Jewel Riders and other Fan Fiction – Chris Kanther

A drawing made for me back in the LiveJournal days.

When you write fan fiction, it is born of a desire to connect. Whether that is connecting with a larger fandom or simply with what you love about the piece of media you’ve chosen to further explore. Fan fiction writing used to (and sometimes unfortunately still does) get a bad rap in the fandom community, and sneers from “real” (whatever that means) writers. But some of the most amazing stories I’ve ever read were fanfic, and I believe that comes from the fact that above all else, fan fiction is born of the deep love for a work.

Fan fiction authors come in a variety of flavors, and the overall size of a fandom can also be a defining characteristic on an author’s output and style. Small fandoms tend to attract authors very loyal to that work. Large fandoms can attract those fans as well, but the sheer volume of writers interested means there will be many who write drabbles or crossovers or shared works.

I haven’t had much experience with writing in large fandoms. I’ve written one Star Wars story and even then I drilled down into characters who were on the periphery of the main saga. (‘Bright Center, Farthest From’ features, for example, the handmaiden Dorme). It was a little thing I dashed off, but it continues to find readers even to this day. Such is the power of large fandom to attract readers.

My heart, however, has always been with the small fandoms with more tumbleweeds than fan works. Maybe it’s just more enticing to my brain to explore and poke around the corners of media that others haven’t already claimed. There’s something about watching a show or reading a book and seeing the potential there for more that whets my appetite. To quote friend of the archive Stormy,  “Pieces of media that are solidly good have fewer gaps in the worldbuilding, unexplained bits of story and unexamined characters. They don’t need any help, they can handle themselves. Good but flawed pieces of media need patching and taping together, they need to be tilled and seeded and watered so they can expand to the full potential that’s clearly visible but not quite reached. They need a fandom that will pick up their tools and get to work.”

Winx Club is basically a magical children’s soap opera.

The first fandom I really wrote in was for Winx Club. On LiveJournal there was a community of writers who did writing-based RP (Roleplay) as the characters. We sent them on adventures, faced dangers, and broke up and mended relationships. It was a truly collaborative and fun experience to create these stories together, and I definitely saved the characters I created in my back pocket to use somewhere again someday. I had some ideas to create a prequel story for Winx set on Eraklyon and featuring Sky, Brandon, and Diaspro as friends before their time at school set them apart, but with real-life grad school bearing down on me the time unfortunately wasn’t available to further explore those ideas.

Really, I just wanted to tell a story with my favorite Specialist himbo.

During this time as well (around 2005-2008 or so) I was drawn back to looking for fan fiction from my favorite show: Princess Gwenevere at the Jewel Riders. Back in the late ’90s and early ’00s I would read the fan fiction stories on Stormy’s Avalon site (archived here at the JRA for posterity). I loved the creativity behind the stories that other fans chose to tell in the Jewel Riders universe. A big theme for this era of storytelling was inserting an original character – a fourth Jewel Rider – to join the trio. More than one author chose to give this fourth character a Star Stone as their Enchanted Jewel. It makes sense if you already have both a Sun and Moon Stone. The most epic of these stories was Stormy’s ‘Trina Saga,’ which I devoured after I found it. Something of an alternate retelling of the second season, mixed with her original character, it was a unique and fun take on the show, often deepening the universe beyond what we saw on screen.

Stormy’s Trina and Silverwind.

After the Avalon site closed, however, fans were left with what they could find on Fanfiction.net. This had (and still has!) a very tiny corner devoted to PGJR (or Starla). But unlike Stormy’s site, the stories on FF.net were often unfinished and long-abandoned. (Fic abandonment is a huge thing, where authors start writing and publishing chapters often without knowing where the story is going or plotting something too big for the amount of time an author can realistically devote to writing.) This abandonment started to frustrate me, and perhaps that desire to read a Jewel Riders fic that was both long and finished again spurred me to try my hand at writing my own.

My love of lore, worldbuilding, and prequels showed itself in my choice of topic. I chose to write a story titled “Heart Stone: A Tale of Tamara” that traced Tamara’s journey from the Heartland Farms to being the next Heart Stone rider. Because I thought it strange her parents would have a heart-themed farm for no reason, I posited that Tamara’s mother Charity was the Heart Stone rider before she’d settled down and passed the jewel on to her successor, an original male character I named Devon. In this backstory, Charity had been a Jewel Rider with Queen Anya, and another original character named Argent who held the Moon Stone prior to Fallon. This led to an interesting half-generation, where both Anya and Argent still held their jewels, but Charity had passed the Heart Stone on after losing her bonded animal.

I made liberal use of the map included with the trading cards to develop the world, including the Great Plains where Tamara’s village was located. As a writer, a map of Avalon was truly a gift in developing the world of Avalon beyond what was seen in the show. Just another way that the creators of Jewel Riders were forward-thinking about how they developed and presented the show. (For more about that aspect of the show, check out our written interviews with the show’s Art Director Greg Autore. Or the podcasts we recorded with him.)

