When my husband and I got married, his dowry was a box full of video game fanfiction he'd printed out in the olden days (1994 or so). It's far more valuable than you think. For one thing, it'll start some toasty fires when the oil situation inevitably leaves us freezing in the dark. More importantly, this box is a link to the past (sword stabs logo, screen flashes). It's a link to David Gonterman.
See, fanfiction is not a new hobby that was nourished by the rise of Inuyasha. It's at least as ancient as the Bible and tales of King Arthur and Robin Hood. As long as people are pompous enough to say, "Holy crap, watch me do one better on the Word of God," fanfiction will thrive.
In the mid-'90s, the Interwebs was little more than a collection of two-meg mud huts bordering a dark forest full of gibbering goblin .gifs, but even then we had our storytellers. In an age when Sonic the Hedgehog was still worth bowing to and not a stumbling franchise living solely on the love of its furry fanbase, we had fanfic writers dedicated to the hedgehog. And the most infamous one was David Gonterman, aka "Daveykins Foxfire."
Now, fanfic was a different beast in the olden days. It was written primarily by boys, since women didn't exist on the Internet and still don't. To that effect, Sonic trashed SWATbots and Robotnik a lot more than he buggered Tails up the bum, but one thing was about the same as it is today: the majority of the fanfics were pretty bad.
But Daveykins' fanfics were the worst of the bad, a cesspool in nuked-out ruins. They were bad on a level that would fascinate sociologists; they're worthy of a multi-thousand word analysis (Oh hey, look).
One of his most "celebrated" works, Sonic the Hedgehog: Blood and Metal (also known as "BAM"--Gonterman wasn't bad with his excitement-inducing onomotopea) starred himself as a scorned student who'd just had his arm shot off by a black man who was very angry about Daveykins being white. Daveykins falls into a coma or something and is pulled into Mobius, where he quickly becomes the saviour of animalkind after becoming an anthromorphic fox. Everything Sonic can do, he can do better. This includes being Robotnik's long lost son.
Offhand, it doesn't sound like anything too wretched other than the angry black man bit, but the story paired up with other quirks to become pure Gonterman. Gonterman is a rare, rare man: no matter how much he draws or writes--and the guy certainly has a passion for writing and drawing that I envy--he never improves. He's still merrily at his craft today and he's just as bad now as he was in 1994. It's like a piece of Web 1.0 never died. Oh, and he was also in his 30s when he wrote BAM, or very close to them. The magical part about his age is that he'd ream 13-year-old fanboys when they inevitably told him his fanfics sucked.
So what does this all have to do with redemption? As weak as his skillz are, Gonterman seeks to "repair his reputation"--undo all the damage done by BAM and his other classic literature.
I wonder if it's possible. Gonterman used to be a pretty angry dude; he used to call himself the "Internet's most dangerous cartoonist." That's the kind of thing that takes more than a gas can and a match to burn away, to say nothing of angry homophobic rants in the middle of Sailor Moon fanfics.
He regrets his past actions, and I sort of do wish him luck in repairing his reputation. Bringing up the past like this probably doesn't help (oops), but it's also a vital step to repair, I think. If someone is regretful about their actions, the public should know what happened, because bad Sonic fanfic is a god damn tragedy compared to everything else going on in the world today. I've been studying Gonterman's works with a horrified fascination for years, so he kind of feels like some two-headed puppy I've taken in and watched over.
If he really wants to change his reputation, however, he should see about advancing his skills so they don't remind me of my zitty Final Fantasy III SNES fandom days.
Related Links:
WTFriday: The Adventures of Sonichu
Sonic the Hedgehog: I'm Just Not That Into You
FMV Hell: Sonic CD