It’s been gone for a while now, but I stumbled across an archive of the Common People Project a few years ago, which was an old challenge from the late ‘90s and early ‘00s in the X-Men fan community. It was still basically fanfiction, with the additional wrinkle that the participating writers were limited strictly to settings and concepts. It was a “view from the ground” challenge, where established characters could only be referred to in passing, if at all.
It was the usual fan-work mixed bag, but there was a lot of imagination involved, and on the whole, it was a fun read.
I’m back to fan writing after a few years away, and it occurs to me that it’d be fun to transfer the basic rules of the Common People Project to other fanworks, using modern sorting tools like an AO3 tag or a specific Dreamwidth community. If someone’s already doing it, I sure haven’t seen it yet.
Obviously, it’d only work with bigger, less mundane settings, where the story of an ordinary person somewhere else is still remarkable enough to be worth telling. If you’re writing the story of another unrelated CSI team somewhere else in the “CSI: Miami” universe, then you’re really just writing original crime fiction, but you could get some mileage out of a couple of bumblefuck hunters in the “Supernatural” universe who have never even heard of the Winchesters.
I’m working through the resurgence of my Resident Evil obsession, thanks to the RE2 remake, and it’s occurred to me that the series is overstuffed with options for its own Common People Project: new outbreaks in unexplored periods of the official timeline, BSAA squads dealing with different criminals, people who managed to get out of Raccoon City some other way than what we’ve seen (or who didn’t), and so on.
Admittedly, what got me thinking about this was the current resurgence of “Leon Kennedy runs into a cool new survivor in Raccoon City and bangs her ears right off her head” stories on AO3 (the Leon thirst is both extra and unusually real right now), but I’ve had half an idea for something like it for years, ever since a conversation about how to handle something like the old Arklay TV show: a new outbreak in a new city somewhere, meant to introduce a couple of new characters as audience surrogates.
(I’m also kind of curious how you’d do an RE2-style zombie story set in 2019, where you wake up one day and your small city is ground zero for a bioweapons hot zone. It’d be a lot more like a couple of the early demonstrations in the Arab Spring: survivors in the city coordinating and communicating through texts and Twitter, while the outside world watches in gobsmacked horror.)
Just an idle thought. I’d be interested in seeing how some of the current crop of fan writers would handle a theoretical Resident Evil Common People Project, and it’d be a worthwhile exercise in most of the big sf/horror franchises of the moment.
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