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miko2In the course of updating my web site the other day, I tried a bunch of searches on various things, including "Muyami Academy" which is of course the title of my largest fan fiction story, a meta-universe story in which characters from as many as two dozen different anime and manga stories all attend the same school -- an odd private school called Muyami Academy.
Now, two of the characters that have appeared in my story are Kagomi and Inu-Yasha from the anime series Inu-Yasha. They appeared a couple of times, but since they spend most of their time back in Medieval Japan, rather than the present, they are not main characters in the story and Kagomi doesn't attend school at Muyami Academy.
So when I was searching on "Muyami Academy" I came across a series of pages dedicated to some form of Inu-Yasha role-playing. It looked as if there was a series of older, abandoned web pages, and some newer ones. At both locations, they had short descriptions of people, places, and objects from the anime/manga series. What struck me as odd was that "Muyami Academy" was given as the name of the school that Kagomi attends (when she happens to be back in the present day). This was stated matter-of-factly, as if it were something you could look up in the manga or anime.
However, as far as I know or remember, the school that Kagomi attends in the anime/manga is never named. I'm almost certain that if it did have a name, it would not be "Muyami Academy". Muyami is a word that means reckless or chaotic; I picked it out of a Japanese dictionary as a joke name for the chaotic private school that I was creating.
Therefore, I can draw no other conclusion than the people that created this web site for role-playing had come across my story at some point, and either mistakenly assumed that my school name was borrowed from the name of the school in Inu-Yasha, or else had just decided to use it since they didn't know the real name for Kagomi's school.
The odd thing, of course, was that I felt sort of violated -- that it was wrong for someone to take my creation and use it in a way I hadn't foreseen. Never mind that this is exactly what I'm doing when I write fan fiction. ^_^ What if more people started assuming that Kagomi's school was called "Muyami Academy"? What if it reached a point where I couldn't even successfully argue that I had come up with the name first?
Well, what if? This is how fan fiction conventions go. They perpetuate themselves to the point where people can't tell fact from fan fiction. For example, Ranma's two friends are Hirhoshi and Daisuke. Akane's two friends are Yuka and Sayuri. Now, you have to be a pretty big geek to even remember the names of these characters -- in the manga itself they are never named, they are just barely-recognizable as reccuring background characters. For the anime they were given names -- but they are still such minor characters that even most major Ranma 1/2 information/resource sites don't even mention them.
Yet in fan fiction, they become not just people who hang around in the background, but major characters -- the best friends Ranma and Akane have. Some stories actually make them the focus of the plot. But of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg -- what are the names of the girls that hang around Nabiki? What was the name of Mrs. Tendo, the long-dead mother of Akane, Nabiki, and Kasumi? Fan fiction has answers for that too, which get perpetuated over and over despite having no basis in reality. Passion Spice? It's one of Shampoo's tricks that appears again and again in fan fiction -- despite never having appeared in the manga.
So I dunno, I guess Kiyomi goes to Muyami Academy now. Not much I can do about it!
Now, two of the characters that have appeared in my story are Kagomi and Inu-Yasha from the anime series Inu-Yasha. They appeared a couple of times, but since they spend most of their time back in Medieval Japan, rather than the present, they are not main characters in the story and Kagomi doesn't attend school at Muyami Academy.
So when I was searching on "Muyami Academy" I came across a series of pages dedicated to some form of Inu-Yasha role-playing. It looked as if there was a series of older, abandoned web pages, and some newer ones. At both locations, they had short descriptions of people, places, and objects from the anime/manga series. What struck me as odd was that "Muyami Academy" was given as the name of the school that Kagomi attends (when she happens to be back in the present day). This was stated matter-of-factly, as if it were something you could look up in the manga or anime.
However, as far as I know or remember, the school that Kagomi attends in the anime/manga is never named. I'm almost certain that if it did have a name, it would not be "Muyami Academy". Muyami is a word that means reckless or chaotic; I picked it out of a Japanese dictionary as a joke name for the chaotic private school that I was creating.
Therefore, I can draw no other conclusion than the people that created this web site for role-playing had come across my story at some point, and either mistakenly assumed that my school name was borrowed from the name of the school in Inu-Yasha, or else had just decided to use it since they didn't know the real name for Kagomi's school.
The odd thing, of course, was that I felt sort of violated -- that it was wrong for someone to take my creation and use it in a way I hadn't foreseen. Never mind that this is exactly what I'm doing when I write fan fiction. ^_^ What if more people started assuming that Kagomi's school was called "Muyami Academy"? What if it reached a point where I couldn't even successfully argue that I had come up with the name first?
Well, what if? This is how fan fiction conventions go. They perpetuate themselves to the point where people can't tell fact from fan fiction. For example, Ranma's two friends are Hirhoshi and Daisuke. Akane's two friends are Yuka and Sayuri. Now, you have to be a pretty big geek to even remember the names of these characters -- in the manga itself they are never named, they are just barely-recognizable as reccuring background characters. For the anime they were given names -- but they are still such minor characters that even most major Ranma 1/2 information/resource sites don't even mention them.
Yet in fan fiction, they become not just people who hang around in the background, but major characters -- the best friends Ranma and Akane have. Some stories actually make them the focus of the plot. But of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg -- what are the names of the girls that hang around Nabiki? What was the name of Mrs. Tendo, the long-dead mother of Akane, Nabiki, and Kasumi? Fan fiction has answers for that too, which get perpetuated over and over despite having no basis in reality. Passion Spice? It's one of Shampoo's tricks that appears again and again in fan fiction -- despite never having appeared in the manga.
So I dunno, I guess Kiyomi goes to Muyami Academy now. Not much I can do about it!
