Hi everyone,
I know the following entry is long, but I'd like your help; I am posting this piece because I would like advice as to how I should structure the placement in history of my fanfic.
I have been writing and rewriting my
MacGyver fanfic for a number of years now. Recently, the reboot made me consider starting the story when MacGyver is a young man in his 20s, experiencing life's challenges and making mistakes, learning and growing into the man we respected and admired on the original series.
My fanfic is primarily a love story between Mac and Kelly Carson from the
Lost Treasure of Atlantis TV movie. The story stretches across decades and follows the pair through friendship, romance, tragedy, silence, perseverance and, ultimately, triumph and much joy.
The fundamental reason I need advice about my (admittedly) bizarre setup comes out of something I noticed when I was working on the second draft of my fanfic.
Based on a dream I had in 1995 and written that summer, my first attempt was pretty straightforward: a year or two after the events in
LTOA, Mac and Kelly date and get married. However, the couple soon encounters heartbreak and disappointment and the story left off with them in love but facing an uncertain future.
I changed the narrative greatly for my second (2002) version. In that story, Mac and Kelly date for a while, break up and spend the next ten years or so apart until an embarrassing (for both) chance meeting that results in them getting back together. During the decade they spend apart, Mac goes back to the Phoenix Foundation on a part-time basis. Kelly has a series of (mostly) comically disastrous relationships before coming to the conclusion that maybe the whole marriage/family thing isn't going to work out for her. At that point in the story, I had her starting to mentor a young woman who, like herself, is an orphan so at least Kelly would get to experience a version of what it's like to be a parent.
It was at this point in storyboarding/writing my fanfic that I thought, half-flippantly at first, but more seriously the more I thought about it, that the whole story would be more streamlined and maybe even more profound
if I could just frame the whole thing by going back into the original canon, change things around a bit, and have Kelly adopt SAM after Kate Malloy's death. After all, being orphaned herself, Kelly would have a tremendous amount of empathy for SAM, she would love him simply because he was MacGyver's son (but would, of course, love SAM for his own sake), and she'd accordingly strive to be a decent and steady role model/adoptive mother for SAM.
I feel this story arc is good for tying the characters together and I decided to make it a central feature of the latest rendition of my fanfic.
My current version is a combination of
both my earlier drafts. I stretched out some of the story from my first version to occur
before Mac and Kelly marry. They date, but break up and Kelly meets and raises SAM in the interim. To do this, of course, I had to fiddle with the canon some for the sake of my story: Kate Malloy doesn't die in China,
LTOA takes place when Mac is in his early 20s and I shrank the age gap implied between Kelly and Mac in
LTOA.
While parts of my fanfic
are sad, this is ultimately a happy story, so Mac and Kelly eventually get back together and live happily ever after....if I could just figure out how to frame that happily ever after....
As I see it, I can go about writing my story in one of two ways: either by building it into the reboot or by writing it as a sort of period-piece prequel to the original series that takes place in the 1970s. Frustratingly, there are drawbacks to both strategies, the most glaring of which I outline below:
Problems with using the reboot as a framework:At first, I thought that building the story of a younger Mac into the reboot seemed like a natural solution, since the reboot
is about a younger Mac. I have to admit, until recently, my gut was telling me it was the best option. But, there are a number of reasons it is also untenable.
First, we aren't
totally sure if Mac 2.0 is truly the original character set in a younger generation, as opposed to Mac 1.0's son, grandson, long-lost cousin, etc., so I could be writing this story for the wrong character.
Second, as almost everyone here knows, the writers of the reboot are not only changing Mac's placement in history, they already rewrote large, important chunks of the original canon as well. And, since the reboot is currently ongoing, the story will likely continue to change even more drastically than it has to date. While I already accommodated some of these changes into my own storyboarding (most of which I did before watching a substantial part of the reboot, thinking they wouldn't change the canon
that much
), I think other changes might prove more challenging to work around--especially because I have events in my own story (heavily informed by the original canon) mapped out from MacGyver's mid-20s to when he is past 70. (Right now, I am writing this story around reboot Mac and I have a character that's obviously a replacement for his mother, still living in the original canon, but supposedly dead in the reboot.)
