To me fanfiction comes in two distinct flavours. You have the serious stuff, where people actually carefully plan out a story of some kind, working with the established canon of whatever they're a fan of in an effort to show their own take on certain scenarios. This is the good fan fiction, and incidentally where mine sits. I consider it serious literature and it's no less artistic than music or art IMHO. All fan fiction of this nature, of course. Not just mine. Not trying to blow my own trumpet here. I'll let you read and blow for yourselves.
But on the flipside you get the crap written by prepubescent girls about what it would be like if Twilight characters were real and came to high school with them, or what Final Fantasy would have been like if Sephiroth was gay for Cloud, etc. These things are just pathetic. There's no effort, rarely any unique thoughts, they're always poorly written and they just plain suck.
So IMHO the quality of fan fiction is proportional to the time and effort the writer is willing to sink in to it in order to create something unique and special. Incidentally I've been working on Requiem on and off for the last six years.
But on the flipside you get the crap written by prepubescent girls about what it would be like if Twilight characters were real and came to high school with them, or what Final Fantasy would have been like if Sephiroth was gay for Cloud, etc. These things are just pathetic. There's no effort, rarely any unique thoughts, they're always poorly written and they just plain suck.
So IMHO the quality of fan fiction is proportional to the time and effort the writer is willing to sink in to it in order to create something unique and special. Incidentally I've been working on Requiem on and off for the last six years.
