My growing dislike of fanfiction (Patreon)

As you guys can probably tell from my slow release speed, I've recently been struggling more than usual to write my Eragon story.

When I reached the end of the village part, when they leave the village that is, I'd been planning to have the story roughly follow canon, with Cedric being present but acting somewhat as a foil to Eragon (in terms of morality and personality).

At that point, I'd already established him being a lone-wolf type, so this would be justified by Saphira teaching him magic (as happened in the normal story), and secretly practicing his own magic when he could avoid Brom's prying eyes.

This route isn't that well planned out, because I started receiving feedback early on that people didn't much like this idea. People's dislike of Brom and their (arguably really intense) backlash to what happened after the drugging, particularly on QQ.

However, aside from that, a sizable portion of readers simply didn't want the story to follow the canon route. Lots of people on different websites wanted Cedric to have his own original side story. 

At that time, I remember expressing my doubts, that it would be pretty difficult to write something for him from scratch. The readers somewhat agreed, and said stuff like 'he should go somewhere else, but somewhere else that's part of the story. and he should meet other people, but people that are already part of the story.'

This wasn't really a practical solution. The world of Eragon isn't very fleshed out. A lot of attention is given to the characters that are part of his journey and the places he visits, but little else aside from that. 

If I could give an example, if I was writing a cosmere fanfic, malazan book of the fallen or even something like a wheel of time fanfic, I would have a lot more to work with. With Eragon, it's simply impossible to have Cedric completely do his own thing without overlapping with Eragon himself or plainly just stealing 'encounters' from him (if I'm only making use of what's already there). 

The setting doesn't have enough substance to it. Rereading it in preparation for this fic, it's obvious just how basic and bare bones it really is. There is no 'spare' content that I can give Cedric that Eragon didn't make much use out of, or characters that weren't ultimately an important part of the main story. Even the Murtagh cult stuff (which I'd placed a lot of my hopes on) was really, really basic, to the extent that I had to rewrite pretty much all of the cult's lore to make them remotely interesting.

One way or another, I would have to write stuff that was ultimately original. So yeah, I did that. And it's pretty hard. 

Explaining why is kinda difficult, but for people that draw or do art ('cause I do a little of that), it's having someone else give you their sketch, and then having to turn it into something you like, or that is your style. Not simply finishing their sketch (the parallel for that would be writing a fanfic that follows canon) but transforming it into something that's different, yet equally good compared to the original, or even better.

It's doable, but if someone had the option, I would bet they'd prefer to just get a blank page and draw what they wanted from scratch. Personally, there's little that annoys me more than having to come back to a piece of paper that looks like a mess, and having to fix that. For writers or artists, I think they'd agree, and I'd bet there's not much that beats the feeling of staring at a nice, clean, white sheet of paper.

I'm beginning to realize that this might be the biggest drawback of writing fanfiction. People want the thing they're familiar with and enjoy, but at the same time they want you to put your own spin on it, to make something that's new and not like what they already know. Not that it's an unreasonable expectation, but it is hard, having to make your own thing inside a pre-existing framework that doesn't provide you with what you need, or even sometimes works against what you're trying to do. 

I don't know what to do about my hangups at this point. Though I am beginning to understand why people eventually 'graduate' from fanfiction. Personally, that was never my goal. I don't care about getting published or anything like that. I think fanfiction is fine, I enjoy reading it, and in theory, I would have no issue writing it until I either couldn't or didn't want to anymore.

But the 'genre', if you can call it that (not sure under what you would classify fanfiction vs. original fiction) has some real problems, and the more I write the more obvious they become to me.

I've been going through some of my old ideas. Particularly, these three, which aren't fanfics but original stories. Maybe I should try something like this and see how it goes for me.

- an isekai into a reverse-harem shojo type story where the mc is one of the reverse harem members, but ultimately turns the setting on its head

- a superhero kind of story where everyone worldwide suddenly develops superpowers in sort of a korean-dungeon kind of story. the mc would be powerless but would go to the demon world or something and come back op. im sure you're familiar with the trope.

- i had this idea for a story where basically the 'dark lord' or whatever won and the world is now fucked. the insert would be the son of said dark lord and would have to fight with his siblings over power and kinda investigate the ruins of whatever is left from the 'past world' before his father exterminated everything and ushered in the age of darkness. naturally he would have a hot demon sister or something like that.