GCB Fanfics: The Fanfiction Project

June 2nd... The day after CJayC announced the brackets for this second annual character contest. I had been planning this long series of fanfiction for a long time, ever since I read fanfics from last year, written by Amazing Telephone, Nickoteenpatch, and others. I remember that Jjukil, a user that I always had and still have a lot of respect for on these boards for his attitudes, had expressed sentiments in 2002 that he had hoped fanfiction would be the craze on the boards that tourneys eventually became. I knew others shared those sentiments... Hell, I did. Tourneys did get old after a while. So I figured... I'd be one of the writers on this board this year. I knew others would follow suit... But at that time, I was fairly sure that the fanfiction project would remain a solo effort. In the end, it wasn't, and for that I am very greatful... We've accomplished so much more as a team, and I've grown so much more as a writer, than what would have happened if I stayed solo for the whole project. But at this time... The fanfics were just a daily, or bidaily thing to do for thirty minutes of lazy time a day during the summer. So back to the intro... I composed it over the course of 40 minutes one night, with little else to do. I had already figured out a preliminary bracket, and I had posted whatever I wanted to lamenting the lack or presence of whichever characters in the tournament. So I settled down, and I wrote. One of the most important things for me, looking back on these fics, was to very quickly draw in the readers. I knew I needed a first fic that was interesting and intriguing, and I think I pulled that off, certainly, it's not great writing, and there are many characterization errors that I hit myself for now as I read this... But alas. "64 chairs were set out on the lawn." I'm not sure, remembering, how I really came up with the idea of that line to open up the story. I'm happy I did, because a lot of people have mentioned it as an excellent starting line... I think it's used in my little description in this topic. That is one of the lines that I'm very proud of in this entire project... We'll get to some of the others later. As you will always notice with my fics, I'm a big fan of using a one sentence paragraph to open up every single fic I write. It's just a stylistic thing that I picked up somewhere, a strange version of an attention grabber. I don't know where I got it, but you can always tell if I wrote the fic by the presence of a one sentence paragraph, and usually more like it, throughout the fic. "Soon, the battles would begin. Every day, one victor would live to fight another day, while one loser would be sent back to his or her respective dimension. Every day, the amount of chairs would decrease. Until there was only one." I specifically chose these first few sentences because I knew the chairs could act as a continuing theme and subplot throughout the project. They've been back a few times, as you'll notice, if you revisit some of the fics. The rest of the fic, for a little while, is just me throwing out little mini-profiles of the characters. For this first fic, I wanted to name and bring out the most characters as was possible, to make this first fic the ensemble fanfiction that I envisioned the project to be. For the most part, that vision has held true, but some players have gotten a lot more screentime than others... Sephiroth, the villain, and Tommy Vercetti, the comic relief, are two examples of characters that would really take almost starring roles as the fics went on. It really depended on how many people in the writing team knew characters to see how much screen time these individual characters would get... On the opposite end of the spectrum, guys like Kite, Ratchet, and even Sweet 16 finisher Alucard would get less moments in the spotlight than they deserved. But for this first fic... I wanted to spread out the attention that I placed on characters. At least a quarter of the many characters in the tourney were mentioned, albeit briefly. It wasn't fun... You try writing a story with a cast of 64 characters, all of whom need moments in the sun. I really wasn't sure HOW to write some of the characters or even who they were at this point. That might have shown in my characterizations... Vengeance was a huge theme in my original fic, but except in the case of Bowser the Bully, Ganondorf, and Sephiroth, those grudges never came to light. Kefka... He was the same the whole way through. I wish he had lasted longer... Because he would have been an interesting villain. I'll get more to that later, because I remember having a lot of angry chats with people about the outcome of Crono vs. Kefka. His gleeful malice was great for writing purposes... He's just so damn insane. I was trying to just find common ground, relationships that could form quickly, with these first few fics... There was Sam Fisher and Max Payne, Kirby and Pikachu, and