This isn't your average fiction site.
MTM does not stick to just fan fiction or just original character fiction, even within one story.
Just because some canon character was in some specific setting during the series/book doesn't mean they have to be stuck there and all original characters moved to that setting for a fan fiction.
Characters, canon (famous fictional) or created/original (fan-made), can come and go wherever they're needed you can find a way to make that happen.
MTM does its best to treat characters worthy of respect, with respect.
MTM also gives disliked characters, famous or otherwise, something most often not doled out by fandoms. But then, MTM is not fandom-friendly either. That doesn't mean fans aren't cool, just that fangirl/boys are annoying.
and this is where foefiction comes in.
So instead of being creeped out or having crushes on blood-thirsty characters such as Slender Man, Laughing Jack, or Jeff The Killer, those characters are shown no fear and no adoration/love.
There are things MTM does not like seeing done to well-established famous fictional characters, and trends that MTM will not have their regular characters engaging in either. Things just about everyone else seems to be in love with.
Necromancy. Eww, no! Just, no!
There's a reason it's called being dead, it means you don't get to come back to play. You can if you're just asleep or unconscious, but dead is dead.
Going MIA and believed to be dead by fellow characters may happen, very rarely, and for good reason. None of this soap opera stuff where A and B just get married and B suddenly has an accident or disappears and is "dead" until A eventually marries D, only for B to suddenly come back from the "dead" just to get another stupid love triangle thing going.
Harry Potter and so many anime have that going on. So does at least one Jeff The Killer pasta.
Your soul is yours, it's what makes you you, it can't be stolen/possessed by another. And that is that.
So Jeff The Killer may consider himself a demon, he is certainly as evil as one. Other characters may call him one. But no matter what damage he does to body and mind, he can't take someone's soul for himself, and drag it down to hell.
The bonding/fusing of one life to another.
It could be called a soul-bond, or bonding of the heart, but it's bad jou-jou either way.
At its most basic form, the life/heart/soul bond is written in just because some character can't stand on their own and needs to be linked tightly as possible to another character the writer is in love with..
That goes especially sour when it's some fan-created character said to be bonded to a famous fictional. That means when the fan-created character's life is threatened, so is the famous fictional's because of the bond.
Can you say uber Mary Sue?
The life/heart/soul bond is often if not mostly brought about by occult/pagan ritual, not innocent make-believe magic, and is employed by especially evil sadistic characters as vampires who bond others to themselves as slaves.
that is something none of our characters would ever do.
They may uncover instances of it having been done by some evil character or other, but the undoing of such is always the aim, and done with as little muss and fuss as possible.
Vampy love.
Uh, no, hardly a cool ideal to promote.
Vampires are predators, people are their prey. So only an idiot human or another vamp thinks vamps are sexy. That doesn't mean there aren't going to be such idiot characters from time to time, but it means you won't find this behaviour coming from our well-established regular characters.
Characters are not all paired off. Sure, there are going to be some mention of romantic involvement among characters here and there, including mentions of past romances, but it's not by any stretch a main goal to pair off characters. To put it another way, sometimes romance just happens, and that is how it ought to be. It just isn't the end-goal/biggest plot in stories on this site.
Multiple births.
Switched at birth.
Overkilled, from online rps to TV shows.
Twins.
Long lost twin, good VS. evil twin, all that has become so cliche.
Dystopic = depressing, infuriating, and way overdone... The Hunger Games? The Hand-maid's Tale? So much no thanks! The latter is utter Christian-bashing feminist crap as well.
Apocalyptic and post apocalyptic.
Bleh! Uninteresting, slightly depressing, and way overdone.
Futuristic.
Writing stories that take place in the future is also way overdone, and we have no idea what the real future will bring anyway.
There is some appreciated classic stuff around that takes place in a fictionalized future, "The Time Machine" "The Jetsons" and that's cool. Our characters just don't live there or in any fictionalized version of the future. They might transport through a fictionalized timewarp into a future setting of some classic such as The time Machine or The Jetsons world, but we're not making up our own version of the future or bothering much with others that are less well known unless it's to take some famous character and shift them to our present time.
