Ok, ok, I admit it, I was asking for it. Going to look - on the pit of voles of all places - for good "Phantom of the Opera" fanfiction, especially since all I know of it comes chiefly from the Leroux book (I've seen the movie that just came out, thanks to BitTorrent *cough*, but that's about it for non-Leroux Phantom), was a bad idea right from the start.
But I wasn't exactly prepared for... well. eh.
Here's a few examples of what I found...
- A rewriting of the story, set in 2000 for the sole purpose of having Christine fall madly in love with Erik, con Raoul into paying for plastic surgery for Erik, and live with beautiful!Erik happily ever after and have lots of beautiful children.
- A frillion "original" characters that Erik ends up falling in love with and forgetting Christine for. I put "original" in quotes because it's almost always either a blind girl or a mute girl. Sigh.
- A frillion badly-done rewritings in which Christine ends up with Erik instead of Raoul. (I can understand liking Christine/Erik - hell, that's my pairing of preference too, Raoul is dull - but for fuck's sake, try and make the rewriting make sense. Don't just have her up and decide, after leaving with Raoul, that oopsie, she loved Erik better after all, and run back to him to live with him in the dungeons happily ever after.)
- A squillion stories claiming to be based on Leroux's book, which break canon in a million ways. (Hello? Erik dies in the end of the book. Rewrite it and stop it from happening if you want, but don't call it canon and based on the book. And don't, for the love of God, call in a gypsy witch to resurrect Erik after he dies because Christine is in twue wuw with him.
And for that matter, book!Erik looks like a corpse, okay? Don't have Christine or your original character state blithely that they find him beautiful, and that his fucked up face makes him all the more fascinating.)
- Entirely too many stories featuring Erik falling in love with the daughter of Raoul and Christine. (Or, worse yet, the son of Raoul and Christine, but don't let me get started on that, please.)
- Slash. Ugh. Raoul/Erik, Christine/Carlotta, Christine/Meg, you name it, it's been written.
- Utterly impossible pairings. I mean - Erik/Carlotta? HELLO?
- Poor, misunderstood Erik. He's messed up in the head and has and will murder anyone who gets in his way, okay? No, Buquet wasn't just an accident (how do you hang somebody by accident?), and no, Piangi didn't die of a heart attack because Erik surprised him. Gah.
I could go on, but it'd only make me grumpy all over again. Heh.
I know this is a long shot, but does anybody know of any well-written Erik/Christine stories? *puppy eyes*