Fan Characters vs Original Characters..........with Cakes.

A diversion from my current dealings to bring to you good people a quite thought provoking and dare I say, philosophical, look on Fan Characters and Original Characters with cakes used for analogy.


For you see any franchise is like a cake; some people will love it and crave more of it like insatiably hungry fat kids, others will take a bite and find it not to their liking and others still will avoid the cake altogether. Perhaps they don't like almonds and its an almond cake or something...but I digress.


Sadly like any cake and unlike wine, a franchise will go stale after a prolonged period of time. Its followers may move on at this point and find a new favourite cake while others will zealously stick by the stale Battenberg that is their favourite franchise and continue savouring it even if its attraction has long past gone.

The Cake Maker may sometimes try to reinvigorate the cake recipe; by making a brand new cake to replace the old or by taking a different spin on the old favourite.These choices in turn have an effect on the cake's numerous fans and separates them.

Some fans will appreciate the new cake as an improvement over the old one and fall in love with it all over again. While others will hate the new cake with a passion and probably call the cake makers a ''sellout'' or ''mainstream loser'' or something.

Things can go about in a cycle until, well, the end of all things really.

But then something odd happens within the legions of cake-munching loyalists. They seek to seemingly make their favourite cake more than an enjoying endeavour, no, they seek to make it much more personal than that...


Fans of a franchise begin creating their own characters or stories based off their favourite cake, err, franchise which when you think about it is tantamount to creating your own cake with everything you loved about your favourite cake but with your own personal touches like heart shaped icing or rainbow sprinkles and such. What jolly good fun! I hear you cry...

...This however is where things become ever more problematic.


Most fans create what is known as 'Fan characters' there own creations intermingled with the original creators own characters but more often than not the Fan characters are carbon copies of an original character and given all manner of different traits, weapons, powers, romances, etc in a bid to make the fan character stand out from the rest. Sadly so does nearly everyone else with a fan character. In essence, many fan characters are like the original cake smothered in the fan's favourite toppings to the point it could give anyone a diabetic shock. Its just too much...

Many other fans still enjoy this over-sweetened mass of sugar and preservatives though as it still has the base of the original cake lying somewhere beneath. Many of these people however are also ones who have tried their hand at a Fan Cake. This is the main and critical flaw with these kinds of cakes; its bake by numbers and in the end the fan's plight to make it their unique cake makes nearly every cake the same gaudy, sticky mass with whatever was good with the cake in the first place usually lost under a sea of chocolate shavings and icing.


Then their are others who take a truer view on cakes. A person who enjoys the cake and is so inspired by what it has done for them its motivates them to take up the spoon and flour themselves and create their own cakes.

These people create ''Original Characters'' characters inspired by their favourites but crafted with the fans own ingredients. As good as it is to see some people trying to become the next big cake making mogul not all people are born with a whisk and a handful of eggs in their hands.

Some original creations are terrible, either due to the creators own inability to bake a good cake or to other circumstance but all in all some people just can't make a good cake. But top marks for trying! You can't expect to get it right on your first try and Rome wasn't built in a day, nor was it built out of cake but that's beside the point.

Point is even if their effort is lopsided, tastes like an old sock, or gives you chronic bowel pains its still worth praise for trying to do something different and not resort to their favourite cake's recipe like others have.

So Bravo, Indie Cake Making Guy, Bravo!



These cakes be it original or fan made are rarely left in a cupboard to drift into obscurity, before making the pantry attract flies and is subsequently thrown out.

No, many creators of cakes showcase their works at a cake showcasing place (Read: deviantART)

And when under scrutiny things turn ugly...

Many creators of Fan Cakes get panned by more experienced cake makers for showing such little intuition or effort in making a cake and so the fan cake makers band together in small cliques of baking anonymity rarely dealing with others except for fellow fan cake makers who've been shunned just as they have. Hell some fan cake makers skip the above and go straight to the other fans because they feel lonely just by themselves....and their cake.


A lot of the cakes being showcased are of this type, though original cake makers try to make a name for themselves too.

The Original Cakes, as per the name I've just given them, garner much less attention than their Fan-made brethren. This is partly due to the fact that its only really relevant to its creator and unless its an awesome cake, it'll be doomed to a short shelf-life before it is forgotten for the rest of time. It is also partly due to the over-saturation of Fan Cakes which seemingly are baked in such numbers Ethiopia needn't go hungry again! (..Hurray!)

To conclude this before I wind up making a joke about a sweet cream filled sponge being purely fictitious (..too late). Lets recap:


The Fan Cakes are like a knock off a popular brand of cake which band together in order to set a foundation for themselves and are proud of it, yet in the eyes of the non-fan cake makers they're still just knock offs.

The Original Cakes are like home made cakes, some are really good, others are going to leave you with your head in the toilet bowl. They get much less attention than Fan Cakes due to smaller numbers and aren't linked as such with any popular brand of cake and so many fly under the Cake-Radar™


That is all I can push this analogy for I hope you've found it informative and possibly arousing. If you wish any further discussion I'll be in my study...eating cake. Toodles!