A Simple Guide To Fanfiction Research (or How To Write About A Country That Isn’t Your Own)

Oh what trials and treacherous waters we fanfiction readers must endure. Bad plots. Out of characterization. Poor spelling and grammar. Ship-to-ship combat. So many of these are so easily fixable. Engaging plots and sensible character arcs come with practice. To improve spelling and grammar, you read more books, and pay more attention in school. Ship-to-ship combat is not fixable, sadly, and will endure until the apocalypse, along with Nokia phones, Brussels sprouts and the burning hatred everyone feels towards call centres.

Lack of research, however, is something that can be fixed with ease, and yet so very often is not. A lot of fanfiction authors genuinely seem to believe that researching for something that ‘just’ gets posted online is beneath them. I admit, I am not a huge advocate for entire books of research – plotting the evolutional path of your aliens, or the ancestry of your characters right back to the 10^th century seems a little extreme unless it’s relevant to the plot. There is a line where research takes over the story, and that is where you need to reign yourself back in. However, there is nothing wrong with a simple bit of fact checking, even if it is ‘just’ the internet.

Have you ever had one of those moments when you’re reading a very enjoyable fanfiction, and suddenly a fact just jumps out and bites you? That’s wrong you think to yourself. That’s not how you hack a computer/that’s not how you treat a gunshot wound/that’s not how Japanese high schools work. Valiantly you try to shake the fact off, but it digs its teeth in to your suspension of disbelief and you can’t really get into the story any more.

Maybe I’m just very picky. Maybe I just like researching this kind of stuff. Or maybe I just feel the brunt of it, after ten years of screaming at Harry Potter fanfictions, because British schools like Hogwarts don’t have lockers or prom, and our first year of school isn’t called Kindergarten. But I fail to see why it is so difficult to pop onto Wikipedia (or TVTropes, if you want to make the experience a little more amusing) and just quickly check whether this is true or not. You wouldn’t get away with this in a published novel, so why should your fanfiction suffer through it? Do you not put just as much creativity and love into your fanfiction as you do your original work? Does it not deserve the same respect? At the very least you should consider it practise for when you write an actual novel.

A colleague of mine gave me this wise advice recently. “Never assume – it makes an ass of you and me”. I’ve been on fanfiction for ten years now, and I’ve found that assumptions are the biggest cause of incorrect facts – specifically, since the tendency is for fanfiction writers to write what they know, they assume that other countries and cultures are exactly like theirs at a fundamental level. Some things are obvious – Yu-Gi-Oh writers are usually perfectly aware that the odds of rain in Egypt are practically nonexistent, for example. But some things are less obvious – like why it is sometimes impossible to buy alcohol in modern Egypt, and why in ancient Egypt, the beer was treated more like soup than a beverage.

To that end, I invite my readers to borrow some of my top tips to remember when writing about countries that you have never visited before. It doesn’t take long to find most of these out, thanks to the mighty powers of Google, and you never know – you may learn something interesting in the process.

1. Location, location, location

Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, irritates me more than opening a Yu-Gi-Oh/Harry Potter crossover, and reading the following words or a variation thereof. "It was sweltering hot in the London International Airport as travellers hurried their way from flight to flight."

I can tolerate a lot of problems in fanfiction – typos, poorly written sex, abandoning your stories – but this has got to be one of my biggest pet peeves. Gods help you if you then have your characters walk from the airport to the Leaky Cauldron because ‘it only takes ten minutes’ – I am liable to start foaming at the mouth.

Let me explain my problem. There is no such thing as London International Airport. London has six airports (in order of largest to smallest: London Heathrow, London Gatwick, London Stansted, London Luton, London City and London Southend). Are your characters flying into Heathrow from Japan? Great – hope they can handle the London Underground through all the jetlag! Are they flying into Gatwick? Excellent! Let’s hope the Gatwick Express is on time, or they won’t get into the centre of London until gone dark! Are they flying into Stansted, Luton, LC or Southend? No they’re not, because those airports are domestic and European flights only, and you’re flying in direct from Japan since we all know that having to change planes is a bitch.

And NONE of these airports are a ten minutes walk away from the Leaky Cauldron – none of these airports are a ten minute train ride away from the Leaky Cauldron! I know that London looks small on a map, especially if you come from the United States, but there is a reason that we have that extensive and well maintained underground system – for the record, it takes about forty five minutes to get from Heathrow to central London by the underground (unless, like my last journey, you get stuck outside South Ealing for thirty three minutes due to a signal failure).

The point I am trying laboriously to get to, is that if you’re going to have your characters visit these places, you need to know a little bit about the lay of the land before you start. Taking your characters to Egypt? Get yourself onto Google maps, pick up the little yellow Street View man, and plonk yourself down into the middle of modern day Cairo. Is it towering skyscrapers or dusty, mud-brick houses? (hint: it’s neither) Sending your characters home to Japan? Google maps has a destination planner – pop the airport and your final destination in, choose your mode of transport, and get an accurate estimated time of journey – you never know, the villain might decide to drop in on them in the middle of their journey. Need a forest in the UK? Switch to the satellite view on Google maps, and look around for a big patch of green (the New Forest is a good one).

Things like this are tiny, but they have the capability to break the reader’s immersion, and they take relatively little time to actually find out. And they mean the world to the readers. There’s nothing like that little warm glow you feel when you read a story, and realise that the author has taken their time to research somewhere that you know so well.

