A lot of people like fanfics. I am not one of these people, but I do put up Chun-Li fanfics for the people who come to my page looking for them. However, the fact that I have only one kind of defeats that purpose. I get a lot of questions about why I don't like fanfics, or why I don't have more, and occasionally someone will send me a fanfic they wrote hoping I'll enjoy it. While I appreciate the sentiment of donating to Kikouken.com, I still haven't gotten any gift fics that I can say I really enjoyed.
The biggest reason I don't like fanfics is because anybody can do them. Unlike fan art, which requires some degree of artistic skill to even scratch out a series of lines that even resembles Chun-Li, any idiot with a word processor can write a fanfic. And unlike fan art, you can't always simply look at it and immediately know whether it's any good or not. You actually have to invest some considerable amount of time reading the fanfic before you can fairly assess it, which I don't like because nine times out of ten (perhaps nineteen out of twenty would be more accurate) I don't like it.
Fanfic authors have a tendency not to base the characters on an informed interpretation of their personalities as reflected by the limited in-game dialogue we are given to draw from. Rather, they base the personalities of their characters based on how they would like them to be. A perfect example of this is the sheer numbers of romantic fanfics involving Ryu and Chun-Li, a topic I shall address in another editorial.
I know I'll probably take a lot of heat for this next comment, but another reason I don't care for fanfics is because I don't care for the authors. I've met a fair share of them in my years on the net, and while I've met a few really nice ones whose company I genuinely enjoyed (people who, to no surprise, wrote some of the most innovative and well-written fics I'd ever seen), it seems to me like the majority of them are mindless fanboys. And often it seems that the ones who don't go along with the norms put in place by the fanboys (such as the whole Chun-Li & Ryu romance) get flamed and are either forced to conform or get rejected from the community. I can certainly testify to the sheer amounts of flames one gets from fanfic fanboys even when he's not part of the fanfic community.
The final reason I don't like fanfics is because I myself am a writer who has taken numerous courses on writing and analyzing literature, so my personal standards are much higher than that of a normal fanfic fan. In case you're wondering why someone so cocky about his writing abilities doesn't write his own damn fanfics and show us all just how good he really is, it's because of two reasons. The first is because most of my writing energy goes into comics I make for The Crossover Comic Archive, and the other reason, in case you haven't been paying attention, is that I DON'T LIKE FANFICS. Geez...
All this being said, however, I will be the first to admit that when it comes to what fanfic fans themselves want to see and what is generally considered "a good fanfic," I'm really not the man to talk to on that. Perhaps what I need to do when hunting for fanfics or when someone sends one to me is to enlist the aid of someone whose taste and judgement I respect who enjoys fanfics in general more than I do. The purpose of Kikouken.com is to celebrate Chun-Li fandom, and that includes fanfics.
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