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Learning that a story originated as a fanfiction before having its serial numbers filed off... the filing jobs can obviously vary in quality a lot, but I have found that learning this info often explains something (neutral statement) about the story / world choices that was tickling my brain somehow. The element I've been thinking about recently are the friendships within the former fanfiction story.

Like, it's not weird for wholly original romance novels to have otherwise disposable friend characters who act as author mouthpieces at crucial points in the story. (It's also not uncommon for romance novel characters to have NO close friends or family, in my experience, which is a different thing.) Former fanfics do not even slightly have a monopoly on, "Hey, what's up with this weird friend character? They seem a little out-of-place here? Also seems like you're maybe under-utilizing the weird, comedic relief friend, tbh; they could be doing more in this story."

But with former fanfics, sometimes you get the lightbulb moment of: "Ohhhhh, this was a former Stucky fanfic and this female best friend is Like That (in a same way that every character is probably also a little bit Like That) because she originated as AU Natasha Romanoff before having the serial numbers filed off! I get it now."

tossawary

See, in fanfiction as literature, it's pretty much wholly accepted that a character's role in a story can exclusively be... Being That Character in this AU. Which isn't a bad thing. It's just a thing. It's very often fun.

Audience familiarity with (and affection for) the characters and their relationships to one another can be one of fanfiction's strengths re: storytelling. You can play with a lot of reader expectations this way.

Anyway, if I was reading a Coffee Shop AU Star Wars Reylo fanfiction (you could basically use this example fic to ward me personally off like garlic against a vampire, tbh, but let's pretend)... even if Finn had nothing to do as a character in this story besides be Rey's coworker at the coffee shop, I would be even more suspicious and dismayed if Finn was completely missing. We EXPECT to see at least briefly all of the major members of a cast in an AU fanfic of certain length, barring unusual circumstances.

Even if he is almost completely irrelevant to the meet-cute at hand, I WANT to know where Chewbacca is in this AU! I want to enjoy a little chuckle when, idk, C-3PO is turned into a high-strung, middle-aged office guy with either a short, non-English-speaking husband or a Border Collie-Corgi mix dog named Artoo that runs his entire life. It's delightful to see the characters I know and love in the background!

But when you file the serial numbers off of AU fanfiction, a character's role in a story can no longer be Being That Character. Now, you potentially have a bunch of story elements that conflict slightly or conflict very seriously. Now, you may have additional characters whose presence is no longer perfectly explained by the fact that you are expected to include all the Avengers in your MCU fanfic.

Now, Not-Chewbacca's quirks cannot be explained away by him Being Chewbacca. And suddenly, readers are like, "Hey, kind of weird throwaway detail for Not-Kylo's dad to be a former drug runner who lives in a van with an old, foreign war vet! Is that going to be relevant later???" Once you cut the fanfiction strings, your new story may feel riddled with inconsistencies and missed opportunities. Why are these characters here if they're 1) not contributing to the plot, 2) not contributing to character ans relationship development, and 3) not even really contributing tonally (humor, angst, fluff) to the story?

I'm sticking to talking about friendships and background characters here, because it's what I've been thinking about lately, though you could obviously go on forever taking about all the many nuances of what filing the serial numbers off does to a story and the art of adaptation. I just had a "Oh! It's NAT! Hi, Black Widow! Sorry this story made you kind of boring, Nat!" moment recently.

gcantread

there's a slightly rarer corollary to this that goes "why is this book spending so much energy bashing this nothingburger minor character? they haven't done anything, they've barely appeared!!" where the answer is "the author hated the character in the canon source material"

#this is what reading game changer felt like

mirdania

Katharine Hepburn bested Peter O'Toole as the top dog on the set. Known to be something of a tyrant on most of his shoots, O'Toole meekly obliged, when she told him, “Peter, stop towering over me. Come and sit down and try to look respectable.” O'Toole readily admitted in her presence that she reduced him “to a shadow of my former gay-dog self. She is terrifying. It is sheer masochism working with her. She has been sent by some dark fate to nag and torment me.” Her reply: “Don’t be so silly. We are going to get on very well. You are Irish, and you make me laugh. In any case, I am on to you, and you to me.”

When filming wrapped on this movie, Katharine Hepburn said to Peter O'Toole, “When I started off in this business, my agent said to me, ‘never act with children and animals,’ but you, Peter, are both.”

#made a real all-timer tho

summersblood

I’m team Eliot.

