Before we begin the article, I have an announcement to make regarding the release of these articles. Starting next week and occurring roughly every 8 weeks or so (not including my month long vacations), I will be taking a week long mental health break from article writing.
The last two years have shown that my consistent article writing has been taking a severe toll on my mental health and affecting the quality of the articles that I bring to you all. With that in mind, it is my hope that these break weeks can be used to recuperate and use any build up of articles, building up articles without the fear of releasing one that week, and focusing on other projects and personal obligations without worrying about disappointing my readers.
Again, these will occur roughly every eight weeks or so starting next week, though that is not inherently a given as my break weeks will have to fit around my vacations as well. It is my genuine hope that these breaks will ensure a continued quality of articles and minimize the possibility of burnout.
Now with news out of the way, let's move on to the weirdest article topic that I've probably ever written.
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Now, I know what you're thinking when you read that title. This is absolutely the weirdest title for an article this dude has ever written. And the fact of the matter is is that you're not entirely wrong. I began my writing and review career by looking at either movies through my Phoenix 8 Productions work or fanfiction through my The Brony Critic channel. As a result, I have developed a deep respect and love for the artistry of fanfiction writing.
Fanfiction occupies a controversial sphere in our modern media. Utilizing already established intellectual properties to create unofficial content of unregulated quality might at first seem deeply troubling and rife with low quality trash, an assumption that at first glance might not be entirely inaccurate.
However, I also hold that fanfiction represents a unique field for practice and creative exploration for writers, allowing writers to skip some of the more difficult and laborious aspects of world-building in favor of focusing more directly on capturing the feel of a character or exposing the narrative strengths of a particular concept. Or simply using a existing property as a framework to enhance the world-building to a much higher degree.
Through this mindset, I have also begun working on various fanfiction ideas from time to time. In fact, I oftentimes have far too many to ever reasonably be able to work on them in any great capacity. But I still want others to hear about my story concepts, even if I never write it myself. So to that end, I decided to create a subset of my editorial segments as sort of a cross between the Building Better Backstories series and the free-form nature of the Let's Talk... articles; thus the creation of the Random Fanfiction Idea, or RFI.
For our first outing of RFI, I decided that we should discuss an idea that I got while watching Don Bluth's 1982 animated classic The Secret of NIMH. The idea is fairly simple but possesses a fantastic narrative and thematic connection that could lead to a bunch of drama.
What if you wrote a fanfiction sequel to The Secret of NIMH inspired by the modern Planet of the Apes franchise? That is, what if you wrote a series of fanfiction's showing how the evolution of mouse and rat society eventually supplants human culture as a result of our own societal defects and systemic issues?
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