On My Fanfiction: The Not So Good

Remember how I said we'd talk about my fanfiction sooner or later?  Well, that's what we're talking about today.

I officially began writing Fanfiction around my junior year of high school, but I'd been unofficially writing it, if only in my mind, for as long as I can remember.  One of my fondest memories is a little story I once came up with where Hiccup Horrendous Hodock III, SpongeBob SquarePants and Avatar Anng all went back in time to meet young Genghis Khan.  I also remember another adventure where they went treasure hunting with Blackbeard.  Good times, but what about when I started writing down the stories?  

Like I said, I got an account on FanFiction my junior year of high school.  I still have that the account, but most of my old fanfiction have been deleted as I felt they weren't up to snuff.  Still, for all that they lacked I admit I still have a certain fondness for those old fanfics.  There are a few however, that I still regard as excellent despite certain faults they's still have, but that is a subject for another post.  

As for this post, we'll talk about those other fanfics I made.  Right off the bat I knew I was going to use Percy Jackson and the Olympians, one of my favorite series, but I also knew I'd be a crossover writer from the start.  Hey, why settle for just one series when you can have more than one?  Also, it's just fun to combine different series and see how the characters interact with each other.  My first attempt was a story combining Percy Jackson and Harry Potter.  This was probably one of the biggest mistakes I made in my fanfic career.  

As a child of the 90s I listened to the Harry Potter audiobooks like many people, and I appreciate the impact Harry had on fantasy and children's literature.  So don't get me wrong, I like Harry Potter, but only as a friend.  Percy Jackson, on the other hand, I absolutely love.  I know Percy forwards, backwards and inside-out.  Basically, I'm saying that I know how to write a Percy Jackson story a lot better than a I know how to write a Harry Potter story.  So then why did I include Harry Potter?  To be honest I'm not entirely sure myself, but it was my first fanfic, so of course there was bound to be a ton of mistakes.  

The story itself was entitled Percy Jackson meets Harry Potter and King Midas.  As you can see, I got the naming convention from that old Scooby-Doo series where Scooby and the gang team up with the celebrity of the week to solve mysteries.  A lot of my early fanfics focused on being funny and humor.  As such, a lot of this one was devoted to the humor of Harry having ADHD, references to The Hangover and Tropic Thunder, Malfoy being ambiguously gay and a thespian, and Chiron coming out of the closet and kissing Dumbledore.  And all of this was interspersed with a plot to stop the Deatheaters from taking over Camp Half-Blood.  

It had it's ups and downs, and paled in comparison to my later works, but I like to think it was still pretty good for a first try, and that it brought laughs and put smiles on people's faces.  All the same, I did eventually get rid of it as part of a Spring Cleaning of my FanFiction account.

My next fanfic started out combing Percy Jackson and Marvel comics, but quickly degenerated into me railing against how much the Percy Jackson movie sucked and how much Chris Columbus had completely butchered a much beloved series.  Hey, it was a dark time for Percy Jackson fans.  A beloved series had just been butchered to the deepest pit of Tartarus and back by a man who admitted in an interview that he didn't even read the books; they just didn't care, indeed.  

I needed a way to vent and cope; we all did quite frankly.  Obviously, it too was on the chopping block eventually.  Another fanfic I made was basically Marvel 1602 but with Percy Jackson, Harry Potter and any other series I could cram in.  This one suffered from the inclusion of Harry Potter (noticing a pattern here?) and trying to juggle way to many series for my own good.  That and trying to cram way too many plotlines into the same story.

Another issue was that I had most of the nation's convert to either the Greek pantheon, Egyptian pantheon or some illy defined wizard religion.  I had the demigods represent the Catholic nations (Spain was, arguably, the Heart of the West at the time) and wizards represent the Protestant nations as an allegory to the European wars of religion.  As you can imagine, Christian readers didn't take it very well.  

For all its faults it had plenty of memorable moments.  I haven't actually deleted this one yet, but that is subject to change.  We'll wrap this up by talking about one last fanfic of mine.  This one, for all its faults, I just can't bring myself to delete.  I'm just too fond of it.  It's Percy Jackson: The Last Puppetbender.  Yeah, it's pretty much Avatar: The Last Puppetbender but with Percy Jackson references and with some of the jokes altered for the sake of differentiation.  

Sure, it was silly and there's spelling and grammatical mistakes in places, but it still puts a smile on my face when I reread it. I had a few other ideas over the years, Clone High with fictional characters, Percy Jackson vs. Day of the Barney, but I deleted them before they got too far.  

Now that we've got my not so good fanfics out of the way, we can talk about my pride and joys, but we will do that next time.