Spongebob and Carol and Ted and Alice

Yesterday's Guardian ran a really thought-provoking article on fan fiction and Fifty Shades of Crap (here it is).

Yikes!
From the Gospels through to Jane Austen's and Arthur Conan-Doyle's very own fanfics it looks like this thing has a long history.
Dickens was constantly plagued by fanfic cash-ins and suffered more plagiarism than any writer before or since, with thousands of cheap, serialised novels based on his plots and characters. Plagiarists adapted Dickens' writings to suit the tastes of a rapidly expanding lower class readership and these imitations enjoyed sales which rivalled and probably outnumbered those of Dickens' originals.*

And now we have the gruesome yet compelling prospect of fifty thousand shades of grey, bland, fanfic pornography of no literary merit whatsoever swamping the bestseller lists.

Fair enough. It's fun. I've violated Jane Austen and Mary Shelley myself in our 500 Words short story circle and thoroughly enjoyed doing it. Writing fanfic has the great advantage of giving you a set of ready made characters that your readers are already familiar with and so saves you having to bother with character development.

The one thing I did find truly fascinating in the Guardian article was the meteoric rise of the "fanfic mash-up." As the article points out, these have been around for a couple of hundred years but are now going viral in a big and entertainingly amateurish way.

The mash-up has been giggling its merry way through real literature for some time, too; witness Mark Twain gleefully mashing present and mythical past in 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' and our own Petrea's upcoming novel 'Camelot and Vine' (in which the heroine deliciously shares Twain's real surname in a kind of mash-up within a mash-up).
In Mario Vargas Llosa's 'Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter' characters from radio soap operas start bleeding into one another's shows and then crossing over into reality (or what passes for reality in a Llosa novel). I love that stuff.

Most fanfic mash-ups, however, appear to be based around bad porn or who-would-beat-who-in-a-fight. Witness the example in the Guardian article of Darth Vader and Spongebob v. Edward and Harry Potter (I assume the Edward is the miserable looking bugger from the kiddies' vampire films).

I made the mistake of discussing the article at lunchtime yesterday and soon became depressingly aware of the literary ambitions (can you have an illiterary ambition?) of the people with whom I share most of my waking hours. Did we get Shakespeare? Tolstoy? Austen? Did we buggery.

"Harry would easily take Vader … One 'Expelliarmus' and his lightsabre would go flying …"
"Ah, but Vader would put the Force-choke on him so Potter couldn't speak any spells. Then he'd pick up his lightsabre and …"
A whumming sound and some demonstrative arm movements followed by a splat.

And so yesterday afternoon was filled with theoretical fights and desperately bad porn. Vignettes sprung up all over the office: Professor McGonagle with the dwarf music teacher from Hogwarts and a chair got popular and pervy support from the girls (and some hilarious facial expressions), while the boys had Mister Magoo fighting the Terminator and Hagrid battling the Oompa-Loompas. It's just as well I no longer work with Mikey as his Chewbacca and Scooby-Doo impersonations are second to none and would have rendered me helpless for the rest of the day.

And so it went on … my personal favourite example occurring slightly later while I was on the phone, discussing services routes with the main contractor's site manager, Tom. A few feet away from me an epic and very noisy battle was raging between Kellie and Erin, featuring some admirably good voice characterisations and imaginatively biological threats and imprecations.
Tom stopped me.
"I have to ask: what the HELL is going on in your office?"
To which I could only truthfully reply, "Miss Piggy and Jar-Jar Binks are fighting."
Tom paused for a moment. "My money's on the pig." he said.

And so the day went on …

I'm tempted to kick start 500 Words again with a fanfic mash-up challenge. Who's up for it? Any ideas which characters we should feature? Do let me know, but please make it more of a literary challenge than I got from the office.

* The Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens.