I was re-reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and came across the part where Harry tries to explain genetics—

*cough* If you haven’t read this fanfiction, it’s pretty darn awesome. Harry Potter meets Science.

—anyway, I won’t spoil it, but they were talking about a certain genetic trait. The phenotype is either +W or -W, and they were trying to figure out what the genotype was. Harry explains the monohybrid cross you probably learned about in high school Bio, where there are two alleles, W and w. To find out how the genotype and phenotype relate, they…

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For me, the term “fanfiction” has grown to include many things that most people would not consider fanfiction, to the point where even I think I need a new term. The case that made me realize this was Serenity, the movie based on the short-lived Firefly television series. Though opinions on Serenity are quite varied, my take on it is that it’s basically fanfiction, despite being made by the original creators of Firefly.

Why? Without spoilers, because character development that traditionally would occur over a long period of time happened in a quick burst. Because the scale changes…

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When a story has enough success, it will have followers. When a story has enough followers, they will write fanfiction. Simplest explanation I can think of.

Of course, it’s not entirely accurate. Apart from the obvious problem with defining “enough”, and the flukes where one loyal fan writes most of the fanfiction or something, it’s not enough to say that a “fanfic” is simply a story that uses the characters and setting of an existing story or series. If that were true, every published Star Wars book would be fanfiction, as would an awful lot of other science fiction and…

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