Misappropriated Fanfiction Theater: #1

If there’s one thing that absolutely forces me to write, it’s coming across a great idea that’s been insufficiently developed to my tastes.

Now when this urge leads to a full work of fanfiction, that’s good, because I can share it with others.

But sometimes, all I’m inspired to write is a single scene, and then what do I do with it?

The best piece of fanfiction I ever wrote was a re-write of a single chapter of somebody else’s Invader Zim fanfic. It was perfect, and chances are that nobody else will ever see it.

This has happened to me twice so far with another author’s Fimfiction. What I would like to do, with a feeble attempt at humility, is to post them. Now I wouldn’t have done this unless I was mightily impressed by the work I was...err...borrowing from, let me state that up front.

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The first re-written scene is from a sequel to ROBCakeran53’s “My Little Dashie”, “The After Years”, by Dasterlos. I shouldn’t have to describe the former, and of the latter, it’s about how the nameless narrator moves on with his life, marrying and raising a human daughter.

The scene in question is when the wife discovers the photo album:

Goodness. I've never panicked so much in my entire life. She found it. She actually found the photo album.

Her original tone when calling me from downstairs sounded as if she were frustrated or angry, and I assumed as usual it was something silly like I had forgotten to flush the toilet, or I didn't make the bed. When I went upstairs and walked into the room, I froze completely, my jaw dropped as low as naturally possible and my eyes staring at my wife in horror, filled with worry.

There she stood, holding the photo album in her two hands. Her expression said it all. What is this? How did I not know of this? How long have you had this for? And yet she kept her mouth shut, expecting some sort of explanation. I really wish I could speak at this point, but the feeling of horror and shock had overcome me.

She broke the silence by putting it down and taking out the note Rainbow Dash had left before leaving. She read it out loud for me, word for word, exactly how I had remembered reading it for the first time. It was then that all feelings of shock had vanished, and tears started coming out of my eyes. That depression was back, and it came with merciless vengeance.

I couldn't help it. I cried like a baby. She obviously stood there confused, but nevertheless she walked over to give me a hug, trying to calm me down. I love this woman, I thought to myself. Even at times at confusion and conflict, she still cares about me so. I suppose it was also to keep quiet and not wake up Darcey as it was way past her bedtime.

An hour had passed where I finally calmed down and she came back to expecting a full explanation. What else could I do? The pictures were there, clear as day. The note sounded nothing like I would write, and the handwriting(sorry, mouthwriting) was completely different from mine. I spilled the beans big time. This was Rainbow Dash from the fictional cartoon My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. I could see it in her eyes, this was far too much. A cartoon character from a show made for little girls? See, she didn't pick up on the Brony culture much back in its hey-days, so it did make a bit of sense that she showed revolt.

That's when I held her by the hands, looked her in the eyes, and gave her my two cents.

"Look, darling. You may think I'm a lunatic, and that I photoshopped these photos as a result. I don't expect you to believe it, much as I don't expect anyone to believe in God unwillingly. But take it from me, those were the best 15 years of my life whether or not you want to believe them. Either way, it's in the past and it's gone. It's history. All that matters now is you, me, and little Darcey sleeping nice and quiet in her room".

She bought it. Thank God she did. I suppose what sold it was that I didn't expect her to believe me, but how could I? But I could see it in her eyes that deep down she did buy the possibility of this happening. I suppose it was my tears that gave it off, who knew.

It came with a catch, though. I had to tell Darcey that she wasn't my first daughter. Oh boy... this is gonna be interesting...

It’s a good scene, certainly. But in my opinion there were two things wrong with it.

First, we have an opportunity to revisit the events of “My Little Dashie”, and they are glossed over. This would have been a perfect opportunity to reveal things that were never in the original fanfic.

And second, the wife is convinced by faith alone, when there was a so much better way to handle this.

Anyway, here’s my take, starting and ending with Dasterlos’ words:

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Goodness. I’ve never panicked so much in my entire life. She found it. She actually found the photo album.

Her original tone when calling me from downstairs sounded as if she were frustrated or angry, and I assumed as usual it was something silly like I had forgotten to flush the toilet, or I didn’t make the bed. When I went upstairs and walked into the room, I froze completely, my jaw dropped as low as naturally possible and my eyes staring at my wife in horror, filled with worry.

There she stood, holding the photo album in her two hands. Her expression said it all. What is this? How did I not know of this? How long have you had this for? And yet she kept her mouth shut, expecting some sort of explanation. I really wish I could speak at this point, but the feeling of horror and shock had overcome me.

