#but she does still visit popstar a *lot* and can get to it whenever so she splits her time between the two a fair bit

[flowering-darkness]

Let's go for one of your non-romantic S/Is! 💬 + Mimi Aster + Meta Knight? — @edencantstopfallininlove

Ooh, yes, sure thing, friend!! Thank you kindly for this~

(I included a render of what Mimi looks like, just as a reminder in case anyone wants it!)

(source: this post by queenieboo22)

send me 💬 and a character and I’ll give you a line my self-insert would say if in a canon interaction with them. - I think I would set this just after the boss fight against him in Star Allies! Mimi's adventures in the Kirby games roughly follow real time per when they each released, so she's about fifteen here.

"So even you can be affected by the power of the dark hearts, Sir Meta Knight.. That's so scary! Even so, I- I'm glad we could get through to you eventually! It's almost funny.. You weren't fighting any way at all like you usually do. That was probably the dark heart's doing. But, even so - you've been training me since nearly the first day I crash-landed on Popstar, and that meant I knew exactly what to do to keep up with you in battle! It's true that I don't enjoy fighting - fighting against friends like you least of all, especially with how it went last time.. But, it's worked out this time! And now we can adventure side by side once again - as Kirby's friends and this planet's protectors!! ..That is, if you want to come with us?"

I hope this is alright! Thank you once again for sending this in!~

[give-me-novakayn]

Random Heartsteel Headcanons:

-Whenever Sett’s mother visits everyone always ensures they’re on their best behaviour (even Kayn). No one would dare risk her wrath by being disrespectful.

-Sett’s mother loves telling the others stories from when Sett was a kid, especially embarrassing ones. He’s ready to chuck himself out the nearest window when she pulls the photo album out (He loves his ma but the boys don’t need to see that). Kayn in particular gets a kick out of it. He’s left mortified however when Zed turns up and does the same thing to him.

-For Mother’s Day the band all bought Yone presents and a card as a joke. Secretly he found it sweet.

-They have a movie night every week, taking turns on who gets to choose. Kayn often chooses horror or overly violent/raunchy action movies, K’sante goes for comedies, Ez picks musicals or fantasy/adventure movies, Sett has a soft spot for cheesy 80s/90s movies, Yone isn’t really into movies can’t say no to a good romcom. Aphelios is a wild card, one week he’ll pick the most gorgeously heartbreaking animated movie known to man and the next he picks a shitty sci-fi.

-For Christmas one year Sett knitted everyone scarves in their favourite colours.

-K’Sante has the most cunty workout playlist.

-Ezreal loves getting piggybacks from Sett and K’Sante. Whenever he gets tired he’ll whine until one of them offers to carry him.

-Kayn once gave the whole group food poisoning. He has been banned from cooking ever since.

-Ezreal takes FOREVER in the bathroom getting ready for the day.

-They try to keep laundry organised but everything always ends up getting mixed somehow. It’s gotten to the point where none of them are ever wearing their own underwear and socks.

-Ezreal is a jacket thief. No one’s clothes are safe.

-Sett can fall asleep anywhere.

-On the subject of sleep, Sett and K’Sante are literally the only ones with a decent sleep schedule.

-Kayn is the most skilled artist in the group. He has a stack of sketchbooks hidden away in his room that no one is allowed to look at. Also never touch his copics unless you want to lose a hand.

-If Kayn wasn’t a musician he’d probably be a tattoo artist.

-Yone is a very skilled coffee maker. He knows everyone’s preferred coffee order by heart and can make it better than any barista could.

-Ezreal keeps a travel journal. It’s filled with photos and little keepsakes from when the band tours.

-During his popstar days Ezreal was forced to hide or fix everything about himself that was deemed imperfect. He wore braces in an attempt to fix his crooked teeth, hid his freckles with makeup, he wasn’t allowed to get tattoos or piercings, his hair had to be styled a specific way, etc. He still feels a bit insecure about these things, but being with Heartsteel has allowed him to embrace his true, imperfect self.

-Yone wears contact lenses. He only wears his glasses very early in the morning and late at night, so none of the other band members know.

-Kayn had long hair for most of his life (like his cannon self) but cut it short after he was kicked out of his old band. I like to imagine it was very dramatic, with lots of crying in the mirror (like that Harley Quinn scene from the beginning of Birds of Prey).