all the relationships that the characters that came from the same world had before the tournament. The really odd duos, like Snake and Samus, Mario and Vercetti, Alucard and Donkey Kong, and the one you all love to hate, Vercetti and KOS-MOS, didn't start to form until much later on, when the team was really comfortable in the plotlines. At this point in the project, in the very first fic, my plan was for Crono to be a mute. I wasn't taking this as the very serious novel that it has become at that time, and I figured with Crono as a mute, he'd just be a comic character. He become one of the many heroes eventually, when plotlines got more serious, and the team and I started to know the directions we were going with all this, but I never liked writing for him, and was relieved when Mario took him out. I actually was one of the one people siding with Heroic Mario in being gleeful that day, simply because of one fact... There were enough heroes. Sonic was the arrogant, cocky good guy. Mega Man was the young, naive, good guy. Snake and Samus were the good guys with romantic tension going on. Link was the good guy with a bad side that rapidly growed. Cloud was the brooding good guy. Squall was the excessively brooding good guy. Way I saw it... With that lot and more, I didn't want Crono to go far in the tournament. He was always a very generic hero to me... Beyond the circumstances he was placed in, not much was special about the guy. Just my opinion... I didn't think he had a lot of a part to play in the story. He ended up doing more than I would have thought... But I still would rather have had Kefka or Tom Nook, because they have very different, out there personalities compared to the rest. No complaints, though. I think the group we ended up with was just fine. And it's funny to know that Tommy Vercetti ended up winning his match probably because project readers liked him better than DK in the stories and voted for him. Heh. Then Link shows up... And all the attention immediately turns to our "hero". Link's another one of those silent heroes, meaning that beyond nobility and courage, there's not much to go on with the guy. But unlike Crono, he was hardly generic in the end of our project. Also, I called them video game stars as Link walked in. God damn it, the first fic and the fourth wall's already crumbling. So, Link shows up, and he brings with up his mortal enemy, his girlfriend of sorts... And his two consorts. Tingle and Kaepora. As soon as Tingle showed up, I just KNOW that a lot of people reading these fics were very likely furious. And I don't mean the author. I know that he's basically the Jar Jar Binks of video games... Why do you think I wrote him in? I knew Tingle was hated. But I have something of a... sadistic side. I used Tingle simply because I knew you all hated him. But don't worry... I was planning to have him die a fiery death before the contest ended. Never ended up happening, unfortunately. I believe that Kirby actually ended up eating him, but he came back, much to the dismay of you all. Ha ha ha. Link was written as conceited and confident in this fic because as I said before, I didn't really have an established character for him. I mean... Hey, he was up against a monkey, and he did win this whole thing last year. But the Link comment was the start of something much more... Link almost felt as if he needed to win, to succeed. I'm surprised that more Zelda fans haven't objected to our characterization of Link so far, but I think that confidence and ambitition can drive people to strange things. Obviously, that's the case for Link in this project. Kaepora's always the explorer, even this early. He's the one precursor of things to come that I really heeded for the entire contest... He warns Link of danger from the outside, and explores the land to make sure nothing is wrong. This fic ends with a little chat between Ganondorf and Sephiroth. I planned at this point to have more of these chats, little meetings between villains, but ended up deciding against it... Two people as power-hungry as the son of Jenova and the Gerudo man could never peacefully coexist. And the fic ends with CATS. Hilarious guy to work with, CATS... Engrish and all. CATS, in the game he was in, was a villain... But he could never really be the bad guy in this project. No one would know what the hell he was saying. So, the first fic... I remember, after finishing it, I liked it. After growing so much as a writer, it's not as good as some of my recent stuff, but as a whole, especially the first few lines, it has worked well into the future fics of the project. Looking for the start of Link's madness? Look no further. But... Just an interesting memory. I remember after finishing the fic, it ended up being two posts. At that time, to me, that was a huge amount of writing, I don't think I had ever made a post on the board that had taken more than one post. Two posts, a long fic? Bah. Now I know better. Back