Would it be too confusing for you, the audience, to read a story originally built into the early part of the reboot, but one that will probably diverge from the reboot as its writing and mine head in different directions?
Problems with doing my story simply as a prequel to the original series:In many ways, writing my fanfic as a grounded-in-history prequel to the original series makes a lot of sense. Doing so would require a lot more research on my part, but I think that I would probably find that sort of fun.
One of the biggest problems with this type of storytelling approach has to do with anachronism in its historical timing. I want to have Kelly be the force behind an archaeological breakthrough. But, this academic milestone hasn't taken place in our time, in 2018, let alone 40+ years ago.
First, I was going to change a little more of the
LTOA canon:
QUOTE Sheepy 6 May 2007 - 11:14 PM Assignments LTOA discussion Pg. 1
This is actually something else that
LTOA has in common with
Journey to the Center of the Earth. (I did this whole, big write-up under the Movie Rip-offs heading in the Houseboat section if you're interested and don't already know about it.) The only thing is, I was going to take that part out and have Mac use his skills to retrieve all those scrolls they initially left behind.
As some of you may know, many archaeologists do believe that the civilization that lived on Thera (and a bunch of other islands around it, too) in the Bronze Age--the Minoan civilization--is the basis for what, down through many centuries of something like the "telephone" game, became Plato's story of the Lost City of Atlantis. What a lot of people don't realize is that, although we know a lot about them from analyzing their art and architecture,
we can't read their writing. Many scholars are trying, but so far none of the interpretations seem "right."
Now, if someone found a large cache of Linear A (the Minoan script) documents, perhaps alongside documents written in other languages (a la the Rosetta Stone), then the task of deciphering Linear A might just get a whole lot easier....
I was going to have Kelly do it (after Atticus asks her to take a look at everything). Once Kelly starts to figure things out, her career goes from stalled to in the spotlight....but perhaps its
still not the career (and life) she always wanted.
Being that decoding Linear A hasn't
actually happened in real life, though, I worry it's the equivalent of writing a story about the American Civil War with the soldiers using lightsabers and atomic bombs.
Another problem is that I have some characters behaving very much as they do in the reboot (Bozer and Matty, are examples). One big part of my doing this comes out of my familiarity with the area where Meredith Eaton grew up in real life. My parents are both from Long Island, too, and I put some of that influence into my current draft. What I will probably do in either case is have characters that take the place of ones missing or altered in the canon I ultimately choose.
Additionally, my current version (written into the reboot) does make reference to modern technology, world politics, genetic testing (a charming part of one story), recent-
ish movies and TV shows (even a veiled reference to
Nova will have to go if I set it
too early in the 1970s!), and the interconnectedness of the characters' lives via technology. I often do the last one with at least some element of humor (characters passive-aggressively harassing each other on YouTube), and it's a facet of the story I might have to (mostly) remove if the characters are going to live in prior decades.
I will probably start off by posting a story that is related to my own particular Mac-verse, but one that doesn't deal with Mac or Kelly directly, so at first I may skirt the issue of
when my romance takes place. However, I really enjoy the interaction between Mac and Kelly, so I hope to publish a story that focuses on
THEM soon....
So, what should I do? Should I just write it into the reboot (or something like it) and continue writing my story as I planned no matter what the reboot does? Or should I write it as a period piece where some elements are unrealistically ahead of their time and pretend that's OK? Any thoughts?P.S. If you made it to the end of this big, huge write-up, THANK YOU! I'm sorry it's so long, but I wanted to go through the biggest obstacles I am encountering while putting everything together. You might like the stories I ultimately write if you enjoy history and romance.
