Death Note

[Vort]

My baby girl (now 19) is a budding but talented artist, drawn (heh heh) toward Japanese manga style. Unsurprisingly, she's an anime fan. Over the Christmas break, I learned that the first anime she really liked, which has been some years back, was Death Note. Had her daddy been doing his job and understood exactly what Death Note was about and how the storyline was pursued, you may rest assured that it would not have been her favorite, because she would not have been watching it. (But it likely may have been her last, at least under my roof.)

For those who do not know, Death Note is an unremittingly black drama (based on some well-known manga-style comic book series) about a college-aged student who finds the notebook of a shinigami (a Japanese angel of death). The idea is that if you write the name of some person in the shinigami's notebook while thinking of the person (you have to know his/her face), then that person will die within something like 48 hours. You can also specify the time and method of death. But importantly, using the shinigami's notebook means that you are forever condemned to be in his power (or something like that; the idea is that using the power means you are essentially eternally damned). In the story, the young man who finds the notebook experiments with it to find the limits of its power, which are impressive and not obvious. He then sets out to use it for the seemingly noble purpose of ridding his country and the world of evildoers. Corruption and increasingly bleak results inevitably follow.

Anyway, it occurred to me that it might be fun to write a fanfic-type storyline that involved someone getting the Death Note, experimenting to find its limitations, then being clever enough to find a way to do some actual good in the world using the notebook, while simultaneously being clever enough to save his own soul from the damnation inherent in using the notebook.

I remember five or so years ago reading someone's fanfic about Harry Potter, except that Harry and his uncle were smart, logical people who approached things in a rational and detached manner. Oh, and Harry's uncle was a decent human being, not the cartoonishly sadistic buffoon of the Harry Potter series' Uncle Vernon. The result was frankly much more entertaining to me in many ways than the original. I won't link to the work, because the author is a polyamorous atheist who often let his predilections show, and that certainly affected my enjoyment of his work. (But it's freely available online. If you want to Google it, it was called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.) If I had had the talent and ambition to recreate Rowling's Harry Potter universe, I would have taken a markedly different direction, hopefully not as dark, but I would like to think I would have incorporated much of the cleverness of this writer.

Other than the Harry Potter knockoff mentioned above, I have read almost no fanfic of any sort. I am not qualified to talk about what the typical fanfic tropes are or how they normally come out. I have taken a glance at a few Jane Austen-related fanfics, and if I were to base my opinion of fanfics on those, that opinion would be very low indeed. I gather most fanfics are continuations of the original storyline(s), which I don't really find very interesting. It's like telling a story about what happened to Scarlett and Rhett after "My dear, I don't give a damn." In fact, that statement pretty much sums up my attitude. If the author did not see fit to weave her (or his) story any further, I have little interest in what Joe or Jane Anonymous wants to pretend would have happened.

But taking an interesting setting, I guess you'd call it a "universe", and retelling the tale with many of the same characters but different initial conditions, seems like it would be interesting. In the Harry Potter fanfic mentioned, Harry becomes Hermione's love interest and pretty good friends with Draco, but considers Ron to be pretty useless. And again, while I don't really like the path the author chose, it's entertaining and interesting. I think it might also be fun to keep the "universe" but populate it with original characters, interfacing only slightly or not at all with the originals. That's kind of what I think would be fun to do with Death Note.

This is basically just chatty. I'm not aiming to go anywhere in particular with this thread, just throwing some thoughts out there. Anyone else have any thoughts to share about Death Note, Harry Potter, anime, fanfic, or what you talked about with your loved ones over Christmas break?

Edited January 7, 2020 by Vort

[zil]

51 minutes ago, Vort said:

Had her daddy been doing his job and understood exactly what Death Note was about and how the storyline was pursued, you may rest assured that it would not have been her favorite, because she would not have been watching it. (But it likely may have been her last, at least under my roof.)

So next Christmas / birthday, you won't be getting her one of these? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00RX1CCS2/

[Vort]

1 minute ago, zil said:

So next Christmas / birthday, you won't be getting her one of these? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00RX1CCS2/

Bingo.

I started watching the anime Death Note a year or two ago, probably two. I watched quite a few of them; I found the style interesting and the storytelling engaging. But about a third or halfway through, it became much too unremittingly dark for my tastes, so I abandoned it and haven't regretted what I didn't see. Not something I would have chosen to have my baby girl exposed to as an impressionable teenager.