When I used to be on a rpg/writing list, there was project started by one of the moderators there that was supposed to be some sort of writing/thinking exercise, where we were supposed to write our characters 20 years into the future.
I had absolutely no ideas nor interest, but some person I was writing with at the time, who was trying to get one of her characters and one of mine together in a possible romantic relationship which I was never comfortable with, and that also would've had to happen in the future because my character was so young. She wrote a story about her character and mine married in the future. And what was the big tada moment she wrote for mine? Pregnancy. Gah! I couldn't figure out how to tell her I utterly hated it. I would've rather she just had my character written in as absent due to being out on some mission.
and since she and I split long ago, and I since quit that list anyway, that pathetic version of the future is thankfully out of the question for my character.
There is only one universe. that is why it is called the universe. Notice the 'uni'? That universe contains everything, including all the worlds we imagine in our heads.
If a canon character is all out evil in a series, alternate versions of him/her as a good guy/girl can reside on Fanfiction.net, Quotev, Wattpad etc. but not on MTM.
Megatron doesn't get to be a good guy. Optimus Prime doesn't get to turn evil. No, "Optimus Crime" is not welcome here..
And the deplorable shabby treatment via character mangling done to Spider Man by Dan Slott gets thumbs down all around!
Jeff the Killer doesn't get to die, only to return from the dead as Jeff the Gentle. His character is too far gone for that.
The IMO forgettable Wickersham Brothers from "Horton Hears A Who" are originally some kind of apes. Not human. Humanified versions of them just aren't cool. Neither are animal versions of humans in some alternate "universe" way as in making them kawaii.
A character can take another form temporarily from an enchantment, or it's some kind of fairy or wizard or magical shapeshifter deliberately assuming a different form for a specific purpose, but that's just magic, not "alternate universe".
MTM is not mythos/meme-friendly.
More trends that won't be indulged here are:
Otakuism,! It's fine to just like anime, to even like some of it a lot, as a sensible, casual fan. It is not fine to go fandom over it. That's annoying as heck especially to anyone else who just isn't into it.
Harry Potter And The Twilight Hunger Games!
Hunger Games.
Another post apocalyptic dystopia.
Away with Harry Potter too. Yes, it's fantasy, but like Twilight and Hunger Games, it was such an annoying fad, becoming a meme, and just not all that interesting. None of our characters would fit into that wizarding world anyway, especially our elves.
We learned enough about that series to know we didn't like it. So we didn't write Twilight fan fiction, we wrote Twilight foe fiction.
Twilight Nightmare Twi-Twitted
Creepy pastas get the same treatment here.
MLP My Little Pony
It's a meme with a fandom that rallies to its defence with the ferocity of any Twi-tard or otaku to their own fandoms.
and for those of us who never even cared about MLP when it originated back in the 80s as some little show and line of plastic merchandise, the resurgence of it in the form of this meme and rabid fandom has turned us completely and irreversibly off it.
So MLP presents a horror to our regular characters, not a friend.
New Home Horrors and MLP Syndrome are not stand-alone MLP foefics, but MLPfoefic in attitude. 'They are just sections within a hypothetical story about non-MLP characters.
Anti-bronies!
No! Get away!
It might come as a surprise and make you wonder, but anti-bronies are as bad and worse than MLP, and here's why.
Cthulhu.
No thanks!
There's all sorts of twisted gunk from necromancy to emersion in some fake religion that, like anything Lovecraft, it's boring and horrific all at once. It's no longer fantasy as we know and love it, but some kind of experimental fiction, with a fandom and mythos.
The creepy evil furby/furby=gremlin thing.
Away with it!
Creepy furby has become another annoying mythos, it is almost impossible to find anything furby-related containing discussions where there isn't anyone at some point talking about how creepy they think furbies are. And the old "Don't feed them after midnight" thing. *Facepalm* Just kill it already!
That doesn't mean there are no evil furbies or that our regular furbies are always nice. Like any characters, there are going to be good and bad ones. But like any other character, if a furby is going to be bad, there's going to be a reason for it and a purpose that doesn't come down to the fraidy-cat mindset "Eeeeek, furby is a demonic gremlin and so creeeeeeepy!"
