I'm serious. I used to write fanfiction a long time ago, back before I realized that I developed characters and plots well enough on my own to not require the constraints of someone else's world. But that was a while ago...and looking back on it I shake at what type of crap I wrote. Anyways...what makes a good fanfic? Unfortunately, it seems to me that a "good" fanfic appears to have Mary Sue like characters, or characters that have "Pants" syndrome: characters so devoid of any actual characterization, that your reader can instantly place themselves into the shoes of your main character... What about canon? Do you prefer stories that keep to the straight and narrow of canon, or do you prefer stories that diverge or bend the rules a little?

As an engineer, if something doesn't fit, I notice it, and it bugs me until I have to stop reading. You can't bend the rules. Then again, I probably won't read whatever you write because I don't enjoy reading unless it's interesting to me in particular, which, unfortunately, eliminates most everything. It's something like the tl;dr syndrome or something.

This drives me crazy in any "side-story" movie/show/book/fanfic. They can easily make it canon, and yet they choose not to.

Good Fanfics are ones that don't fanboy some crappy anime show.


Oh wait....

Depends on what you mean by 'good'. If you mean 'popular', then you mash together Twilight, Pokemon, Star Trek (the newest movie) and Naruto, throw in yourself as the main character and some gay sex among male leads, and you've done it.

Coincidentally, you didn't mention 'Pants syndrome' because of this, did you? If you did, you just won 28 internets.

That is exactly why I mentioned Pants Syndrome Its a common enough plague on literature, it deserves to have its own syndrome named after it.

Peter Chimaera's Doom: Repercussions of Evil is a fantastic fanfiction.