I'm ashamed to say it's something I never thought much about until reading a fanfic a year or two ago. It was a Star Trek Reboot fic that played on the theory that Gaila is green because she photosynthesizes, and postulated that as a result, Orions have a mess of taboos about eating in public...
Yeah, I've been recruited to read/watch several new books/movies/shows by reading crossover fanfiction, and to many by the enthusiasm of my favorite fanfic writers. Fanvids are also great recruiting devices for new fandoms, as well as new musicians.
I'm a pretty fickle tv watcher and almost always stop watching shows before they end, so my list of favorite shows looks something like this:
Currently watching: The Vampire Diaries, Hawaii Five-0, Burn Notice, White Collar, The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
Quality of writing deteriorated so I...
As people may have guessed from all the GRRM fangirling, coming up with complicated and dangerous politics is one of my favorite parts of worldbuilding! My current main worldbuilding project is based (very) loosely on the late Roman Empire, so it's full of multiple different ethnic groups...
LOL. I don't know what it is about fanfiction and incest. One of my friends has a theory that TPTB were trying to thwart slash writers a few years back with the sudden rash of shows and movies focusing on brothers and/or sisters. Instead they got Wincest. ~snickers~
I don't really get the appeal either, but to each their own. ~shrugs~ I'm a devoted Remus/Sirius shipper myself and I know a lot of people think they're platonic or boring or whatever, so I'd be hypocritical to rag on them about their taste if I don't want them ragging on me about mine. :)
Hehe, the Harry Potter fandom has a weirder collection of ships than any other fandom I've ever seen. It's like some people just throw the name of every character, creature, or object, no matter how minor, in a hat and then write a story about whichever two they pull out. Actually, one of the...
Yeah, I agree with this too. I've known some people who put dark elements in their fic just to be "edgy" without much attention to if they actually suit the canon, and I consider that bad writing. But I've also known some people who literally used fanfic as their therapy and I think it's...
I know fanfiction is pretty controversial, even among geeks, but I personally love it. Well, the good stuff anyway, which can admittedly be pretty hard to find if you don't know where to look!
I write fanfic only occasionally, but I read quite a lot. I don't really like original short stories...
Another thing you can do is fiddle around with Chris Pound's fantasy name generators to get names that sound similar to the languages you want. For example, his English female names generator turned out Jessana for me once, which is unusual enough to not have associations for very many people...
Interesting! I've never read the books, but from what you say maybe they should have just changed some names and details and created an entirely new series! I knew about a few of these changes - Elena's hair color and Stefan and Damon being from Renaissance Italy in particular - but not the others.
Heh, same problem here, but with Jaime, not Cersei. Is it Jay-me, is it Hi-may? Apparently it's Jay-me, but having studied Spanish my brain always wants to pronounce it Hi-may. :P
Re: the OP, I don't think normalish names would throw me out of the story in a world based closely on our own. The...