[spatort]

I’m at my parents’ house and I have too much time on my hands apparently, so it’s time for a trip down memory lane! More specifically, a trip into the weird world of 1990s for-profit teen idol RPF, such as this beauty:

No, I did not find this at my parents’ house, I bought it second-hand specifically in order to make this post because I’m a person who enjoys studying fan culture in her free time. So, if you’re wondering what the hell the monstrosity pictured above is, and why it exists, don’t worry, I’m about to answer that question extensively.

LONG (AND HOPEFULLY FUN & INTERESTING) POST UNDER THE CUT

Let’s start with a bit of history: In the pre-internet era, fan culture differed from today in a few key regards. Although fanfiction existed, without the internet it was much harder for fans to share their stories with each other. Large fandoms such as Star Trek did have fanzines where fanfic could be printed, but all in all it was a much more niche thing than it is today with millions of fics accessible on AO3.

Fan culture in general, however, was a big thing in the 90s – particularly when it came to pop acts that appealed to teen (and tween) audiences, such as the Backstreet Boys, the Spice Girls, or (mostly in Europe) the Kelly Family. When I was in elementary school, you basically had to pick whether you were a BSB or an NSYNC fan – and god forbid you were a Kelly fan like me, then you were the lowest rung on the social ladder and the target of relentless mockery. Like many German kids in the 90s, me and my sister would religiously read teen magazine BRAVO, cut out every single bit of material about our faves and collect them in folders and self-made fanzines. We created fan art and fanfiction without having words for these things. Without the internet and social media, fans did not have a constant stream of content about their idols, and were left with no other choice but to cling to every bit of information they could find in magazines, on TV shows, or on the radio.

Enter a savvy businessperson who comes up with the perfect merchandise product to sell to these popstar-obsessed teens: fan novels! These books, featuring taglines such as ‘The novel for all Backstreet Boys fans’, typically revolved around a relatable female teenage protagonist who is a fan of the celebrity or music group in question, and usually ends up meeting their idol or, gasp, even becoming romantically involved with them. As far as themes go, they look pretty much exactly like your classic self-insert RPF. Except there is a big difference setting these books apart from ‘actual’ fanfiction: Rather than being written by real fans to express their ‘fannish’ feelings about the subject, fan novels were most likely commissioned works created by professional romance authors purely to profit off of actual fans. There is very little background information available about this ‘genre’, but I did stumble across an academic work on Google Books which featured a passage about these fan novels (translated into English by me):

There are several commissioned works by professional authors, which could be mistaken for fanfiction. Especially in the 1990s, when lots of boy bands were on the market, many books of this kind were published. […] These are fictional stories for fans [redacted].

Jennie Hermann: Backstreet Girl. Projektionsfläche Popstar - Wenn der Fan zum Schriftsteller wird (2009) [Popstar as Projection Surface – When fans become writers]

One of the things I find most intriguing about this type of commercially published fanfiction is the question of personal rights. Obviously, the celebs in question or their management must have consented to using their names in the story, their pictures on the cover and so on – because a profit could be made with this. Especially with the fan debate around RPF allegely being unethical, I wonder if the celebrities themselves were aware someone was writing these stories about them, putting words in their mouth, and if they had any clue what exactly happened in these novels. Now, I’ve read a couple of them in my own youth. Some of them deal mostly with the state of being a fan, e.g. I recall a novel about a girl who is so obsessed with Leonardo Di Caprio that she doesn’t pay attention to real life guys at all, only to learn that her actual dream boy has been in her life all along! This story did not feature Di Caprio himself as a character, it was more about the protagonist’s arc of realizing your idols are not all that matters in life. Others do describe fan encounters with teen idols, and some even feature (hints at) romance with a celebrity. When I decided to purchase a vintage copy of one of these books, I opted for one of the latter category, precisely because of the popular argument that writing romance stories featuring real people is somehow ‘wrong’. For only a couple of euros, I was able to get my hands on a weird and wonderful relic of fan culture: Mein Frühling mit Nick (My spring with Nick) by the likely pseudonymous Maxi Keller, heralded on the book cover as ‘the novel for all fans of the Backstreet Boys’.

