OPINION: WotC Writers Live My Dream Of Writing Canon Fanfic

Ao3, the World Wide Web — Following Friday’s announcement of yet another Marvel Magic: The Gathering set, while many people are talking about important things, like how this is the third Marvel set in as many years while actual Magic-original planes barely get seen, or how the art and theming do genuinely look kinda sick for once, or even the weird movie tie-in promo Doctor Doom card people are apparently going to get if they go see Avengers: Doomsday in theatres (what is this, Yu-Gi-Oh‘s 10th anniversary movie, Bonds Beyond Time? Are they gonna hand these cards out to suburban moms and 12-year olds?), I have bravely chosen to discuss the objectively least relevant thing that was announced then:

The fact that Marvel: Darkhold Destiny is going to be the first-ever Universes Beyond set with its own, entirely original story that is evidently going to be canon to the Marvel universe. They even apparently get to add their own original character to the Marvel canon.

I have entirely neutral feelings about this, of course. Oh, remember how earlier, I mentioned Yu-Gi-Oh? Here’s one specific clip from that show that I am sharing for absolutely no reason.

Ahem. Okay. I’m normal now.

So, yes, apparently, Universes Beyond: Darkhold Destiny is going to be the first-ever Universes Beyond set with its own, entirely original story, which has the potential to actually make some of the cards feel momentous and poignant, and perhaps just one teensy smidge less grating than the current prevailing design philosophy for UB cards–that, of course, being a Wizards of the Coast designer looking at you nervously and pointing to the piece of cardboard saying, “Look! It’s Guy! From Thing! Don’t you remember Guy, from Thing???” while secretly praying that known puppy strangler and sunshine destroyer Chris Cocks is too distracted snorting liquid shareholder value to push back too hard against their union.

(Which you should support!)

I, as perhaps the single greatest Universes Beyond hater that I know (I’ve been extremely, extremely against it since The Walking Dead, baby! All of you other UB haters gotta line up behind me!), am certainly not going to buy this product or encourage others to do it. But it is at the very least a potential teensy-weensy tiny baby step in perhaps the right direction towards making me not physically gag and cover my mouth at the idea of tapping Magic: The Gathering lands to play Caped White Man From Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe #683. Even if that motherfucker breaks the Commander format in half over his knee with his giga-overpowered effect, which a lot of them seem to be doing lately.

But while this is a genuinely unique potential step forward for UB as a whole, I am allegedly writing a satire article, and therefore will choose to make the following silly point instead of all the potential serious ones that legitimately could be made about this new concept for UB:

Hey, uh… WotC? Are you guys, like… into fanfiction? Do you post on Ao3? It’s okay. You can tell me.

Because let’s be so honest with ourselves, here–has anyone else noticed that the Big Media Companies (or, you know, whatever we’re calling the one big media company we have left after all the mergers) have gotten a little, y’know… fanfic-y lately? Hear me out.

Staying right in-house with Wizards of the Coast, let’s talk about Baldur’s Gate 3, one of the most award-winningest video games of all time, a spectacular masterpiece by all accounts, and a complete and utter triumph for single-player story-driven games with complex themes and NSFW content everywhere. BG3 received so many awards that they had to set up a formal staff rotation for attending the ceremonies because it apparently genuinely started to impact development.

BG3 is also basically just the most high-effort, high-budget, and well-crafted fanfiction of all time.

Like, let’s be honest with ourselves for a moment here. The original six companions are literally all someone’s OC. Astarion specifically is the most “someone’s OC” character I’ve seen in any work of media in years. The same is definitely true of Shadowheart, and they’re by far the two most popular characters in the game. We do get to see some major characters from the Forgotten Realms’ main canon–Minsc and Jaheira are I think the least spoiler-inducing characters I can list, there. But Baldur’s Gate 3’s narrative team also got full permission from Wizards to do whatever they wanted to the canon, and so they went wild. They fundamentally changed a significant amount of lore about both illithids and githyanki, both of which are iconic to the “old days” of D&D, and there’s even a certain Prince whose whole third-act story (and the places it can go in BG3) might cause a genuine headache for future lore writers going forward. Larian Studios wrote a gorgeous and loving work of fanfiction that beautifully integrated itself with the canon, but was also unafraid to make sweeping changes to it to serve its own self-contained story. I see fanfiction writers make calls like they probably made in Larian’s writer’s room. I’ve made those same calls myself when I write fanfiction. BG3 is a fanfic, and it’s beautiful.