Gremlins.
In a word: suck!
The tale used an old stupid urban legend chain letter story about a father who died stuck in a chimney trying to play Santa. But that isn't the worst. At the end of the movie, and probably the book as well, I don't remember for sure, but the movie, this old guy who took Gismo back went on this big sanctimonious rant of environmentalist contempt for the human race wind-baggery about how humans were killing the planet with this and that and this and that, and how "Human is not ready for maugui" or however the heck that stupid word for baby gremlin is spelled.
So, fooey on gremlins! They're not wanted here, in original form or as some weird gremlin/furby hybrid.
acceptable: Make-believe magic.
Some of our characters are fantasy beings, but not pagan.
The magic written here is pure fantasy, as in "Once upon a time" where various imaginary places and things have strange properties and powers that don't exist in the real world. The other acceptable magic is of the carnival variety, as in the magic shows sometimes put on to amaze people of all ages with slight of hand tricks and the like.
None of that has anything whatsoever to do with actual pagan rituals or beliefs, which have permeated so much of the fantasy genre.
Unacceptable: pagan/occult, including necromancy.
No pagan magic or rituals for our regular characters.
You have to believe in or at least be a lot more interested in it than we are to pull it off. Pagan influence is already everywhere in fantasy themed communities, and necromancy is simply gross as well as against pretty much everything we stand for here.
Our characters also don't fool around with angel/demon magic such as Enochian magic. Demons come from hell, which is the worst form of afterlife, and angels are sacred, also appearing in the Bible, and innocent purely make-believe magic can't touch the afterlife, it deals with characters during their lives and doesn't interfere with the sacred nor has anything to do with hell.
While some character might be referred to affectionately as an angel, or in disgust as a demon, it's not meant literally.
That stuff is being way overdone everywhere just as with the shipping (character pairings).
Sure, characters will have religious persuasions or at least a set of standards they set for themselves. So a Christian or Jewish character will act according to what their beliefs are, in any given situation, but that won't be the focus.
Some character may be mentioned as saying a prayer or singing in a church choir, but we do not write characters interacting directly with God, a fictionalized version of God, or feel the need to invent pantheons for worlds of characters to worship. That is being done to death in high fantasy, wifi, and anime.
Likewise, we do not give Satan that treatment either.
Nor do we write angels, especially those mentioned in the Bible into our fiction. Fictionalized versions of Biblical characters are out of the question. Again, mentioning them during character conversations as we sometimes may in real life is fine. Making fictionalized versions of them, not so much.
We avoid this because 1. we don't want to trivialize biblical people, 2. we make no time for the devil, and last, but not least, 3. we do not wish to disrespect God by putting him into some role, saying and doing stuff in a piece of fiction as if he was just some character.
None of that demon possession/soul-stealing, and ousting it with crucifixes/exorcisms/holy water etc. No apocalyptic stuff. Again, that's done to death elsewhere, and doesn't feel like fantasy any more, rather, a cult-fiction genre.
No horrible stereotypes of "Christian" fanatics. That is already being done in far too many mainstream TV shows and fantasy role-plays with a decidedly anti-Christian bent. You know the sort, where some whacko believes electronics are of the devil, and who beats their kid for looking the wrong way because of that "Spare the rod and spoil the child" thing, and who is more than likely to have their kid half killed during an exorcism because the kid talked out of turn during school prayers or something.
We're sick of it.
When what's supposed to be fantasy has been turned into a paganism promo or an exercise in how to build up a false religion from the ground up, it gets very convoluted and boring, very fast, and when all out hostility towards Christianity is thrown in, it really sucks.
Our regular characters oppose those who go around acting as if they think they are gods and goddesses.
Having said all that, it doesn't mean our regular characters never run up against cults, it just means that situation would be exceedingly rare, they oppose the cult, and not through the use of rather notorious religious rites such as exorcism.
Instead, they would use magic to stop a being such as Slender Man, and detective work and similar to expose the cult as a big fraud.
The one time a fake diety may be used is in a satire/parody story. That's where the Hamgod comes in.
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