Fandom-Specific Plot/Live-Action TV

Examples of Fandom-Specific Plots based on Live-Action TV include:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

• The (in)famous Yet Another Halloween Fic sub-genre of fanfiction, in which Xander (and possibly other characters) choose a different outfit for the fateful Halloween when Ethan Rayne turned everyone into their costumes. Invariably, these will be the costumes of recognizable characters, particularly from anime.
• What might be termed the "Slayer Speculation Fic", in which the famous, strong female character of the author's choice from another fandom is called as a Slayer by Willow's spell in the series finale.
• A number of stories portray Xander as still having the essence of the hyena spirit inside of him. It seems to often draw him to Oz or Spike, one being a werewolf, the other being a dominant predator.
• There are three standard Willow/Tara plots:
  1. Rewrite season four to show all the details of how Willow and Tara fell in love. (The TV show didn't show this.)
  2. Rewrite season six so that Tara doesn't die.
  3. A post-season six story in which Tara comes back from the dead.
• Rewrites of season 1-4 episodes to include Dawn, or specifically the altered memories of the cast that include Dawn.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly Common Crossovers

• Book is (or was) a Watcher.
• River is a Slayer, and the Academy was a corrupt version of the Watcher's Council. (Well, more corrupt than usual.)
• Rarely will more than one or two of the Scooby Gang feature, and it's usually Xander or Willow transported to the future/an alternate dimension via magical portal or suspended animation.
• Xander is an enormous Badass, since he only has normal humans to fight, and has spent his life surviving against creatures at least twice as fast and strong as he is.
• Mal will be mistaken for Caleb. Zoe and Jayne's resemblance to Jasmine and Hamilton may also be brought up, but this occurs less frequently.

Doctor Who

• The Doctor Who episode "Doomsday" spawned hundreds, if not thousands, of 10/Rose Reunion fics, an event which became canon with "Journey's End". After that, everyone is writing the 10.5-and-Rose-in-the-alternate-universe fic.
• It seems you don't actually get your Doctor Who fanfic writer's union card until you've written an "Eighth Doctor fights in the Time War and/or Ninth Doctor regenerates in the Time War and/or both angst about the Time War" fic.
• More like Fandom Specific Title, but the Literary Allusion Title "World enough, and time" is practically irresistible to Whofic writers.
• So you have a story. In it, the Doctor lands the TARDIS on Earth near where you live and meets a human with an inexplicable resemblance to you. He decides this human will be his new companion and the two of them go off to have wacky adventures together. Congratulations, we'll add it to the pile.
• Stories in which Donna recovers her memories are quite common, usually taking place either at the end of her life (usually elderly) with the Doctor visiting her one last time, or by miraculously being able to remember everything without her mind burning itself up in the process. The latter is accomplished by the Doctor figuring out some clever way to save her that he didn't before, or by regeneration.
• Fics where the Doctor regenerates into an eight year old/an animal/a girl^[1]/pretty much anything else.
• River Song's true identity used to be a mystery and many different scenarios and theories were written about it, usually by somehow making her be a future version of a companion, namely Rose Tyler, Donna Temple-Noble or Amy Pond. While they significantly died down since the events of "A Good Man Goes To War" and "Let's Kill Hitler", Alternate Universe Fics are still being written that ignore some or all the events of those episodes.
  • Also relating to River, "Forest Of The Dead" Fix Fics are common, as well as fanfics involving her and the Doctor going to the Singing Towers.
• Fans of The Sarah Jane Adventures like to have an earlier incarnation of the Doctor, usually the third or fourth, although any will do, show up at Sarah Jane's house.
• Within Torchwood fandom, a truly mind-boggling number of Jack/Ianto Hurt/Comfort Fics involve the characters showering together—often not even romantically, but simply because one or the other is hurt and needs help, or is untrustworthy and has to be watched.
  • It seems as if there is no one who hasn't written the "Countrycide" follow up fic.
  • Lots of Fix Fics were written after Children of Earth, either changing the end so Ianto (and occasionally Steven) doesn't die, or bringing him/them back to life somehow. Time Travel is sometimes involved.

