Thereās a quality that certain books/movies/TV shows have that leads me to say, āYeah, I can see people making fanfiction of that.ā Itās something to do, I think, with how tight the story is, how much feels open-ended or like it could be elaborated on.
Something like Breaking Bad, for example, has low squiggability (thatās what Iām calling this quality). Itās tightly written, the characters are consistent, thereās little left to interpolate or extrapolate. Obviously, people DO write fanfic of Breaking Bad, but it still has a low squiggability score. Whereas something like Supernatural has a high squiggability score. Fantasy and science fiction often have high squiggability scores. This suggests squiggability could also be related to worldbuilding and potential for people to borrow a premise or setting.
And sometimes youāll read or watch something and youāll say, āAh, low squiggability,ā and then youāll open tumblr and find out that everyone else seem to think its squiggability was very high indeed.
