We’ve all been there. You’re scrolling through AO3 at 2:00 AM, filter tags tuned to perfection, and you click on a promising fic featuring an original character. You’re expecting an absolute masterpiece. Instead, you’re met with complete utter disappointment because the author decided to shackle their creativity to the canon storyline.
Don’t get me wrong, there are great canon compliant fics out there. But a lot of the time, the original character is just standing there like a glorified extra, observing rather than actually adding anything to the plot. If you’re lucky they might get a line or two of dialogue, but it’s nothing groundbreaking. They are just a side character narrating a script we already know by heart.
A quick scroll through r/FanFiction on Reddit proves I am definitely not alone in this frustration. As one user, @AmazonClimber, perfectly puts it, fics are an “auto-drop” when an author promises divergence but only delivers tiny sprinkles of ship interaction while the actual plot remains totally untouched. There’s no easy way to say that if a fic hits the 50 chapter mark but is just a verbatim rehash of the source material you haven’t blessed AO3 with a masterpiece, you’ve just trapped your readers in a 200,000-word hostage situation
If we wanted to read the exact script, we’d just rewatch the show. The entire soul of fanfiction is the “what if” element into an established world and watching the old timeline shatter.
This is my desperate plea to writers, if you are going to follow the canon trajectory then you have to make sure your characters are truly the stars of the show. Give us the heavy trauma, the agonizing background lore, and the craziest most chaotic love triangles possible.
Text allows us to get inside a character’s head in a way an on screen format never could. Expand the scenes, fill in the blanks and write the missing moments that happened between the episodes. Most importantly, do not be afraid to rip up the rulebook and add your own entirely original scenes within the timeline. If an OC doesn’t force the plot to bend around them, their inclusion feels hollow. Your characters need agency. Let them make terrible choices that derail the plot, let them scream at the main cast and leave a mark.
Because if a fic is just going to replicate exactly what happened on screen, I would have never opened up AO3 in the first place. I would have just pressed play on what I already had.