User blog:Staticcat/article about YOU

''' THINGS UNHEARD OF: ORIGINALITY ON A FAN SITE?!? '''

Since 2009, the Sonic Fan Characters Wiki has been the home of hundreds of fans wanting to share their creations with the world (or at least the website). Everything from stories, to characters, to roleplays are put there, most of which Sonic the hedgehog-themed. But in recent times, this website has been more than just a showcase for Sonic-themed fictional stories and characters. New users are diverting from the normal and creating original things!

The user known as KniroAndTito3915 (For our purposes, KAT) has created a comic-making spark on this website with their formerly-themed-now-original comic book series, “Lippies” that has four “versions,” each with about 10 comic books each. The newer version of “Lippies” is about an anthro-pomorphic leopard, Kniro, and his sidekick, an anthropomorphic mink named Tito. They team up with a wolf named Paws to help stop the evil force that created a mind-controlling breakfast cereal, “Kissy-Lips.” Recently, Kat has been experimenting with styles to try to get rid of the Sonic-style they’ve been working with. “The Sonic style is a disease!” says KAT on an art website. “Even my non-Sonic characters are in that style!” KAT has even resorted to realistic half-animal-half-human drawings to rid of the style, as evident on the page “Clyde the Cat,” which has a box at the top telling that the page is “close enough to a fan character.” KAT has multiple websites, one called the Lippies Wiki, about this and other comics drawn in their own style. These include “Taters” and “The Doggie Diner,” which are also adventures of anthropomorphic animals. Others include the “Animal OC Wiki,” where people can write stories about their no-fandom-involved animal characters, and the “Joke Character Wiki,” where people can put their gag characters instead of filling the Sonic Fan Characters Wiki with them.

                Another user, Zy BG9k (AKA B.G.), could be the next Youtube and gaming star. Working with the programs Macromedia Flash 8 and Swivel, he is able to create animated short films featuring his and others’ characters. One example is the short film “Finley’s World” about a young mouse animal wondering about the world.” He has also taken a page of comics made by another user (used with permission) and animated it into his longest animated feature, which he called “Animation Test 3.” Not only has he made animations, he has partially completed a number of ROM hacks of the 1991 game, Sonic the Hedgehog. In these new versions, the playable character, Sonic, is replaced with a character created by either him or another user. The farthest B.G. has gotten on a ROM hack was the game he made for the user Sam237, with some zone names changed and  color schemes switched out. "I'm not that great in 68k assembly (the programming language in Genesis games)," says B.G. on the site. "And I'm not that awesome in animations." But contrary to what he says, most of the users on the site respect and admire him, even though he is the only user on the site to be successful without any characters. B.G. is planning to make more and longer animations based on roleplays and other comics, and his own games in the future, probably with the help of Sam237.

                If this continues, the Sonic Fan Characters Wiki will be a safe place for people to create new, non-fandom things and learn about how not to make "Mary-sues" and "Gary-Stus," or otherwise unoriginal and ripoff characters. So, are fandom sites just for fandom? When the users are bent on making something great, not always.