She broke the silence by putting it down and taking out the note Rainbow Dash had left before leaving. She read it out loud for me, word for word, exactly how I had remembered reading it for the first time. It was then that all feelings of shock had vanished, and tears started coming out of my eyes. That depression was back, and it came with merciless vengeance.

I couldn’t help it. I cried like a baby. She obviously stood there confused, but nevertheless she walked over to give me a hug, trying to calm me down. I love this woman, I thought to myself. Even at times at confusion and conflict, she still cares about me so. I suppose it was also to keep quiet and not wake up Darcey as it was way past her bedtime.

An hour passed where I finally calmed down and she came back to expecting a full explanation.

Gingerly, I sat down beside her on the bed, and took the album out of her hands. “There are only two possible explanations,” I told her. “Let me start with the most-rational, common-sense version.”

I opened the photo album so it spanned both our laps. The first page showed my parents’ wedding photo. “Once upon a time,” I began, “I lived in a dying city. It had been beautiful, once, but the beauty had died before I was even born. My parents had seen that beauty, and they loved it.” I turned the pages slowly, allowing Nikki time to look back and forth between me and the pictures my mother had taken of my family. “They tried to live there and raise me to be a decent human being, but in the end, the city won.”

I stopped, on a photo I had made of my parent’s gravestones. You could tell that this picture was taken by me and not by my mother: it was blurry, over-exposed, and Father’s headstone was nearly clipped out of the picture.

I turned to the next page. It was blank. “I tried to continue on with my life, living in my parent’s house, but things kept getting worse and worse. I was in my twenties then, and convinced that the world had cheated me out of my happiness, and that I was allowed to claim that happiness by force. I did some really, really stupid things in those years. I told you once that I have a criminal record. This page used to contain mementoes of what I did then. Cruel, thoughtless things. I was becoming nearly as heartless as the city.” I glanced over to see Nikki looking quietly over at me. Was she wondering what manner of man she had married? What she would hear next would be much worse.

“One day I woke up from a drunken party at my house and saw that one of my mother’s paintings had been damaged. That’s what my mother was: a landscape painter. She couldn’t get any work in her last years, so in between raising me she painted the walls with visions of how she remembered the city used to be. I have no idea if that’s how it actually looked. I think she was painting 50 % memories, and 50 % dashed dreams. But seeing what one of my so-called ‘friends’ had done to that painting finally caused me to snap out of my funk. Maybe it was me who spray-painted that word--I honestly don’t remember. I chased all of them out of there, made it clear I was done with them, and most especially, made it abundantly clear that I wasn’t afraid of them. They never bothered me again.

“And so I was alone again, and my life fell apart.” Having prepared her, I turned the page. The pictures on this page had always disturbed me. Perhaps when Nikki was flipping through these pages before, she didn’t notice. After all, Dashie’s note was sitting right here. But looking at them, her eyes slowly grew wide.

Ostensibly, these photos showed me at the zoo. Me at the local malt shop with my friends. Me throwing a Frisbee at my dog. Photos of an average single guy enjoying an average single life. But they were fakes, every one of them. I had photographed myself in front of a cheap green screen and then inserted myself into clip art and stills from movies. I was even hanging out with a colorized Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep. Worst of all, of course, were the expressions on my face in those photos. Stiff, plastic smiles with eyes that were far too round--the face of someone trying to smile who no longer remembered how. A look of madness.

Nikki saw all of this, and I knew that I did not need to say anything.

“I spent all my free time on the internet,” I said. “Joining the vast culture of young male snarkers. We’d pick some innocent fad, and tear it to pieces with our ridicule. How quickly I fell back into my old ways! So one day, we decided to take down this new children’s cartoon that we had decided was proof of the death-knell of artist-driven originality in Hollywood. That cartoon was a reboot of the venerable My Little Pony franchise called Friendship Is Magic. I mean, the title alone just invited derision.”

I shook my head incredulously. “I could not be more wrong. That silly little cartoon turned out to be the best-written series of that year. Maybe it was my vulnerable emotional state, I dunno. But one character in that show really stood out to me: Rainbow Dash. No, I know exactly why she stood out to me.” Reaching into an envelope of loose photographs at the start of the album, I pulled one out and handed it to my listener. “This is my mother’s masterpiece: Sunrise Over the Park Street Bridge. It was painted on the biggest wall in the house, opposite the fireplace, and was superbly lit in springtime. The rainbow in that painting was the most colorful thing in the house. In my heart, that rainbow was my mother, everything she dreamed for me, everything she wished the world could be. So when I saw a cartoon character inspired by the rainbow, I wanted it. I would do anything to have it.”

