Fan fiction

Checking out Wikipedia’s excellent (as always) article on fan fiction today, I ran across the site FanFiction.net, which I hadn’t seen before. It’s a comprehensive directory of fan fiction, organized by TV shows, movies, cartoon, games, books, and much more.

The amount of fan fiction out there is truly astounding; I’ve known this, of course, but I just never guessed at the sheer depth and breadth it covers. Let’s take a little stroll through the site for some examples.

• The combined number of Star Trek stories: 9240. Wow. They actually split the Star Trek stories up by each TV show, but that doesn’t really matter.
• X-Files: 5393 stories.
• Lost (the TV series that debuted just this season): 1462 stories.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: 26,567. Holy shit!
• Law and Order: 2037. Like Star Trek, they split out by the different subseries.
• Star Wars: 11,828.
• Lord of the Rings: 37,136. Good grief.
• Harry Potter: 190,077! If I’d been drinking something when I read this one, I would have done a spit-take. This is beyond comprehensible!

Those are kind of the usual suspects in fan fiction, what you’d expect… but there are seriously hundreds more different topics people are writing about. Here’s a sample of some of the oddball ones:

• All in the Family: 4 stories.
• Bill Nye the Science Guy: 6 stories.
• Lazytown (a kids show, our kids watch it): 16 stories.
• Diff’rent Strokes: 2 stories.
• Saved by the Bell: 13 stories.
• Moulin Rouge (the movie musical): 1466(!)

You get the idea.