The story revolves around 16-year-old musical prodigy and designated wallflower Katharina, who lives in a German small town and cares about nothing else than playing the organ – certainly not about boys, let alone ones that are super-famous American pop stars. This means she is not initially a fan of the Backstreet Boys, which I guess is something of a trope itself – the protagonist meeting a celebrity by chance without knowing who they are and the celeb being thrilled that someone doesn’t just like them for their fame. Anyway, the boys visit Katharina’s hometown while on tour in Germany because band member AJ is doing some research on his German ancestors who happened to live in this very town. Katharina runs into them, she and Nick (who was only 17 himself when this was published in 1997, so it’s legal) fall in love at first sight, she helps them dig up information on AJ’s ancestors and finds out the two of them are related, the boys invite Katharina and her friend Saskia backstage after their show and … nothing happens. The book is 200 pages long and Katharina doesn’t even get one kiss with her boy band sweetheart, even though they mutually crush on each other right away. Perhaps that’s as far as the band or their management agreed for the novel to go – a hint at romance, but no trace of any on-page action, no matter how innocent.

That said, the book is so hilariously poorly written that it was still very entertaining to read. Although I could not find out anything about the author Maxi Keller, and therefore assume this might be a pseudonym, their writing style very much suggests that their are a professional romance author who usually writes for an older audience (plus, the book was published by Bastei Lübbe, who also publish a range of cheap romance novels known as ‘Romanhefte’). The language is extremely flowery at times, and even teenage characters speak with an eloquence that is hardly age-appropriate, with some 90s teen slang peppered in at unfitting times (such as the overuse of the English word ‘girl’). Often the novel loses itself in pointless detail that does nothing to move the plot forward (such as an extensive description of a house party hosted by Saskia’s rich parents, with minute details of their luxurious lifestyle and assets, even though Saskia is only a supporting character in the overall plot). It appears as if the author is desperately trying to fill the pages with meaningless drivel so they don’t need to write too many scenes featuring the presumed main attraction, the boys themselves.

If Keller was indeed merely hired to write this, and is not a fan themselves, one must still admit that the author did their research when it comes to the band. Whereas fanfiction typically assumes that the audience is already familiar with the characters and often skips any introductory descriptions of their appearance or personality, Keller makes sure that even a reader who is completely unfamiliar with the Backstreet Boys can keep up. The author delivers extensive descriptions of the boys’ appearance and demeanor, even spelling out their full names repeatedly, and frequently peppers in ‘fun facts’ such as ‘Kevin was raised on a farm in Kentucky’. While an actual fan might do so to prove how knowledgeable they are, and earning their status as a ‘true fan’, in this case it only seems like Keller really wants to show off how much research they did – as if not a single piece of information they took in must go to waste by not being used in the novel.

When it comes to the question how realistically the non-fannish author replicates the way the boys act and speak, there are two barriers to delivering a well-founded answer: Firstly, I was personally very young when BSB were popular and I really don’t remember too well what each member was like. Secondly, the elephant in the room: the language barrier. All of the aforementioned fan novels were written in German, and the problems posed by writing about an English-speaking band interacting with German OCs (and teenage ones at that) are addressed poorly, if at all. Pretty much all dialogue is written in German, and the audience is left to assume that everyone is actually speaking English whenever the boys are involved – except the novel does nothing to explain why two 16-year-old German girls would be able to express themselves so effortlessly in a foreign language. (Remember, the internet was not a thing, so German kids were not exposed to the same amount of English in everyday life as they are these days.) It would have been easy to make one of them a language nerd who gets straight A’s in English class, and give the other a British parent and make them bilingual. Instead, Katharina initially even worries about the prospect of having to talk to boys at all, and in English on top of that! But when she actually does, the language barrier never comes up again. The suspension of disbelief expected from the reader is therefore immense. The language barrier also gives the author an easy way out when it comes to imitating the way the boys speak in real life – there is no need to take into account idiolects or regional differences (such as ‘you guys’ vs. ‘y’all’) if the boys’ speech is essentially translated into a foreign language. However, I wanted to give you guys (or y’all, if you will) a taste of how Keller attempts to write a scene where AJ and Nick discuss the latter��s crush on Katharina:

I would argue that this sounds realistic enough for what it’s worth, if a little cheesy, which is excusable in this genre. Perhaps a true 90s BSB fan would beg to differ, so if you happen to be one, feel free to drop me a message. But in my semi-professional opinion, this most likely holds up for readers.

So, to answer the initial question that drove me to purchase this book: Do fan novels like Mein Frühling mit Nick count as fanfiction?

If we assume that something is only a fanfic if the author themselves is a fan of the subject matter, then I would argue no, Maxi Keller is probably not a fan themselves and therefore this work of for-profit real-person fiction does not qualify as fanfic. However, fan novels definitely have a (however small) place in the history of fan culture and fan-adjacent works, and I personally found reading this relic both entertaining and insightful!