Fan Fiction (Hey Otaku, we're in the same boat!)

[tabsie3210]

Well. Okay, I’m a Catholic who was a fallen-away Catholic for a while and am now working my way back toward Orthodoxy, much to my parents’ relief. (Only took me 15 years… I’m 31 now, in case you’re wondering.)

I used to write yaoi fan fiction. Yaoi is a Japanese word that means you’re writing about same-sex pairings. It’s about male homosexuality, but it’s geared at females. The psychological reasoning - in the first place, it’s a “safe” fantasy because the characters can’t be purely identified with (neither one is female, so young girls can have fantasies without starring in them), and second, for adult women it gives them a sense of “equality” that you don’t see in traditional romance novels. Some of the stuff is very well-written and wouldn’t be a problem if not for the homosexuality.

I started getting back into Catholicism and stopped writing that sort of thing. But I still like writing fan fiction.

Trouble - most of my friends are pagan. This goes back to the whole, “When I was 15,” thing. My best friend and I have been best friends since 9th grade. She’s a pagan.

I started changing a lot of my writing so that it reflects more Christian values, like stopping writing about gay relationships and turning all the characters either Catholic or proto-Catholic (not there yet but getting there). I don’t have to be overt about it in my writing because mostly I’m writing adventure stories these days.

But now I’m into Transformers fan fiction and my best friend and I have created our own little world, so to speak. That’s typical of people writing fan fiction.

Trouble - she won’t let me write them as proto-Catholic and so we have a kind of Pantheon thing going on, except I don’t like it, but I don’t want to stop writing with her because aside from that (and it doesn’t crop up very often, but it does show up in one pivitol scene we’re doing), the stories are fun and I enjoy writing adventure stories altogether.

I still like reading a good fantasy from time to time, though I’ve gotten away from most of the ones I loved the best as a youngster because they no longer jive with my beliefs. Used to be a big Mercedes Lackey fan, but I can’t get into her work now because of the multiple gods and the magic and the homosexuality she throws in periodically.

I’m not writing this stuff to put God down - Catholicism is my religoin for a -reason.- I believe in it. And my human characters in the story are all Catholics or at least Christian. I just like to write a fun fantasy, but that’s all it is. Fantasy. A joke. Not real by any stretch.

I mean, the guy who invented Dungeon’s & Dragons was a professing Christian who loved God and who just wanted to tell a good story and have fun. God knows that I’m not 100% comfortable writing this stuff because of my conflict between the fake and His Reality. But I don’t know what to do, because my friend won’t write with me unless they’re not Christian. She says it wouldn’t make any sense for the characters from another planet who are robotic to follow Christianity anyway.

As I’ve said, all the human characters are Christian as I play them all, and I don’t negatively portray Catholicism at all. I just feel up in arms about a lot of this. Any opinions would be helpful in getting my brain geared up to the right level.

Tabs.

 

[I_A]

Not every character you write about has to be Christian. It is fantasy. You can write about buddists, hindus, and aliens from the planet Xenu if you wanted.

If it doesn’t make sense for Bumblebee to genuflect than it doesn’t make sense.

However you’ve hit on something with your characters being “proto-Catholic.” All people are either moving towards God or away from him. You can’t stand still. If characters in your stories aren’t on this journey to or away form God then are you accurately describing the human condition?

Have you ever read G.K. Cheterton’s “The Ball and the Cross?” It is a story about an atheist and a Catholic who have vowed to duel to the death. He charitiably portrays both sides, thier zealous desires and their weaknesses, their stubborneness and cluelessness.

Where fiction gets to be a problem is where you use it as a vehicle to advocate an anti-Christian message. See Pullman’s Dark series: he gets so wrapped up in advocating a message he twists the story line to in the end the Subtle Knife, the title, isn’t even used to slay the enemy at all! Do Christian authors get into this problem? I’m sure some do, but Tolkien claims he didn’t intend his books to be so Catholic, yet you can’t help but see Christ in so many characters. Of course C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books were meant to be Christian parables, but they flowed so well, it didn’t seem to harm the story at all.

Another place where fiction gets into a problem is when it explicitly describes sexual acts. I just fished reading Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh and there was a sexual scene in there, but it was very straightforward and to the point, a small paragraph. It served to move the story on without trying to sexually excite the reader.

 

[Morningkill]

I write fanfic too - although most of the stuff which I currently have published is overtly Catholic.

