Off the Cliff

And suddenly I've flashbacked a dozen years to early fandom when I was addicted to my first series as only a netless foreign exile could be, and the manga was doing loop-the-loops and a geological age elapsed between episodes and all I wanted was more more more of these guys; and I'd go to comic sales and spend two or three hundred dollars at a time just to get more more more of these guys, and...

...it wasn't enough. They looked like these guys but they weren't these guys. They could guess what would happen and what had happened but they couldn't tell me for sure. Only the mangaka could tell me for sure and she wasn't going to, not until next month or the one after if she was sick as she often was. (Sound familiar?)

That's how I feel about fanfic now. It's supposed to be the guys but it isn't the guys and the pale fanfic reflection just mocks me with its meretricious resemblance to the *real* guys, off doing their unknowable thing in the sealed-off recesses of Minekura's brain.

Unfortunately the fanfic where this happens most signally is my own. And if even my own resources fail me, there would seem to be no obvious solution to the problem.