Rainbow Brite Fan Fiction Review #1
3/25/2012
She sat back, stunned. These books should not exist. None of these books should be found off her home world.
It's not too often that you run into a fanfic that sucks you in like a published novel. Much more rarely, you find one that you read with the kind of enthralled fervor usually reserved for the newest book in your favorite series. But just occasionally - a bare few times in your whole life - you encounter a fanfic which you read passionately, save to your hard drive, make a title image for, laboriously reformat to suit your word processor, and reread at least once a year.
Back in 2000, I discovered just such a fanfic.
Rainbow Brite and the War of Darkness is a collection of three short novels written by Robert Teague: book one is Shadows of the Past, book two is Lights of the Present, and book three is Rainbows of the Future. Collectively, they're a decent chunk of text - about two-thirds the length of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
The strongest point of this story, I would have to say, is that it feels very much like the original cartoon. A focus on dialogue and simple narration lends to this. A close second would be the worldbuilding - unusual in Rainbow Brite fic - that obviously went into this story.
If there's any downside to this trilogy, it's that they don't take to the FF.net formatting too well - they were originally for Katy Cartee Haile's RainbowBrite.net, but the site stopped hosting fanfic and fanart a few years back for a reason that is unknown to me. It doesn't look bad or anything, but it doesn't look as good as I remember.
All said, this is a gem of a fanfic - especially in the sparsely-populated Rainbow Brite fandom. I don't want to overhype it (that's the best way to seed disappointment), but nevertheless I have to admit that Rainbow Brite and the War of Darkness is not just my favorite Rainbow Brite fanfic, it's my favorite fanfic of all time.
Without knowing why, the rest of the Universe trembled.
Article originally posted on girlythingsforgeekypeople.tumblr.com
Reprinted with permission.
