One of the big draws for the reader/writers I know is that you have this narrow framework, with established characters, and yet you're still trying to tell a story that feels fresh and emotionally true.

Though at the same time, in my particular fandom, AU's are a big and massive thing that makes up a fair percentage of the fanfiction produced. And oftentimes it takes the characters wildly out of their preexisting conditions, times, positions, relationships, etc, although they're good because usually they stick to the general characterization of that character--exploring how they would deal with a particular wild and crazy situation. So in that case, you get a story that's fresh and emotionally true, but it's achieved in what I would consider a very different way from canonized stories.

I don't know anything about this...must work out of procedural ghetto. Enlighten me.The fairy tale thing, I mean. Interesting definition of successful AU, SA. Although I tried to change as little about "Homicide" as possible to get the Buffy cast in. This Angel one is much more "alternate"

vw, if you google using - if wrote star trek - as the parameter (no quotes) the first page gives you -

• LarryGelbart
• Stan Lee
• Dr. Seuss
• Jane Austen
• Quentin Tarantino
• My Aunt From Minnesota

but they don't seem to be collected on one page as far as I can tell. I'll keep digging, because I'm sure I've seen them on one page.

Though at the same time, in my particular fandom, AU's are a big and massive thing that makes up a fair percentage of the fanfiction produced.

It does seem to be larger in Pop/RPS than in TV/Book based fandom.

I do like not having to create the characters from scratch, and having an established milieu to work with is handy as well. The imitation, ie, staying true to established tone, is not something I do consciously, though. Xander speaks like Xander, and I'm not pining to have him suddenly talk like a highly-educated Harvard grad (back to the hutch, bunny!). My fic is more like transcribing the movie in my head, and I spend hours moving the people around the "sets", trying to get the blocking right.

I was never good with literary analysis, inasmuch as "why that style was chosen and not some other." I'm not conscious of stylistic choices as such. I know what works (for me) with different stories and different characters. I love heavy plot, but I can do the introspective character study as well. I don't think of myself as "imitating" Joss Et Alia beyond the fact that I'm playing in the sandbox they built.

Some of the imitating is not totally conscious. I just have a lot of influences...

I don't think that I imitate anything, particularly, though I do try to get the characters' voices right.

I think it's true that in literary fandoms, the general feeling that one must write in the style of the original text is much stronger than for video fandoms (and certainly real-people fandoms, whose original texts certainly don't have a comparable intrinsic style!), because you're faced not with translating video to words, as it were, but with actual sentences.

A notable exception would be Harry Potter, since most people in the fandom don't exactly seem to, y'know, revere the literary style of the series.

Overall I think that fan writers would say they don't write things that are imitative so much as derivative.

fwiw, VW, I wrote two different thigns using the Raymond Chandler style, both fannish: one was a summary of Angel canon, and the other a short scene set in The Lord of the Rings. It was hella fun, juxtaposing Chandler's baroque-but-fun prose into situations that (a) don't comprehend comedy and (b) are a completely different setting -- magic, elves, etc.

I think the nice idea behind a lot of fanfic based on TV/movies is the fredom of transformative use: you're doing something the source can't do, because you're working in a different medium. You've got a lot of freedom, if you want it.

Then again, sometimes I think the whole enterprise of fanfic is based on the joys of making characters fuck like bunnies, and any phraseology like "transformative use" is like wearing a top hat during a sex scene.

There was a Batman comic quite a while ago, one of the annuals, where Azrael, the new superhero on the block who had grown up in very isolated surroundings, had just discovered Chandler and Hammett and the entire pulp fiction detective genre. The entire Batman-esque adventure--featuring Catwoman!--was done in glorious hard-bitten private-eye speak.