#crying screaming throwing up etc etc

letterful

“Writing is, rather, entering an immense cemetery where every tomb is waiting to be profaned. Writing is getting comfortable with everything that has already been written—great literature and commercial literature, if useful, the novel-essay and the screenplay—and in turn becoming, within the limits of one’s own dizzying, crowded individuality, something written. Writing is seizing everything that has already been written and gradually learning to spend that enormous fortune. (…) Thus in order to devote ourselves to literary work must we subscribe to the great scroll of writing? Yes. Writing inevitably has to reckon with other writing, and it’s from the terrain of the already written that the sentence might jump out that sets in motion a small admirable book or the great book that displays a trajectory and constructs a unique world of words, characters, and conflicts.”

— ELENA FERRANTE, from In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing, trans. Ann Goldstein.

ohmovie

BERTIE CARVEL as Prince BEALOR "Breakspear" TARGARYEN, Prince of Dragonstone, Hand of the King and Protector of the Realm, heir to the Iron Throne

A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS│Season 1, 2026 –

loveridden1999

problematic sudoku solving skills gap

featuringmarkhoppus

#me playing jeopardy w my wife and my mil #however i am the elite sudoku player i do have that going for myself

stuckinapril

I think part of getting better is complete ego death. Like you’re not above setting a timer for 5 minutes and focusing on a task. You’re not above doing a very simple 3 minute workout to start. You’re not above reading for 10 minutes a day when you first get out of your reading slump, even if you used to read for hours. You’re not above starting slow and then building up to where you want to be/where you once were. What you are above is total inertia. Doing something really is better than doing nothing. Radically accept where you are, radically accept your limits, and go from there. Don’t let your ego get in the way.

hansoeii

lyonel and his hedge knight!

helloitsbees

i dont even go to hockey but the "yet" is fucking crazy

#evgeni malkin is exploding people w his mind rn

only-tiktoks

kawree

Y'all for real please do these. Even if you're certain your posture doesn't suck. One day you will wake up with impinged shoulder pain like I did and let me tell you it fucking HURTS. Do these exercises even just once a week and it will make such a difference. Especially my fellow creatives out there, stop shrimping over your work and go do these right now. RIGHT NOW.

fluentisonus

lots going on in my drafts apparently

aslongasitsblack

stories about the danger of making your hot wife move from the city to the suburban town you grew up in:

gone girl

heated rivalry: the long game

#insinuating some rlly interesting things abt ottawa here

creekfiend

even if your nervous system is shot to hell and you're a reactive dog on a chain all the time you can spend several years retraining your nervous system (with the help of friends to practice Disagreeing With) and one day you can reach a point where getting Disagreed With doesn't cause your whole entire bodybrain situation to implode messily. it's super great. I recommend it

creekfiend

I think the best thing about this is that it's really really really hard for ages and it feels like you're not making much progress. but then once you hit a certain point the benefits start to snowball because every time you're able to handle a situation without getting Activated, able to admit you were wrong with grace, able to reevaluate your ideas without getting defensive, able to deescalate interpersonal conflicts, you're building up this positive reinforcement history with those things and that makes those pathways in your brain get more deeply grooved and you start to associate opportunities to do those things with like, Learning New Stuff, or Connecting With People In New Ways, or even just That Interaction Went Better Than It Would Have Five Years Ago. and then the next time it happens it's that much less terrifying. and then in situations where despite your efforts it DOESN'T go well, that makes it easier to be like "well that's an anomaly and it seems like it's more about where the other person is at right now than it is about me" and not have it feel like EVIL FAILURE. it's like building a muscle but it's such a crucial muscle and so many other things really depend on it in terms of moving thru the world as a social animal. I think. like once you accept your status as Social Animal In Progress, Doing My Best and Willing To Change it takes so much pressure off. omg. it's such a game changer

that-house

Making a shitty one-page RPG called Oh Shit It’s the Killer. The premise is simple: you’re a high schooler spending the weekend in the woods with your besties. The Killer is there also. He is trying to the Kill you

that-house

I say shitty not to demean the quality of my work but because it’s less an exercise in good game design and more an attempt to induce paranoid internal conflict that turns into murder (in game of course). It has like three mechanics and one of them actively encourages you to murder the other PCs

that-house

Great news!

It’s done

I put like three braincells into this, so if there’s anything about it that outright sucks, uh. Sorry not sorry, L + ratio + let’s use the 1-page restriction as an excuse for any unfun mechanics

that-house

“What if there was a game about being a genre-savvy slasher protagonist murdering their way to the role of Final Girl?”

“Sounds cool when exactly does the PvP start”

“character creation”