Let's Talk Fanworks 001: Your Unwritten Magnum Opus?

[lordyellowtail]

I've been online doing fannish things on the internet roughly since America Online began offering a flat rate monthly fee. So, without giving my precise age, I think it's safe to say it's been a while.

And in that time, I've written a lot of fanfic. Some of it is finished. Too much of it isn't. Most of it is a crossover of one kind or another, because I have a serious weakness for those. The challenge of making them work and balancing two or more canons so that everything fits together and examining the parallels and differences between characters that are iconic within their own fandoms is a lot of fun.

tl;dr: I have written and continue to write a lot of fanfic.

But in all that time there has been one big project that I've always wanted to do, and never managed to start. Something that's been in my head for so many years it's actually highly developed. But like trying to grab a snowflake, part of me is wary of actually trying to do it in case I destroy the (hopefully) awesomeness in my head in my attempt to make it manifest.

One fun side effect to this is the longer it lingers, the more nostalgia cred it (hopefully) accumulates.

Question: Does anyone else have one of these floating around their heads?

A relatively short (given the massive amount of brainstorming I've done on this) intro to mine is under the cut.
I'll briefly say mine is a decades-spanning Disney Afternoon/pulp superhero fusion/crossover that puts Kit Cloudkicker from TaleSpin into the role of The Shadow based on the early 1990s movie, spanning a time period from the late 1930s (post-Tale Spin) through the mid 1960s (featuring a younger Scrooge McDuck and Mickey Mouse as Mighty Mouse alongside intrepid reporter Minnie Mousekowitz), working alongside an OC anthro panther Phantom in a proto-Justice Society fighting criminals and aliens and a far more dangerous but still just as hilarious Don Karnage and his Air Pirates, who got in bed with the Nazis during the Second World War. Eventually Molly Cunningham would get old enough and crazy awesome enough to become The Rocketeer.

Since this story is pulp-inspired, this time period is very much a dark and dangerous, bare-knuckled badassery and bullets version of the past, just with furry animal people. But it's still the Disney Afternoon universe--just with the broadcast standards and practices censors removed.


After Kit is frozen in 1965 in the vein of Mel Gibson from Forever Young, during his last confrontation with Karnage, There would be a timeskip to the late 20th/early 21st century of this universe, where the world's greatest heroes are now Darkwing Duck--whose whole persona is intentionally a tribute to the Shadow--and Gizmoduck, who's trying to emulate Mighty Mouse, who no one's seen since 1970. Molly's still alive, but otherwise the only possible connections Kit has to his own time who remember him are the son of his personal driver, one Goofy Goof of Spoonerville, and Scrooge, who's somehow managed not to age a day.

But then he realizes Goofy's son is dating a girl named Roxanne that's the spitting image of his late wife, murdered by Don Karnage in 1965, and he's suddenly faced with the possibility that Karnage was lying when he told Kit he murdered the baby. Because if the old pirate was lying, there's a very good chance he's a grandfather...

And on top of that mystery and reintegrating himself with the present time, there remains the question of whether the world even needs the Shadow anymore, or a flyboy philanthropist, or whether the era of his sort of adventuring is passed...

Then again, sometimes the old ways are best.