My watchword when writing fanfic (or, indeed, any kind of story) is that the story AS A WHOLE has to fit in with the rest of my life (i.e. Catholicism). So, there might be elements which are less than Catholic (currently working on a scene with a drunken Jesuit student, for example!), the story as a whole should advance Catholic notions.

Note that not every character (or, indeed, every story) needs to be Catholic (although most of mine are) in order for it to be a Catholic story. We know nothing about the religious beliefs of the Pevensies (although I’ve made them Catholic) and no-one in Tolkien has even HEARD of Christ. But, those stories are all very Catholic in certain ways.

I think that you need to be very careful about colaborations with people who might be preventing you from giving glory to God with your writing - I don’t mean people who are saying “I don’t wanna write Christian fiction!” but rather people who are wanting to put negative, immoral elements in there and show them as good.

There is absolutely nothing bad about an adventure story which doesn’t mention Catholicism at all which involves people acting in a decent way, the guy resucing the girl, the two of them getting married and riding off into the sunset. That’s a good, wholesome story - even if there is no religion in there. It’s probably not a tale I would write (I’d have a Catholic in there!) but it might be one you want to write.

If you want to chat about this with a fellow fanfic author, just drop me a PM. Also, drop me a PM anyway if you might be willing to be interviewed for a TV show that I am going to be doing on the subject of Catholic fanfic and (specifically) “slash” and associated genres.

 

[patrick457]

Well. Okay, I’m a Catholic who was a fallen-away Catholic for a while and am now working my way back toward Orthodoxy, much to my parents’ relief. (Only took me 15 years… I’m 31 now, in case you’re wondering.)

I used to write yaoi fan fiction. Yaoi is a Japanese word that means you’re writing about same-sex pairings. It’s about male homosexuality, but it’s geared at females. The psychological reasoning - in the first place, it’s a “safe” fantasy because the characters can’t be purely identified with (neither one is female, so young girls can have fantasies without starring in them), and second, for adult women it gives them a sense of “equality” that you don’t see in traditional romance novels. Some of the stuff is very well-written and wouldn’t be a problem if not for the homosexuality.

I started getting back into Catholicism and stopped writing that sort of thing. But I still like writing fan fiction.

Trouble - most of my friends are pagan. This goes back to the whole, “When I was 15,” thing. My best friend and I have been best friends since 9th grade. She’s a pagan.

I started changing a lot of my writing so that it reflects more Christian values, like stopping writing about gay relationships and turning all the characters either Catholic or proto-Catholic (not there yet but getting there). I don’t have to be overt about it in my writing because mostly I’m writing adventure stories these days.

But now I’m into Transformers fan fiction and my best friend and I have created our own little world, so to speak. That’s typical of people writing fan fiction.

Trouble - she won’t let me write them as proto-Catholic and so we have a kind of Pantheon thing going on, except I don’t like it, but I don’t want to stop writing with her because aside from that (and it doesn’t crop up very often, but it does show up in one pivitol scene we’re doing), the stories are fun and I enjoy writing adventure stories altogether.

I still like reading a good fantasy from time to time, though I’ve gotten away from most of the ones I loved the best as a youngster because they no longer jive with my beliefs. Used to be a big Mercedes Lackey fan, but I can’t get into her work now because of the multiple gods and the magic and the homosexuality she throws in periodically.

I’m not writing this stuff to put God down - Catholicism is my religoin for a -reason.- I believe in it. And my human characters in the story are all Catholics or at least Christian. I just like to write a fun fantasy, but that’s all it is. Fantasy. A joke. Not real by any stretch.

I mean, the guy who invented Dungeon’s & Dragons was a professing Christian who loved God and who just wanted to tell a good story and have fun. God knows that I’m not 100% comfortable writing this stuff because of my conflict between the fake and His Reality. But I don’t know what to do, because my friend won’t write with me unless they’re not Christian. She says it wouldn’t make any sense for the characters from another planet who are robotic to follow Christianity anyway.

As I’ve said, all the human characters are Christian as I play them all, and I don’t negatively portray Catholicism at all. I just feel up in arms about a lot of this. Any opinions would be helpful in getting my brain geared up to the right level.

Tabs.

For one, your friend has a point here. You don’t have to portray your characters as Christian/Catholic as it’s not really a necessary requirement.

