Okay, first off, as for Avatar… I have to say, I am actually leaning more towards racebending.com’s perception of things. I mean, Katara and Sokka and their people are based on the Inuit… and the casting call for them stated ‘Caucasian or any other ethnicity’. Doesn’t that seem odd? The two actors picked to play these characters are pretty damn Anglo-Saxon looking, and I find that just a little bit sad. It would have been really exciting to see some up and coming actors who at least remotely looked Inuit. So, whilst I will not boycott the movie, I can clearly see that there is some stuff going on there that I would rather wasn’t.

Now, on to what I wanted to say about live-action remakes in general. When you see an actor cast in the role of a character that has only been either cartoon or an image in your imagination – as with characters from books – it is so very highly unlikely that the actor will look exactly like you imagined them that it is sort of ridiculous to try. What has to be attained is the right ‘feel’. Not everyone was perfectly happy with casting choices from The Lord of the Rings, but no one can doubt that the cast really ‘owned’ their characters. They managed to embody them, even if they weren’t the spitting image.

Now, that’s not to say that it doesn’t matter at all what the actors look like, I mean, I care about the Avatar actors so there’s proof to that. But I am also extremely leery of who is going to be cast in The Song of Ice and Fire series that HBO is going to make. I really hope this series will be good, and the actors cast good, but not overly known ones. I think that would work best, I mean, that’s what worked so well for the Harry Potter movies.

On the flip side to that, the Cowboy Bebop film is going to be starring Keanu Reeves as Spike, but I honestly think that could work. Either way, with all these things, people care. People love Cowboy Bebop, they love Song of Ice and Fire, so what they don’t want to see is crappy remakes of them.

Fanfic as it is today started in the 60’s, an homage to the sci fi genre mostly, but it originated in the many re-tellings of the Arthurian saga. So, the original Star Trek wasn’t really my bag, but I know it was (and is) incredible to some… and I suppose I can see enjoying making up story lines for your favorite characters afterward… but it just doesn’t sit right with me.

I really dislike the notion of taking a body of work, and because you don’t like that a certain something happened in that series, just taking it off in your own direction because that suits you better. What about story continuity? What about story credibility? What about what the author wanted? The only time I would condone altering major plotlines is when they utterly suck, see the Soldier Son Trilogy by Robin Hobb – her worst work by far, but if it sucks that bad, then don’t read it! As I did with the Soldier Son, stopped a short way into book two… I’m sorry, Nevare, I am so sorry for what she did to you.

As I said, apart from that, it just sits badly… like pants tailored for someone else. I find myself wondering if people who write fanfic are trying to use it as a jumping platform for launching their own writing… but I would suggest that writing your own stories, with your own characters, would actually work for you in that way.

I would have to say, though, that I could excuse fanfic that used a world, rather than chracters, as a medium. I would say that you could see some excellent second party writing for the worlds of the Malazan series, the Harry Potter series, and the Wheel of Time series. But as for the rest of it, please people, believe that you can come up with your own stuff!