One of the myriad reasons posting has been non-existent lately is, as my roommate could confirm, that I have been reading a very long Batman fanfiction, Cat-Tales by Chris Dee. Well, actually, the author calls it a Catwoman fanfiction, but it’s the same thing really.
Having finally finished (or rather, caught up with, since it is still ongoing) the story, I figured I might as well offer some thoughts.
A story this huge – it’s more accurate to call it a universe with a large number of stories set in it, really – defies easy summarization, but I’ll try. Essentially, within the “Catverse”, the stories you and I can read in the comics aren’t what actually occurs, but rather what is reported in the news – with varying degrees of accuracy. What kicks everything off is this universe’s version of a recent reinvention/retconning of Catwoman. In the “Catverse” this becomes a tabloid printing a completely inaccurate story, and the real Catwoman is hardly amused.
So, she starts a one-woman show at the “Hijinx Playhouse” (Cat Tales) to set the record straight. This, of course, attracts Batman’s – and others’ – attention, and one thing leads to another… to another to another, through (to date) fifty usually multi-chapter stories. I said it was long, didn’t it?
I won’t waste too much time on the “review” portion of the review. Tastes differ, after all, though it’s safe to say since I read the whole thing that I at least liked it. It’s decently written, frequently funny, and the characters and plot are generally believable. I have only a passing familiarity with DC canon; it was generally sufficient to understand the story, with an occasional visit to Wikipedia to look up a more obscure character.
The story did prompt a couple of interesting thoughts on… I guess the “philosophy of fanfiction”, though, and I will talk about those.
When I choose to write for an unfinished series, I generally say “everything up to such-and-such point in canon counts for this story, everything afterwards doesn’t.” Cat-Tails, on the other hand, broadly proceeds parallel to the advancing canon Batman story, with some recognizable version of events occurring in the comics occurring in the Catverse. (This seems to have broken down with the recent Infinite Crisis/One Year Later story arc; the “Catverse Infinite Crisis” has no real relation to the canon one, and there’s no sign of a year-long timeskip coming up.)
If you don’t think doing this is hard, you’ve never tried it, and I am awed at how well Chris Dee has been able to integrate the occasionally drastic twists and turns of the canon story while remaining coherent.
It does lead to the one thing about this story that makes me a bit uncomfortable, which is its relationship with the canon. I suppose it’s part of the premise of the story, but the general “this is better than the canon” tone of some of the writing, including the characters (derisively) commenting on canon events by way of their appearance in the tabloids, seems a little… rude to me, I suppose. In particularly poor taste is one story where “F. Miller” and others responsible for the “tabloids” appear in the story, and Catwoman arranges a (non-violent) revenge on them.
I suppose part of the reason for this is that I usually write fanfiction for single-author stories. It’s incoherent to say that Kishimoto doesn’t understand the rules of the Naruto universe or that Takahashi doesn’t understand the characters of Ranma 1/2. As the sole authors and original creators of those series, their views are by definition correct, even if one thinks another view might lead to a better series. American comics, on the other hand, are a much different matter, with numerous authors taking their turns at writing the characters over the course of decades.
And that’s about enough of that.