Now came the hard part.

“One day when I was walking home from my dead-end job, I stumbled across a cardboard box. And in that box I found my very own Rainbow Dash, a helpless filly so much younger than she was on the show. So I took her home, and raised her as my own.” I turned the page to the first of the photos of the filly Dashie in my home.

Nikki looked at me incredulously, as was to be expected from any normal human being.

“Of course, this is absurd,” I continued with a forced smile. “What really happened is that I lost my mind. Unable to deal with the horrible world I lived in, and too poor to leave, I retreated into fantasy. You can already see that I was dabbling with false reality. I now dived in head first. I documented a complete parallel life with my new daughter. Yes, I actually treated her as my own daughter, and took all the photographs that a proud father would expect to take. Here she is with a new toy, here she is at her first birthday, here’s her first molt, and here we are watching NASCAR together. I had obviously got a lot better at faking photographs.”

I flipped through them, pages and pages of a filly becoming a mare and a young man approaching middle age.

“This went on for fifteen years,” I continued. “Let me say that again: I persisted in this madness for fifteen years. In that time I took online classes, got out of retail, and became a system administrator. This may sound admirable, but remember that I was doing all this for a daughter who did not exist. I finally saved enough money so that I could move out here, to this wonderful home. And I did it so my pegasus daughter could fly to her heart’s content without being discovered. Because that was my greatest fear, that she would be discovered and taken away. Of course, what I was really fearing was somebody telling me the truth: that I had lost my grip on reality, and that I had to give up the cyan pony in order to reclaim it. Dashie and I went through many adventures in that time: I taught her to fly, she broke the sound barrier, she even discovered that she was a cartoon character. You would think that would snap me out of my delusion, but it didn’t.”

I did my best not to look to my side. The last thing I wanted was to see what my wife was thinking right now.

I flipped back to the page with Dashie’s farewell letter and finished my story. “One day, I finally managed to come up with a way to cure myself. Dashie came from a cartoon with a lot of magic--she was a pegasus, after all. In the scenario I created, the characters from that show used magic to visit me. They had an elaborate and very convincing explanation for how I had managed to discover a filly Rainbow Dash, and why they were only now coming to reclaim her. And we agreed through tears that it would be best for Dashie to spend the rest of her life in a world where she wouldn’t have to live in fear of being discovered. And so magic was used to put her back in her magical world, to restore her memories to canon, and to remove all physical proof that she had ever lived with me. Delusions are awfully good at covering their tracks like that. All I was left with was my memories, and that photo album, including that letter.

“That is the first explanation of what happened. The believable explanation. The sane explanation.”

I finally looked up at her face. To my surprise, there were tears in her eyes. For a long time, neither of us spoke.

“You really loved her, didn’t you?” she asked me softly.

I was speechless.

She flipped back through the pages. “You always like to brag about how great you are with computers, but I know better.” She pulled out a picture of me giving Dashie a bath. “You’re not smart enough to know how to frame this picture with just a green screen. The water effects alone would be beyond you. And unlike your mother, you don’t have the artistic talents to have drawn all of those animated poses. They work too well for you to have taken them from any other source. There is a real feeling of weight here.”

“You...you’re just guessing!” I protested.

I was protecting her, I really was. I had spent years doubting my sanity, even with the evidence of the photo album. I had no wish to drag my wife into that unhappy place. It seemed better for her to think me a recovering lunatic than to force her to question her own sanity.

Nikki sighed and pulled out the feather which was carefully taped to the page. “Then tell me how you faked this.” I had handled it so many times over the years that I had stopped looking at it for what it was: an impossible object. It was a cartoon feather, in a real world. It felt like no object on earth. It seemed to glow with an inner light, yet illuminated nothing around it. Nikki passed it from her shadow to right in front of the lamp, and it retained exactly the same shade of cyan coloring, even as her hand changed shades in all the ways that real objects do.

“My heart and mind were at war when I found this album, but this is the feather that broke the camel’s back: I have no choice but to believe you.”

It came with a catch, though. I had to tell Darcey that she wasn't my first daughter. Oh boy... this is gonna be interesting...