One better alternative here is to have the characters express basic Christian ideas (such as sacrificing oneself for the sake of another, the power of love or the sort) without being overtly Christian, i.e. having them to be ‘proto-Catholic’ without actually being one. You could show a nice depiction of the human condition like them seeking and finding or turning away from God or something like that.

J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of works such as The Lord of the Rings, himself had a lot of Catholic ideas in his work which is no wonder as he was a Catholic, yet he had not set to write out a world where everybody was a Christian (after all, the conceit of the work is that Middle-Earth is the World as it was before actual recorded history); in fact, there is little, if any mention of God or religion in that work (or in The Hobbit; The Silmarillon however is another story). Yet there were a lot of distinctly Christian, especially Catholic elements in there.

 

[tabsie3210]

Thanks for your replies, all. I do appreciate it, as you’ve given me another way of looking at things.

Another author who’s an outspoken Catholic is Dean Koontz. His most overt stories about his Catholic beliefs are “The Taking” and “One Door Away From Heaven.” And while his characters aren’t always Catholic, or even Christian, and while some have “psychic powers,” he always puts a lot of stress on charity, hope, and faith in God. I try to use him as a model when I do my own writing, and even though we have a kind of quasi-pantheon in our Transformers fiction, I try to stress the ideas of Christian values - faith, love, seeing God (Christ) in all people and working to do good for Him, etc. I don’t always succeed, but I have hope that I can turn my stuff into something better than the average fan fic.

You guys have helped me out a LOT. Thank you, and God bless you.

Tabs

 

[The_Otaku]

I agree with others saying that religion isn’t a requirement in telling a story. The only reason it’s a requirement in my comic is because the existing universe has religious undertones in it. In your case, however, you have complete freedom, and for the sake of continuing to work with your friend, I don’t see why you can’t keep doing it the way you have been and go along with her ideas.

However, if she’s really a friend, she would be open-minded to your catholic themes and consider wanting to write a story using your catholic themes so that she’s supporting you too. If she’s only willing to deal with content that pleases her, then this partnership isn’t mutual, and I’d consider just writing your stories solo of finding someone else.

I’m glad to see you’ve stopped writing yaoi. I’m well aware of what it is (never read any, but I’m familiar with the anime terminology, like loli, etc.) Basically, you were creating male porn for females. Female porn. You know, the porn industry pretty much exists for men, but women have their pornography too, it’s called the romantic novel. Romance novels are porn for women. See, men and women need to be excited and aroused differently. Men are very visually stimulated creatures. We need to see, touch, and feel. Women are aroused mainly through the mind and fantasy, and words in a book can be just as sexually explicit or lead to sin as when a man watches a pornographic video or reads a porno magazine. In the case of yaoi, and just anime in general, anime men are just as as attractive as anime women sometimes, and they often possess androgynous qualities, and this is intentional on the part of the animators. They want to appeal to both a woman’s physical need of a man, yet they display him in a homo-erotic fashion so that he seems ‘sensitive’ and women just love that quality in a man. If you think about it, yaoi isn’t just homosexual porn, it’s heterosexual porn as well as a woman is satisfied in her fantasy by both the erotic nature of man on man, and the fact these types of men are sexually pleasing to their senses as women- they’re the type of men they’d want to have, since they meet their needs.

The thing with hentai in general is that it’s unrealistic, and because it’s unrealistic you can make it whatever you want it to be. I think hentai, yaoi, yuri, and so forth can actually be WORSE to watch than REAL porn because there’s no limit to the possibilities of the sin, the depth to which it can be taken, and the laws of nature don’t exist with an animation. There’s tentacle monsters, aliens, crazy robot sex machines and so forth. In the case of anime fiction (fan or otherwise), one can just take those liberties and do the same things with them. The line is never crossed because there was no line to begin with, which makes hentai arguably worse than regular porn, since it can create all kinds of sexual addictions and fetishes in people that they wouldn’t have had if these things didn’t exist.

Real men will never be as physically attractive as anime men since they’re so effeminate, yet not gay (unless made to be in a fanfiction), that they’re contradictory, so it’s easy for anime fan girls to get hot and bothered by this stuff because it gives them, in their mind, exactly what they want, and since men like that don’t exist in the real world, they settle for the stories and develop exaggerated lust for them and become pornographically addicted. It’s the same thing with the romance novel. And in both cases, this addiction is very subtle at first and only grabs ahold of them once they’ve opened their minds up to the various sexual possibilities. Once your mind is ready to entertain sexual thoughts, the sin comes right in.

