Gillespie Nods: Unusual Fan Fiction

The Internet is full of fan fiction and most of it lives up to the stereotypes. Take the top movies, TV shows or books that are popular with the early teen set and remove any obligation to quality or coherence and you have a decent idea of the stuff that sprouts up in the tubes. But I'm not here to find the typical. Browsing some of the most recent additions to the infinite library of crap that is the whole of online fanfic, it's surprisingly easy to stumble across the weird or out of place. I can understand why there's so much Twilight fanfic, but every now and then somebody posts a story that just doesn't make any sense among its contemporaries. Sometimes this is just the result of people being unaware of what fan fiction really is, but in other cases it's because of a deliciously specific love that maybe no other person has. Observe, unusual fan fiction. I will be using Net Insanity's 1 to 5 Gillespie fan fiction rating system for each selection.

The story that inspired this search for the square pegs among fanfic is "Where His Heart Is", a Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman fanfic written by someone called Janeaustenfan1981. It is the second of three speculative takes on the moderately popular 90's TV series, all filed in the "Angst" and "Western" subcategories. At first I wondered what 12-year-old kid developed an obsessive love for a corny ABC series, assuming that 1981 is indeed Janeaustenfan's actual year of birth, but then I did a little research. Apparently Dr. Quinn has been enjoying a long period of syndication on what can only be described as an Axis of TV Evil, consisting of ABC Family, The Hallmark Channel, The Gospel Music Channel and various other Christian programming stations. What we have here is a doubly depressing slice of pop culture reality. Some sad person who only watches squeaky-clean religious TV is writing fanfic about a mediocre show from fifteen years ago. C'est L'Internet.

Rating: 2 and a half Gillespies. Sad, but not that poorly written.

On the other end of the spectrum we find fanfic of something rather recent that was actually pretty good in its original form. Apparently there is District 9 fan fiction out there and I honestly don't know how to feel about that. The movie is one of the best of 2009, so writers like Katie Says Pewpew, author of "Freedom to Change", have better taste than their fellow fanfic-ers. One click deeper into that story reveals that Ms. Pewpew is all of 14 years old. Is her story worth contacting Neill Blomkamp over? Not exactly, but it's still better than most of the stuff written by the less precocious kiddies in the fanfic community.

Rating: 1 Gillespie. If I were a 9th grade English teacher and Katie Says Pewpew were my student, I'd actually encourage her to write non-fanfic.

Perhaps the most unlikely bit of fanfic I discovered on this recent run was nw611's "Wake Island", a story that doesn't really meet the qualifications of either aspect of fan fiction. It's not about an existing bit of pop culture, but rather an actual event from history. nw611 dispassionately describes the technical details of the famous World War II battle in the style of an inappropriately narrative Wikipedia article. Confoundingly, he decided to file this document under the "Movies- 10,000 BC" category. Color me confused.

Rating: 3 alternate history Gillespies. It has no earthly reason to exist, but "Wake Island" is still a million times better than 10,000 BC so I'm being lenient.