Edited January 7, 2020 by Vort

[zil]

From what little fanfic I've read, it stinks - as in, the writing stinks.  Sometimes someone has a good story idea, but the execution is awful.

[NeuroTypical]

I can relate to absolutely everything in Vort's post.  Even the "old daddy is considering writing a fanfic" part.   Because of my daughters, I learned the difference between being a fan of something, and being a member of a fandom.  

Both my daughters started with the Warriors book series (cats and their clans and battles and whatnot), and took off in all sorts of directions.  My wife did a homeschooling unit on "you guys pick something, and we'll learn everything about it." Hence the My Little Pony stuff.  Since 2011, we've done 6 different kinds of art, written stories, written and performed songs, created and published Youtube animations and skits.  I've tweeted the show's writers, and was rewarded with a retweet of my suggestions on binomial nomenclature for a new species of pony they were going to introduce in an episode.

One daughter learned how to draw characters with emotions.  She wrote a 3500 word fanfic at age 13, and we published it online to see what would happen.  She got back a few genuine reviews from other kids, some spam, and one long rant against Jews occupying Palestine.  We called the exercise "trolling for bad guys", and it was a good experience that introduced our kids to the realities of social media and some of the dangers of an online presence.

I've found that exploring dark and death and stuff is a normal part of growing up and learning about how reality works, should work, and doesn't work.   In my day, it was graphing out Moroni's battles with the Lamanites, mapping out the TARDIS, and playing Dungeons & Dragons.  

Hindsight reminded me that the first "fanfic" I read was in the early '90's, on a StarTrek Usenet group.  Someone posted an Enterprise/Muppet Show crossover story that was hilarious.  

If 99% of fanfiction stinks, it's because it is produced by children, who are still learning how to do things like spell and think. 

Might as well jump in with both feet, Dad.  She won't be stopping with Death Note.  Not saying she'll move to darker stuff, but she'll move from anime to anime.  If you write a fanfic, you and I can read each other's work. 

I challenge you to shoot for a creative peak of some sort.  I think mine happened with a collaborative artistic effort involving at least 6 strangers and me.  It was a Facebook post of a picture of a printout of a picture of a painting of a fan work of a scene from the show.  Hung on the hotel door of someone attending a convention in Baltimore.  The painting was my contribution, everything else involved other people. 

Edited January 7, 2020 by NeuroTypical

[mirkwood]

@Vort does she love Halloween?

 

297 days btw.

 

 

[Guest MormonGator]

To be blunt, 99% of fan fiction is terrible. Some of it is pornographic, but almost all of it is quite bad. 

[anatess2]

My son got into Attack of Titan manga when he was... 14?  I never bought it for him, he read  it online.  Anyway, the thing got turned into anime so he made me watch it and I was shocked at the violence of it.  In the first episode, the protagonist's mother got eaten by a Titan!

Anyway, I grew up on Shaolin Temple and Voltes V so I allowed it for my sons.  And then I got hooked on it too.

My niece was 12 when she got into manga.  She likes the dark ones about vampires and such and quite bloody too.  My brother gave her the entire set for Christmas and  I thought for sure she'll turn out goth.  But she's still the cute girl that she is and my husband gained a horror-movie partner which was a Yeay for me because I cannot watch horror movies and my husband won't watch a movie by himself.

[anatess2]

And about fan fiction... I was cleaning my closets last weekend and I found several pf my sons' fan fics that they've geen writing since they were little.  I found a hand-written illustrated novel set in Minecraft that was pretty good for a 7 year old.

[Ironhold]

There was a very long spell in which I did fan fic for a lot of series, primarily "Transformers". Much of it is, from what I understand, still floating around online. 

I'll be the first to admit that a lot of it is terrible and not worth reading. 

Thing is, part of why it's so bad is because I used it as an avenue to explore different writing styles, concepts, and themes. The way I saw it, fanfic is disposable, and so if something I come up with doesn't go over well I can just toss it aside and move on with something else. This way, I figured I'd have my bad ideas used up by the time I got to writing fiction for real. 

[Guest Gallant Pioneer]

Nate Rivers for the win!