I had a very busy week and didn’t quite get my planned review post done in time so, rather than leave you with something incomplete or nothing at all, I decided to try something that wouldn’t require me to re-read entire stories in order to make sure I have my facts straight… a generalized author recommendation.
Early in my time on Fanfiction.net, my main approach to finding new stories to read was to read more or less everything by an author I liked, then poke through their favourites lists and repeat the process. (A digital successor to my very conservative approach to trying new print authors back in my teen years and before.)
Two of the fics I discovered in that process which really stick in my memory to this day were A boy in the hand (a Ranma-Sailor Moon comedy where Hotaru decides to try and catch a boyfriend) and Glaring Problems (a comedy which starts everything off with Uzumaki Naruto decides that maybe the civilians of Konoha should know what it’s like to have countless pairs of eyes glaring down at you).
As a sample of said humour, here’s a paragraph from the latter story’s take on Team 7 meeting the Demon Brothers on their first real mission:
Team 7 crested a hill, only to find a pair of nin standing back to back in the center of the path, surrounded by an ungodly amount of orange squirrels who just stared at them unmoving.
Both of these fics are written by the same author: dogbertcarroll. …an author with a knack for creative ideas, and an amazing rate of output (despite, apparently, having trouble keeping volunteers willing to transcribe handwritten prose) …but “a bit of a problem completing stories” would be an understatement.
Even the automatic “96 stories” listing Fanfiction.net generates is misleading, since over 800,000 words of that is in nine “Fragments” stories… compilations of whatever new ideas for first (and sometimes, second, third, fourth, etc.) chapters come to dogbertcarroll’s mind… occasionally getting split out into their own stories if they get long enough.
That said, it’s not to say longer stories never get updates. For example, Walking in the shadows is over 70,000 words and still receives the occasional update. (In it, D’Hoffryn convinces Xander Harris to accept an interdimensional detour for his roadtrip and he picks up Sirius Black as a travelling buddy.)
The key to enjoying dogbertcarroll’s work is to treat it less like your novel of the week, and more like a newspaper comic strip or bathroom reader… A little, usually self-contained bit of entertainment of predictable character to receive in your inbox as a pleasant surprise every now and then. In other words, sort of like the Lone Traveler series of shorts by dunuelos (basically Quantum Leap, Harry Potter edition) or the multi-author Infinite Loops multiverse started by Innortal, but with less of a concrete theme to risk growing tired of.
On the other hand, dogbertcarroll does still update some longer fics on occasion. For example, Lex Marks The Spot, in which, Xander Harris wakes up as Lex Luthor and decides to fix as much as he can, while trolling the Justice League with his comics-originated knowledge of when and how they’re likely to spy on him.
In short, if you’re willing to try out high-quality funny fics with the caveat that they are likely to never be completed, I highly recommend dogbertcarroll.
Enjoy. 🙂
Fanfiction Author Feature – dogbertcarrol by Stephan Sokolow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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