Glee

• Blaine-centric stories that transplant the characters to a Film Noir setting are common. Blaine is overwhelmingly the sharp-dressed, jaded Private Detective, the New Directions and the Cheerios are rival nightclubs, and Kurt will either be the person seeking help or connected to them in some way. The Kurt/Blaine fics often end very badly. It's hard to tell how much of it is just faithfulness to the film-noir style, and how much is a reflection of real-life Values Dissonance.
• The badboy!Klaine trend. Blaine or Kurt is Troubled but Cute, and the other is usually very close to their canon persona. Sometimes, especially when Blaine is the bad boy, Dalton is some sort of reform school.
• A good number of Kurt/Blaine fic reference or incorporate "Baby It's Cold Outside", even before the actual duet was released.
• An interesting trend is several stories where Rory and Sugar sleep together, and she becomes pregnant shortly before he returns to Ireland.
• Many future fics involve characters performing together on Broadway. This is particularly common with Rachel/Jesse fics.
• Sugar, Rory, and Harmony being the children of Brittana, Klaine, and Finchel or Faberry (respectively) travelling back in time to visit their parents. Occasionally they also include Sebastian as the son of Kurtofsky.
• Many Sam/Rory fics take place either during Christmas (when the ship was first introduced) or Valentine's Day (in the Christmas episode Sam promised to be Rory's sponsor and help him get a girlfriend for Valentine's Day).

iCarly

• Mostly based around shipping, each ship has a couple specific plots that come up time and again:
  • Sam/Freddie: Having a "Sam gets pregnant" fic is pretty much a rite of passage for any writer. A writing challenge which constantly flooded the site until the end of 2010 was the pair ending up as the lead in a romantic play, usually Romeo and Juliet. Fix Fic reworkings of the episode iSpeed Date.
  • Carly/Freddie: The "Root and Berry Retreat" fic for Creddie (Carly/Freddie) writers in the back half of 2009. Fix Fic reworkings of the episode iKiss.
  • Sam/Carly: Sam is a lesbian, Carly isn't; Hilarity Ensues, as does If It's You It's Okay. A smaller but significant variation involves Carly as a lesbian while Sam isn't.

Law & Order (franchise)

• Law & Order has two:
  1. The other characters mourn for Claire, "the other characters" meaning Lennie if the fic is set right after "Aftershock" or Jack if it's set a while later because more than one person having strong emotions at the same time would just bog things down.
  2. Claire's death gets undone somehow.
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: It's not entirely surprising that many, many Alex/Olivia fics write the missing scene from "Ghost", because the preceding scene deliberately written like that to cheer the shippers up, and then left it nice and ambiguous what it was that they were doing, all by themselves in a hotel room after a meaningful conversation about being someone you're not. Hoo, boy...

Star Trek: The Original Series

• For some reason, any Star Trek: The Original Series Kirk/Spock author worth their salt has written a, if not several, fic(s) featuring the duo in a cave. The "Kirk and Spock are in a shuttlecraft together, it crashes on a godforsaken planet, they hide in a cave, and Spock goes into Pon Farr" plot has even become a Dead Horse Trope in the fandom, parodied by Genre Savvy fans with the "rude person ^{[dead link]}" meme.
  • Kirk/Spock fics set immediately after "Amok Time" are extremely common, using the idea that the shock of "killing" Kirk didn't stop Spock's pon farr so much as postpone it. And now that he doesn't have a wife to mate with...
• The Mary Sue plot. At one time, the term "Mary Sue story" referred to the specific plot parodied by A Trekkie's Tale. This plot was once very common, but is now largely forgotten. The character in the story would be recognized as a Mary Sue by modern standards, but it's much more formulaic and Trek-centric. The 1992 book Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth defines it as follows:

Mary Sue is the youngest officer ever to serve on the starship Enterprise. She is a teenager, tall and slim, with clear skin and straight teeth. If she is not blond, Mary Sue is half Vulcan, her ears delicately pointed. But Mary Sue is not just another pretty face. She is usually highly educated, with degrees from universities throughout the known universe in all fields of technical and cultural studies (or an equivalent head of her class in Starfleet Academy). She can mend the Enterprise with a hairpin, save the lives of the crew through wit, courage, and, occasionally, the sacrifice of her virtue. If the formula is strictly followed. Lieutenant Mary Sue dies in the last paragraph of the story, leaving behind a grieving but safe crew and ship.

