Fanfiction has gotten a bad rep when it comes to quality writing. The most famous examples of fanfiction, things like 50 Shades of Grey or My Immortal, would definitely not be considered top quality. In fact, My Immortal is more known for bad quality storytelling.
In my experience, however, if you dig hard enough you can find some pretty interesting quality, depending on your taste of course. There are some pretty impressive works from all types of fandoms of stories. I plan to do a series breaking down stories, but to start, I’ll share some more high level findings and places where I found the higher quality stories in that fandom.
In many cases, some of the best stories I found weren’t even in the most popular fandoms.
I had a team of people review thousands of stories in the top 150 or so fandoms I could find. I’ll reveal the rubric we used in the future. Generally speaking, we collected data on both the basics and more detailed storytelling metrics.
On the basic side, we looked at spelling, grammar, diction, and other technical measures of writing. The reason why this was difficult because we also looked at story structure and creativity as stronger measures. We compared story plot lines to popular story structures and typical plots. Let’s face it, most fanfiction readers aren’t reading just for great grammar! Plotline must be evaluated to really evaluate these stories.
A lot of people have asked whether outlining is a good practice for writing fanfiction or novels in general. From what we’ve found, the answer is yes.
We’re excited to share some of the results below.
Fanfiction Quality Results
1. Power Rangers Fanfiction
Find it on: Commaful
Yea seriously…this surprised us. Perhaps the fact that it’s older is a big reason for this. The writers may be older and perhaps more experienced. Perhaps the nostalgia factor is a big part of the quality as well. I suppose the truth is, who doesn’t want to run around in colored suits and kick monster butt? Right. Everybody does! Hense the popularity for this old-school story.
2. Lucky Star Fanfiction
Find it on: Fanfiction.net
Not a super popular fandom by any means, but definitely a pretty quality one. The few stories about this book are fairly impressive when it comes to writing quality and left most of us very impressed.
3. Omega Chronicles Fanfiction
Find it on: Fanfiction.net
Another relatively smaller fandom. The type of person who might write fanfiction about this particular book likely lends itself to good writers and avid readers in the first place so there may be some correlation on that front.
Conclusion
I’m excited to share more of my findings. It’s been a very immersive and interesting experience diving deep into fandoms and fanfiction. People can be so creative, wild, and exciting in sharing their passions and stories with the world. It has opened my eyes to a wide variety of pairings, niches, and more. There is still much to learn about these worlds!