Epilogue
I hope you enjoyed Dani’s tale as much as I enjoyed writing it!
I was always an imaginative child, introverted as I grew up finding more companionship in books, cartoons and games than in other people. Other children alienated me for being a bookworm, and I in turn shunned them by turning to my beloved characters, reading and re-reading my favorite stories and imagining alternate lives for them. My mother would adopt Mowgli, and I would try to teach him how to be a normal boy and go to school, and he would teach me to talk to the bears, lions and tigers I saw at the zoo. I’d wish I could talk to the Princess Peach from the Mario World videogame and talk her out of always being by her stupid self, instead of having a bodyguard to keep her from being kidnapped by the evil dragon, time and time again. I wished I could be an honorary Thundercat.
So, when I started writing about other stories, games and shows as warm-up exercises to my academic writing, as something to do when I was bored, I grew to think this was childish, that it was foolish of me to spend so much time and energy writing something no one would ever see. A year ago, you wouldn’t have ever heard me admit to it. I still remember the first fanfiction I ever wrote; a dragon story inspired by the movie ‘DragonHeart’. As much pleasure as I drew from writing it, bringing myself to show it to anyone was another task entirely, and I was embarrassed and overtly critical of my work. I struggled to read even more, learning rhetoric, learning synonyms for the simpler words I used, and I kept writing, until I felt it was good enough to show off, and I began publishing in fanfiction.net. Several people were kind enough to comment, offering suggestions and uttering words of praise I treasured. But it didn’t last much, as university pressure put a cramp on the free time I had.
I still write, but more in my original manner: as means of limbering my ‘writing muscles’, as it were, stretching my capabilities to write lengthy pieces. I still publish, on occasion, mostly on the RPG video game archive under the Final Fantasy 7 game category, and frequently message those who reviewed my work before. Nothing as dramatic or impressive as Francisca Soler, of course.
Although I already knew much about fanfiction, and the way it is intimately related to other such pop culture elements like videogames and anime, what did surprise me was that other people, people with much higher levels of education than myself, also defended it as a valid means of instruction. The intrinsic values of self-correction, peer-editing, and writing strategies learned and employed by people who might not be expertly-trained (or even completely fluent in English!) are explored by such people as Rebecca Black, James Paul Gee, and all the talented people in The New London Group. I learned the proper names, as it were, of all the resources fanfiction writers use, all the strategies we use in creating worlds of fiction based on original works, all of it things I did, or used, without knowing that there are people out there labeling it, defining it, and researching it for use in today’s classrooms.
Therefore, I did what I know best: I wrote an original story, using real-life events and pre-existing stories to flesh out the story of Dani, a character who, like all the other characters in the story, represents different facets of my perception of myself as a writer. I truly hope you enjoyed the news articles, dialogues, and comic strip I used, and I hope you as a reader (and potential fanfiction writer!) learned that it is never childish or simple to write up a paragraph imagining what your favorite character did ten years after the original story ended, or what would their life be like if they existed in our world, or if you yourself were the child, sibling or even spouse of a character in a beloved story.