I don’t remember exactly when I started writing the story, but I published the first chapter on FF.net on May 1st, 2008. Chapters came out sporadically, and had unfortunately (much to my chagrin) petered out around a third of the way into the story. Perhaps it was grad school once again making its presence known as the chief black hole for my time, but I was still frustrated with myself for not finishing the story. I’d even planned to do other prequel stories featuring how Fallon got the Moon Stone and how the Pack came together with their Forest Stones.

Unfortunately with ‘Heart Stone’ stalled out, it was several years until I could get back to it. But by 2012 I felt rusty at writing again, and decided to finally attempt something I’d been wanting to try for years. National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is an annual tradition that invites authors to write 50,000 words (the traditional minimum length for a novel) over the course of one month in November.

For NaNo in 2012 I decided to revisit one of the other cartoons I’d loved from the mid-’90s: Dragon Flyz. I found a prompt table on LiveJournal that gave one-word prompts for each of the 30 days (with I believe the last 5 being writer’s choice). And so for each day of that November I told a different story set in the Dragon Flyz universe. Partway through I realized I had started developing connective tissue within the prompts, and by the time I reached the end of the month I had hit my 50,000 words but was only a little over half done with the story I wanted to tell. I continued writing and building out based on the prompt table, and by the time I got to the final five prompts, I used them to tell an epic finale for the series. What started as a little project ended up a novel-length work of over 80,000 words.

In 2013, I wanted to attempt NaNoWriMo again, and since I’d had luck with fan fiction in 2012 I decided I’d pick up the remaining pieces of ‘Heart Stone’ and try to use that November to finish telling that story. One of the things with NaNo that you don’t realize before you start is that the speed of the writing makes it such that your doubts don’t have time to catch up to you, and it’s easier to move forward in your manuscript with the momentum born of the need to get that day’s words written. It’s about not letting a need for perfection get in the way of you telling the story you want. I think that without this philosphy I may have never finished ‘Heart Stone,’ and it would be another sad half-finished, abandoned fic project. I published the final chapters of ‘Heart Stone’ in early 2014, and believe me I never thought it would be a seven-year journey to write that book. I ended up folding Fallon’s story into ‘Heart Stone’ instead of writing the companion book I’d originally envisioned, and I think it enriched the overall story to have the two girls’ journeys to their Enchanted Jewels overlap.

After I finished ‘Heart Stone’ I found there were still a few tales I wanted to tell in the Jewel Riders universe. I’d always been intrigued by the episode ‘Dreamfields,’ where the Crown Jewel of the Dreamfields shows Kale and the Jewel Riders a different life, where Kale could have had the Sun Stone and been a Jewel Rider instead of Anya. Alternate universes are absolute catnip to fan fiction writers, and the moment in the episode where Kale is about to take the Jewel of Dreamfields, looks at it with a pained expression, and says “It’s…out of my reach.” before walking away from it is one of my favorite moments in the show. It adds a layer of pathos and depth to a character that began as a cartoon villainess. I always wondered what Kale saw in the Dreamfields to make her reject taking the jewel for herself. And so, I told the story ‘Queen Kale’ about Kale’s alternate life we never got to see in the episode. It might be my favorite piece of Jewel Riders work I’ve produced. (Also in the comic from Maverick, I was delighted to see them lean into the idea that what if it was more circumstance than nature that caused Kale to become a villain.)

Afterward, I wanted to put a little bow on my favorite pairing, and favorite character with Gwen and Drake. Drake spends a winter at his family’s inn, mulling over his feelings for Gwenevere after the end of the show’s second season. After being with his family, he returns to New Camelot and finally gets together with Gwen. (After she rejects Ian. I’m Team Drake all the way! Another possible future shown in Dreamfields!) I thought this story was my end for telling Jewel Riders tales until a few years later after we’d started the Jewel Riders Archive, and I decided to write a fun Halloween story called ‘The Beast of Ravenwood,” in the vein of all the “test of courage going into a cave” episodes of so many anime shows. Later, I even recorded it with music and sound effects as a Halloween episode of the Jewel Riders Archive Podcast! Doing my first podfic was difficult, but a lot of fun. I’ve contemplated recording ‘Queen Kale’ or ‘The Feast of St. Valentine’ ever since, but the amount of work that went into ‘The Beast of Ravenwood’ has made me shy about committing to the editing again haha.

If you check out my profile over on AO3 you can find a few little ficlets I’ve written for Jewel Riders as well.

Thanks for reading this autobiographical sketch of my time as a fan fiction author. I’m so pleased that I was able to tell a few fun tales in the Jewel Riders universe, and I hope that others have found them worthy of a read and enjoyed them too! I wish more people still wrote Jewel Riders fan fiction; perhaps the comic reboot will renew interest in telling new stories in the world of Avalon! But until then, we hope you all can enjoy the thirty years of collected fan works here at the Archive.

Friends Together, Friends Forever!
Chris Kanther