Waddle Around the Web

My online resources for the research paper are actually a lot of fun, because the lead right back to my research topic: Fanfiction! I needed a way to link an actual fanfic work into the paper, which started me back at reading the works that'd I'd first considered when Dr. Burton first planted the idea in my head. I've found two that I'm using in the research paper, and I wanted to include them as my online resources.

First, we have The Seussification of Romeo and Juliet. I've already gone on for a long while with the textual analysis of this piece, as well as including a link back to it for you, but I've decided to put it here again. Wah-la, la link: The Seussification of Romeo and Juliet. This one is a great online source because of the methods I had to use to find it. I went in under the usual Shakespeare category for "Plays" at www.fanfiction.net and began a quick perusal. Here's how my method of determining a good fanfic over a bad or decent fanfic comes in. Below the summary of each story, the site keeps track of specific details: when it was posted and/or updated, the genre it's playing with, the rating, and--the most important part--the number of reviews/comments. Now, because the category of Shakespeare is considerable for plays (something like 2000 stories have been posted), I'll give you this math. (Remember, in a bigger category like Harry Potter that has over 500,000 Fanfiction stories, math like this would need to be adjusted.) The story was posted in 2008, meaning that it's had four years to garner reviews, but it's also been pushed back to the 17th page (based on when it was posted), with each page holding twenty stories, making it harder to find. Now, it only has the one chapter, so, in a category like Shakespeare and given these variables, the math goes like this: one to six comments on the fanfic deem it 'bad' to 'tolerable', seven to thirteen comments make it 'average', and anything over fourteen comments makes it 'really, really good'. If you had a multiple chapter story you would multiply but also take off ten reviews or so for every three chapters, just because people aren't likely to post on every single update. Now, here's the commenting on The Seussification of Romeo and Juliet: 20 comments, making it 'really, really good'.

I go through and, rather than scanning the summaries to begin with, I look at the ratings-to-chapter ratio, just so I get that feel for it. Only then will I look at a summary and consider the story--just because sometimes it's REALLY not what you want to read. You have no idea how many Mercutio/Benvolio works are out there, the weirdos. That's exactly what led me to this and the other work, Modern Day Ghosts.

Modern Day Ghosts is actually one of the exceptions to the rule, because it only has five comments for a one-chapter story. There are other factors I haven't talked about, such as genre, that can complicate this system, which is why I only gave you the basic math. Anyways, the two genres listed for Modern Day Ghosts are supernatural and friendship, which can attribute to the lack of comments just because this aren't as popular of a story type. I read it because the summary actually sounded good. (The summary is: Being a ghost, when you get down to it, is really, horribly boring.) Simple and quick, but it led me in. Here's the link, if you wanted to take a look at that one (It's Hamlet): Modern Day Ghosts.