 

[tabsie3210]

Hi Otaku,

Thanks for your insights, and I’ll be honest, I struggle with pornography addiction myself, and guess where it started…

I still have issues with it because like any other addiction, it takes some time to break a habit, and anyway, your brain releases opium-like chemicals during sex and whilst watching pornogrphy, or reading it in my case. That takes some work to get over, and it’s slow going, but it’s do-able.

But would I have been so totally enraptured by it if I hadn’t come across yaoi? I don’t know the answer to that. See, I never liked traditional romance novels because I never liked how flat the female characters were, and how arrogant the male characters were, so I never enjoyed them, or soap operas for that matter. But when I first discovered yaoi, the stories I read were wrapped up in the story lines of the anime series I watched (I started with Gundam Wing, which has young, pretty boys by the truck loads), and since the stories were good and the characters weren’t flat females, I got into them the way I never did with romances.

And of course that meant getting into more and more explicit types of anime and manga and fan fiction. When I was finally blessed with a nervous breakdown (hey, God uses whatever it takes to shove you back onto the road where you belong), I started feeling weird about my fan fiction, and stopped it. I still have trouble with things, I don’t pretend I’ve become a saint (and I’m probably going to do some serious time in purgatory for my sins), but I want to stop, which is far better than what I was like a long time ago.

I’m glad I’ve gotten away from it. I wish I could just up and chage my entire thinking all the way through. But as long as I keep hauling myself back onto the wagon every time I fall off, eventually I’ll get beyond my bad behavior. I’ve got enough faith in God to keep it up.

The only thing that makes me really sad is that I used to enjoy anime, and now I’m not as crazy about it as I once was. There’s a lot of stuff in anime that’s fun to watch and interesting, but it doesn’t grab me like it once did. Some stories do, the ones that are interesting stories that can be taken as any fairy tale and not be looked at as an example of any king of religiosity - “Spirited Away” for example, or “The Last Unicorn,” or “Kiki’s Delivery Service.” And Gundam Wing not only portrays Christians in a positive light (Relena Peacecraft is a Christian, and Duo Maxwell is a Catholic), but both Christian characters point out that you can’t run away from your sins, and that God takes account of the things you do in this life. But then there are some stories that slap bits and pieces of non-Christian beliefs into a Catholic setting, like Chrono Crusade.

One year we had an anime convention on campus at my university, and there was a panal of people who had lived in Japan for over two years. One was a teacher of English there for five years, one moved there when he married a Japanese woman and only recently returned, and one was a military wife who lived on an American base there. One thing that all three of them agreed to, when I asked them questions about Japanese religion, is that the Japanese have a tendency to take different things and just sort of stick them together. The teacher said something like, “They don’t have much faith in organized religion, and sometimes you’ll hear someone say, ‘Oh, I’m Christian,’ but that person will start talking about things that are Buddhist, not Christian at all. They’re more superstitious than religious. There are places where you buy certain lucky charms for passing exams and for doing well in business, and they get more people visiting than the local Church. Pretty much if someone really is a Christian, he’ll be Catholic and he’ll be in a tight-knit group of other Catholics. They tend to stick together because of how easy it is for their culture to just up and assimilate whatever new thing shows up.”

That’s probaby why Japanese culture has so much Christian reference but doesn’t have the particulars right most of the time. Why your nun in your game is a sexy creature, and why Sister Rosette of Chrono Crusade has a love affair with a ‘good Demon,’ and possibly will be reincarnated according to that show’s story line. And because of these weird meshes, it’s hard to find something that I can enjoy anymore. Anime that’s either a total fairy tale, where it’s so divorced from reality it’s impossible to get drawn in to the thinking, or anime that has an accurate or positive depiction of Catholicism, is hard to come by. And if you’re into the story and get emotionally attached to the characters, it’s easy to fall into the wrong kind of thinking when you’re trying to write your own stories.

Blah, I talk too much.

 

[The_Otaku]

Blah, I talk too much.

No more than I do.

There’s nothing wrong with being passionate and forthcoming about your feelings. When I posted that thread asking about my doujinshi, I was brand new here, and I actually joined just so I could post that thread and ask those questions and before I had posted that thread, my first one was asking about fetishes and how these affect mortal sin, and so forth.