2. Cultural values

Variety is the spice of life. And humans have it in abundance. But from the consumption of most fanfiction set in schools, you could be forgiven for thinking that we all live in America. This of course, isn’t limited to America, and other countries are guilty too – I still have a British brand of aspirin based painkiller being used in the second chapter of my Yu-Gi-Oh!/Harry Potter crossover, even though that scene is set in Japan (oops!).

If you are planning on writing a story based in another country, you need to give yourself a crash course of the everyday lives of people who live there. I did this for many of my duellists in my crossover, even though their appearances were limited. Standard of living. Education levels. Religion. Languages spoken in the area. All of these are important. Are the cast of Yu-Gi-Oh driving cars in your story? No they’re not – because they’re still sixteen/seventeen when the series is going on, and you can’t drive until you’re eighteen in Japan. Have your American characters been arrested in the UK? No, you can’t plead the fifth – you’re not in America any more. Sixteen year old British character with a full time job? No they didn’t drop out – mandatory schooling finishes at sixteen in the UK. Your character from the UAE and your character from Egypt both speak Arabic, so they should be able to understand each other, right? So very wrong!

The one that frustrates me the most is Yu-Gi-Oh slash fics that send their recently married gay couples on honeymoons to Egypt – SUCH A BAD IDEA!

And while I’m on the subject, and it’s fresh in my mind: “What do you mean you’re at work today? It’s Thanksgiving”. RAGE!

This isn’t just anal-ness for the sake of story immersion. At best, a native reading your story may simply shake their heads and move on – at worst, you could grossly offend them. Remember, this is another person’s culture – their life – that you’re describing here. To assume that their way of life is identical to your own, does not convey the respect that they deserve, both as a reader and a representative of their country.

This is one of my favourite aspects of research, because other cultures are fascinating. Don’t skimp on it. You are depriving yourself of an opportunity to learn some wonderful things. Don’t believe me? Pick a country, hop onto Wikipedia, and research some of their cuisine. You learn the most about a culture from their food. If your fanfic is set in Japan, don’t just stop at sushi. Go look up soba, udon, okonomiyaki, miso, tempura, sashimi, katsu, sukiyaki, mochi and doroyaki. Go on. I’ll still be here when you come back.

3. Terminology

As some of you may have grasped by now, I’m British. I speak British English, in a mixed accent, and I am not afraid to shout ‘bollocks!’ if something goes wrong.

But a lot of my characters are not British. They don’t speak British English. They have all sorts of accents. And some of them have some pretty creative curses from their home country that don’t involve male genitalia.

I’ve heard a lot of authors on fanfiction explain over the years that they have Harry Potter characters saying pants or freeway because they, the author, are American and that is how they speak. And I understand that – I really do. Every Japanese character in my crossover speaks British English, in spite of the fact that logically they would have been more likely to learn American English in schools (although since they are using Language Patches created and distributed in the UK, I suppose I can get away with this). But this really shouldn’t be an excuse. If it’s not in a character’s nature to swear during stressful moments, then it shouldn’t be acceptable for them to start using an entirely different form of the language.

This might seem like a silly thing to fuss over, but terminology goes beyond simply remembering to say ‘mobile phone’ instead of ‘cell phone’. This ties into the character’s style of speech, and using the wrong words can heavily impact how the character comes about. Changing a single word can alter tone, meaning and politeness. Japanese is an excellent example of this, where a character’s way of speaking, how they address other people and what kind of respect they afford them, is an intricate part of who they are as a character. Simply using an incorrect suffix or even the wrong tone can instantly change an honest statement to an insult. It is the same when writing all characters.

Terminology might seem unimportant when you’ve got a story to tell, but the way it changes meaning should not be underestimated. It’s the simple act of saying the sentence “can I bum a fag?” to an American and a British person (the former will probably be shocked and appalled, where as the latter is more likely to say “Sorry mate – I don’t smoke”). Familiarise yourself with a few common terms and local language courtesies, for everyone’s sake.

4. Current events

The relevance of this tip depends on whether your fandom is one based off the real world, or an entirely fictional world/planet (e.g. is your fandom Glee, or Game of Thrones?). It does sort of hold true for fictional worlds, but for the purpose of explanation, I’ll be using it to describe stories set in the real world.

To use a topical example, if your characters visit Sierra Leone during 2012, great. If they visit during 2014, not great (if you haven’t heard of Ebola by now, there’s this programme you should start watching – it’s called the News).

It might not seem relevant to your story, but it is important to know what the current events are in the country you’re about to plonk your characters into. Just because a place seems idyllic, doesn’t mean it is – that delightful safari you could be about to send your characters off for, might be in the middle of a war zone for all you know.

This doesn’t just apply to modern settings either. I’ve lost count of the number of Yu-Gi-Oh fics I have read, set in ancient Egypt, which refer to Cairo and Luxor, which isn’t correct at all. These are the modern names for the cities that stand on or near the location of the ancient capitals today, and nobody from ancient Egypt would use them. The correct names are Memphis and Thebes respectively, but which one Atem ruled from depends on whether you’re following manga or dubbed anime, as 3,000 years ago would put him in Thebes, and 5,000 years Memphis.

Dates, advancements, events – all of these are important in building your world. Don’t let them slip by. And you never know – some of these events might provide an interesting backdrop for your story.