I think an equally accurate description would be 'dreck'. Listen, I have to go, someone is editing the Evolution entry again."

Wikipedia hangs up, and the blogger is left listening to echoes. He still has nothing written, so he decides to procrastinate. He lets his mind wander back to a kinder, more halcyon time a year or two ago when he went to fanfiction.net for some sort of research project that wasn’t embarrassing at all. Surprised that fanfiction.net had categories for everything, including video games, he decided that he would come up with the one game that no one in their right mind would write fan fiction about.

"No one would write a fan fiction story about Tetris!" he said triumphantly, to no one in particular.

Luck was not with our intrepid blogger, however. He found no less than four entries under the Tetris category.

"That was just a fluke," he tells himself, back in the present. "I bet there are still only four entries."

Clearly having not learned anything, he checks fanfiction.net again. He finds no less than 41 entries in the Tetris section. He picks one entry at random:

"I am just an L-block. My life has been pretty simple, really. I would pay my taxes, go to work. I had never really though about meeting any other blocks. But a friend of mine, Mr. T recently got me interested in this online dating service he has heard of - Tetris, it is called. They were holding this get-together function sort of thing in one of the most prestigious joints in town, the Grey Box. So I rocked up, dressed in green."

In a hopeless attempt to save himself from reading the rest of the story, the blogger attempts to stab his eyes out with a pen, but misses and ends up drawing all over his face. As the ink dries, he realizes, he will never finish this blog entry. It is too late. He has already seen the horror, and the horror is he.

2 comments:

Ken said...

Wait, so you're a "blogger" now? I mean, I punch small children on occasion (as you know) but that doesn't make me a boxer.

Dan-o said...

I think in this day and age, anyone keeping a blog is a "blogger", even if that person does update said blog sporadically at best. Once you join the mass collection of blogs out there [note I just avoided using a certain word there], you're automatically qualified.

If it helps, you can put me in a sub-category of "blogger". File me under "amateur blogger", or maybe "disinterested blogger".