I say this with love. I’ve been writing fanfiction for nearly a decade. Here is my actual real Ao3 account. I think that fanfiction is a criminally underrated art form and it happens to include some of the most genuinely fascinating character and scene writing I’ve ever personally consumed, let alone how radically queer it all is. Don’t get me wrong. There are absolutely an untold number of problems with the culture around the medium and even its queerness–sapphic content makes up a vanishingly small percentage of Ao3, for one. It’s less than half as much as straight content, which is half again the amount of fics about gay men. I’m also personally not nearly qualified to speak about the racism in fandom spaces, but I do know that it’s absolutely staggering. I won’t pretend any differently.

But it’s also a profoundly beautiful thing that absolutely requires a person to love the story and world that they’re adapting with the full-fledged dorkiness and nerdiness that someone must have to be posting regularly on Ao3. Too often these days do we see people with no love for an established IP to try and make something in that world–the recent Masters of the Universe movie comes to mind. It’s too embarrassed by its characters with dorky names like Evil-Lyn to commit to being a good fucking addition to He-Man‘s canon. You can feel the writers cringing at the source material.

Anyone who has been entrusted with the rights to make a canon addition to a beloved story who is themselves embarrassed by that story needs to be tossed out a window (in Minecraft) and replaced by a genuine dweeb who truly loves the material they’re writing for.

This is by no means a “let fans write the movies instead of actual accredited writers!” call. My god, this is not that. Many, many pieces of media have “fans” who would really prefer if, say, Asian people weren’t portrayed in Star Wars, for example, and I think those fans should also be thrown out a window in Minecraft. But I do think that to some degree it requires someone who is both a genuinely skilled writer and an entirely earnest dork.

And I do think there’s a bit of a point to be made about the sort of… fanfic-ification of modern media, to some degree. Like… what was Iron Man (2008) but someone’s very earnest retelling of the origin story of Tony Stark in the then-modern day? Fucking Elon Musk had a cameo in that movie. I know, it’s crazy, but there once was a time when anyone reasonable thought he was smart. The whole conceit of the early MCU was that it takes place in the modern day–Tony Stark had an iPhone. Captain America runs out of the whatever S.H.I.E.L.D. facility to see 2011’s Times Square. Guardians of the Galaxy 2 made a joke about Microsoft’s Zune. That was the initial draw of the MCU, way back when–the heroes of then in the world of now.

Fanfic has a term for that, it’s called a modern AU.

Many people (including me!) have referred to Reality Fracture as more or less Jace Beleren’s Fanfic-A-Palooza, and I’ve seen some people be brave enough to call it one of the top five Magic sets of all time. I personally wouldn’t go that far, which has absolutely nothing to do with me getting dumpstered by two of the four green decks I played against at prerelease. As someone who hates green. But let me at last reach the point that I’ve been circling around:

The only true, major differences between a significant amount of modern media and fanfiction is budget and the approval of the rights-holders.

Our modern culture around media is so centered around telling and retelling the same established stories, so focused on once again showing us Peter Parker getting bitten by that radioactive spider, or by Bruce Wayne’s parents getting shot in that dark alley, that I think no one is willing to admit that a lot of what the Big Studios have been putting out has the same sort of feel to it as my beloved Tumblr mutuals who’ve been posting Supercorp, Bumbleby, Korrasami, and Catradora over and over again since circa 2016. This new and unique direction for Universes Beyond (you know, the thing this article is allegedly about?) probably means a ton of different things to a ton of different people, but to me, it represents another tiny step towards some fucking studio executive admitting that they do essentially the same thing I do on Ao3.

So, no, I still won’t be buying anything from Universes Beyond: Marvel Darkhold Destiny, but I am genuinely happy for the WotC writers who get to write their own Marvel Universe fanfiction and get an actual real corporate stamp of approval for their beloved OC. Even if, statistically, that OC is going to be a cishet able-bodied woman at most, if we’re lucky. But as a fanfiction writer who genuinely thinks some of her shit is good enough to be a part of some works’ canons, I will proudly cheer on a fellow dweeb for being paid a working salary to write a piece of fanfiction.

Even if it should’ve been me.