Can somebody explain to me what the word means and what function it serves?

Parody is almost entirely a subset of fanfiction. The main exceptions would be non-contingent references that are so passing as to not even constitute a crossover (like if Zack Braff has a brief fantasy on _Scrubs_ where he is the Green Lantern), or works that are a combination of hostile and disinterested in the source material to the extent that they fail to fulfill even the very very light burden that the particle “fan” places on “fanfiction.”

But this also means that fanfiction is a lot less strange than we think it is, and I think that’s accurate.

I suppose there’s the additional expectation that fanfiction be produced by amateurs, but I don’t think that requirement really holds as much as we might assume it does.

And it even gets a little muddy with things like Robert Jordan _Conan: The Barbarian_ books. Are those fanfic? He’s not Robert E. Howard, but he is doing it with the legal permission and material compensation from the estate/corporation that owns the rights.

The best way to define fanfiction seems to be to cast a wide net and pull in things like Mad Magazine’s “Star Blecch” http://www.startrekanimated.com/mad_main.html. I don’t see any solid literary criteria that seem to differentiate that from what’s on the Internet and is obviously fanfic.

I suppose by that definition, the above radio pieces do qualify as parody, but I think there’s a reverence and imaginative quality about them that I, at least, associate with fanfic.

So they can be both parody and fanfic at the same time, right?

Search for any major hard rock song by a band listened to by people born in the early 90s on YouTube, and somewhere, probably not too far down, you’ll find a fan-made video montage of the exploits – canonical, fanmade, or other – of one or more anime characters.

AMV deserves special mention because of the volume of work done, how long it’s been done, and the number of people who do it, but the concept has kind of gone global across genres.

Search for “In the End” on YouTube, and you’ll get a Dragonball video before you get one of Linkin Park.

Bizarrely, if you instead search for “It Doesn’t Even Matter,” you get a fan-made One Tree Hill video before you get to Linkin Park.

Ok, so maybe movies aren’t necessarily “unlikely.”

I also propose movies like _Pearl Harbor_ and _Titanic_. Yeah, they’re historical fiction, BUT… I mean, they’re about characters inserted and created for the purpose of that insertion into pre-existing worlds; what I guess makes it difficult is that the worlds they’re being thrust into are actual moments in real history, not fake worlds based on the real world for the purpose of the story.

So this makes me ask you, is all historical fiction a type of fanfic?

Would you count a celebrity cameo (movie, TV, OR book, I suppose) that somehow saves the day or at least helps the protagonist do so? If that’s the case, I can think of quite a few.

My dreams. And apparently Fenzel’s, too.