So I was really honest and forthcoming with the people here, and I just blurted everything out, and it felt very good to do it, because I knew I was on a website with other catholics and while the subject matter is embarrassing stuff, I was willing to wager that people would accept it, me, and help me out with it, and they did. I’m sure that if you have more issues you wish to talk about specifically there will be people here for you too.

I think most people who watch anime and are above the age of 18 (though there is certainly younger groups) are bound to watch a hentai film, hentai series, look at a hentai picture, animated gif, clip, or read a hentai fiction or fanfiction. It’s a very real trap alot of people can fall into easily. Today’s japanese anime is overloaded with sex appeal and fanservice and they’re so casual with it that nobody seems to care. They come for the anime, but stay for the porn. LOL! Seriously, that’s how it is for some people. They honestly just like the animation, or the story, or the art style or character designs, or maybe even just the voice actors, and thats fine, but one things leads to another and one sexy looking character is all it takes for a fan to draw or write some porn about it.

We need to hold each other accountable more often but we all fail so miserably at it. I believe Satan is very much present in all of this so we have to be careful how we allow ourselves to be attached to these characters and so forth and try to watch shows that aren’t as bad as some of the others. As long as we can watch these shows, and if we’re artists, draw the characters and such, and leave it at that, it’s fine, and the demons don’t get their way.

It’s very tempting, and being an otaku is a cross to bear in it’s own way but we have to keep at it, and when we do fall into sin or habits, we need to confess them to priests, and fight harder to resist. I believe God rewards us and gives us graces when we try to do the right thing, even if we fail constantly. If we think that it’s pointless to resist and we apply logic to it, that’s playing right into the scheme of the demons, who don’t want you in a state of grace, since you’re harder to manipulate and control.

 

[patrick457]

One year we had an anime convention on campus at my university, and there was a panal of people who had lived in Japan for over two years. One was a teacher of English there for five years, one moved there when he married a Japanese woman and only recently returned, and one was a military wife who lived on an American base there. One thing that all three of them agreed to, when I asked them questions about Japanese religion, is that the Japanese have a tendency to take different things and just sort of stick them together. The teacher said something like, “They don’t have much faith in organized religion, and sometimes you’ll hear someone say, ‘Oh, I’m Christian,’ but that person will start talking about things that are Buddhist, not Christian at all. They’re more superstitious than religious. There are places where you buy certain lucky charms for passing exams and for doing well in business, and they get more people visiting than the local Church. Pretty much if someone really is a Christian, he’ll be Catholic and he’ll be in a tight-knit group of other Catholics. They tend to stick together because of how easy it is for their culture to just up and assimilate whatever new thing shows up.”

That’s probaby why Japanese culture has so much Christian reference but doesn’t have the particulars right most of the time. Why your nun in your game is a sexy creature, and why Sister Rosette of Chrono Crusade has a love affair with a ‘good Demon,’ and possibly will be reincarnated according to that show’s story line. And because of these weird meshes, it’s hard to find something that I can enjoy anymore. Anime that’s either a total fairy tale, where it’s so divorced from reality it’s impossible to get drawn in to the thinking, or anime that has an accurate or positive depiction of Catholicism, is hard to come by. And if you’re into the story and get emotionally attached to the characters, it’s easy to fall into the wrong kind of thinking when you’re trying to write your own stories.

Blah, I talk too much.

Syncretism is a part of Japanese society-a lot of people get registered at a Shinto shrine at birth, marry in a Christian church, and get a Buddhist burial. In fact, until about a hundred years ago, Shintoism and Buddhism were amalgamated with each other, with Shinto deities usually being identified either as Buddhas under different names or as deities who have a special role in protecting Buddhism and allowing its teachings to flourish. Then, in 1868 Shintoism and Buddhism was separated forcibly by the government, usually resulting in Buddhist temples and property being destroyed, lands confiscated and Buddhist monks being laicized.

As for the almost-omnipresent depiction of crosses and other Christian symbolism in anime, this is because Christianity, being a ‘foreign’ religion practiced by 1% of the population, is viewed as a ‘mysterious’ and ‘exotic’ religion. Thus, the use of crosses and some such symbols are usually done merely to add an edgy and cool feel to it, just like how many people use Chinese characters in the West. An anime series which depicts Christianity (especially Catholicism) accurately or positively is definitely hard to come by.