Supernatural

• Dean and/or Sam is turned into some kind of monster; one of them isn't a Winchester, so they can be paired safely; a character from another fandom turns out to be their sibling; female equivalents to both brothers are introduced; Dean is also one of the special children.
• A demon summoning calls forth a character from another fandom who does not behave the way demons in Supernatural usually do. E.g.: An attempt to summon "the Morning Star" results in Dawn appearing, dressed up like The Devil for a Halloween party. Or cultists call upon "the Yellow-Eyed Demon" and get Crowley.
• One of the Winchester brothers gets turned into a dog, usually Sam.
• If you ship Dean/Castiel and are willing to write a sex scene, you've written a fic set after 'Free to be You and Me'.

Other works

• Fic dealing with "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"^[2] was common in Stargate Verse slash, though there are a few other fandoms where it's possible.
  • And fics dealing with the military's policy against fraternization are also common on the straight side of things, such as Jack/Carter fics.
• Odds are, any White Collar fic will either have some sort of Ho Yay between Peter and Neal or at least some Neal whumpage. Based on these, it's hard to believe Neal can cross the street without a) breaking something b) getting kidnapped or c) getting some sort of disease of illness that requires Peter and Elizabeth take care of him.
• Back in 2005/2006, probably a good fifth of all Criminal Minds fic involved Reid being kidnapped and tortured. It was so common that people wrote parodies of it. Then the show itself used that plot, and it became less popular in fanfiction.
• Heroes Mohinder/Sylar fans have The Road Trip. It's amazing how much fic there is set in those, what? Three days? Of course, give the nature of their relationship, if they ever secretly had sex, that's when they did it.
• The "Skinner finds out about Mulder's and Scully's relationship" stories in The X-Files fandom. (Which is kind of odd, considering he dropped hints several times in the last two seasons that he already knew about their relationship. Then again, so did everyone else...)
• If you write for How I Met Your Mother and you like Barney/Robin, you have written an episode tag to "Benefits" and/or "Sandcastles in the Sand".
• Power Rangers stories that feature Tommy post-Zeo have two options: tackle the reason for the infamous Dear John letter that caused Tommy and Kimberly to break up, or completely ignore it. Fans have since gotten very tired of new stories that choose to tackle it, to the extent that even season 12, Dino Thunder, which brought Tommy back as an active Ranger, completely ignored his romantic past. Stories that feature Kimberly have no choice but to tackle it, unfortunately.
  • An equally captivating problem for the fans is that of Tommy and Kat, as a Flash Forward episode outright shows them as eventually marrying, which makes the lack of any mention of her and of any implication of Tommy's romantic life from Dino Thunder a complicated issue for 'ficcers to address, as most take the earlier episode as gospel truth.
• A subset of Charmed fanfics are known as "Chris revelation fics", which alter how his true identity is revealed, invariably in ways which increase the drama and/or angst level compared to canon. "Almost obligatory" for a writer in the fandom to have written such a story.
  • There's a related subset, often the same fic or a sequel to one of the above, which allows Chris to in some way survive the end of the sixth season.
• If you're a House fan who likes House/Wilson and Dark!Wilson, it's almost obligatory for you to write a post-Wilson's Heart fic where Wilson loses it after Amber's death and takes it out on House, who is either so brain-damaged or so guilty that he doesn't fight back.
• With Jeeves and Wooster being such an innocent series, there's a good handful of fics involving Bertie discovering the concept of sexuality.
• Top Gear crack fanon considers the Stig an alien with Reality Warper powers. This means that "The Stig did it" is an incredibly common explanation for wackiness in crackfic. Sometimes Top Gear Dog or May's cat gets the blame.
• Merlin fandom is very fond of stories that have the title character reveal his magic to Arthur and/or the rest of Camelot, intentionally or otherwise. These are mostly written since the series has Status Quo Is God in full effect in regard to this, until most likely the eventual Grand Finale (nearly everyone who finds out about his magic tend to end up soon Put on a Bus or dead).