Doorstoppers and Fanfic

A few weeks back I was putzing around, watching Bob's Burgers with the TV Tropes website open as I watched the episode. I do this often, enjoying how writers use (and misuse) tropes in their work. I have strong opinions on tropes that I'll share another time. That's not what this post is about. It's about a specific trope that I came across on the website as the adventures of the Belcher family played in the background. I found myself reading the page dedicated to Doorstoppers and there went the rest of my night as I fell down this deep rabbit hole. 

According to TV Tropes, a "Doorstopper" is a book that is literally heavy enough to stop a door. A proper doorstopper is no less than 500 pages, that's about 150,000 words with a normal sized typeface though most use a smaller font to fit more words on paper likely pushing that to number closer to 250,000 words. That's the number that TV Tropes uses as the minimum to define a doorstopper. That works for me, so we'll use that number. 

3.8 million words of doorstopping goodness.

I perused the entries. the Literature one hit all the classics you know and love. Dumas, Trollope, Michener, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Tolkein, Follet and modern writers like Brandon Sanderson, Robert Jordan, Stephen King and, of course, George RR Martin. I've obviously read my share of doorstoppers. I mean A Song of Ice and Fire is hugely important to me. I've read It and The Dark Tower series. I made it about 2/3 of the way through Winter's Heart in The Wheel of Time before I made a bold decision to start the series all over and read from the beginning. (It's been 20 years since I read The Eye of the World.) But a knew a lot of the entries in the Literature section. It was another section that caught me off guard. 

I opened the tab for Fan Works and, boy, was I quickly overwhelmed. Not only by the number of entries but by some of the word counts. Great googly moogly. The tab is split into smaller tabs labeled Over 2 million words, Over 1 million words, Over 500k words and Over 250k words. I was flabbergasted by the numbers. Someone wrote 16 million words of fan fiction dedicated to the Nickelodeon show The Loud House. To put that into perspective, that's FOUR Wheel of Times. Not four books but four of the ENTIRE SERIES. There's a lot-and I mean A LOT-of My Little Pony. I did a little research. I found someone that wrote 2 million words of MASH fanfic and someone else that 1.3 million words of Dallas fanfic. (These were strictly found on Fanfiction.net. I didn't even attempt to check AAO3.)

On Fanfiction.net there are over 600 words of 800,000 words or more. That's a lot of passion for an IP. I mean 800,000 words is about 2,700 double spaced writing pages (Times New Roman, 12 point font). That's incredible. That's a lot of time and energy. That's a lot of love and devotion. the level of commitment it takes to write this much is titanic, no matter the topic. And it seems to me to be a waste. 

I have an antagonistic relationship with fan fiction. I've never been a fan of it. Technically, you are stealing the blood, sweat and tears of another author. I know that's a little melodramatic but it's kind of true. That's the way I feel about my work. I know that there are plenty of writers, especially genre writers, that got their start writing fanfic and there are others that wholly endorse fanfic of their own work. I'm not so innocent, I suppose. My earliest attempts at writing were little more than Lord of the Rings/Dragonlance fanfic with the serial numbers barely filed off. But even then, it was my own world, my own characters and ultimately my own story. It turns out I was just using the same tropes from those properties. I wasn't using Middle Earth as a setting and despite the likeness I didn't have a character named Tanis Half-Elven. If you are going to spend the amount of energy it takes to write 16 million words of fanfic, why not on something original? Or, at the very least, something that could be called an homage or pastiche of the thing you love. It seems to me to be a better use of energy. I've written about shared DNA before and find that to be far more digestible a concept than fan fiction.

But who am I? Maybe I'm just being a Grumpy Gus. I try not to be a goalie in life. As long as you aren't hurting anyone, why should I stand in your way? (There's an argument to be made that you are hurting the original author with fanfic, but I'm not here to make it.) I'm all for writing in any form, especially if you derive happiness from it.