Freda's fanfiction reviews

I always like to watch the DVDs of "Garfield" with my younger daughter and every time Garfield brings us so much laugh and happiness. It is a series of comic cartoon, and in the age like me taking it as a favourite may seem a bit childish, but I still want to tell you: I like it not only for its cheerfulness and relaxing atmosphere, but also there are so many humourous dialogs and unexpected plots.

There is not a large number of fanictions about "Garfield" on http://www.fanfiction.net/, but I found that it still has many good stories online and some of the writers showed their creative imagination and humour to us. I chose 10 out of 122 of the stories to give my comments as below.

Garfield: First Blood

This story is about Garfield, a hero saved a charming and famous lady from the vampire gangsters.

I noticed although the plot of this story appeared a bit stereotype, its genre was special and its speeches were very wonderful. By its genre, we can see there are 60 sentences in this story, however, the sentences including dialogs account for 75%, and between the dialogs, there are only 1-2 necessary sentences for helping to describe the development of the story. Also, there are few comas or punctuations in the dialogs.

The whole story seems brief and tidy, easily read. By its words, a number of humorous and playful speeches are used in the story. They keep the humorous style of the Garfield's canon through out the whole story. I think this story is fluent, vivid and has comic effect.

The Garfield mystery

Actually, this is not a story, it is about an important discovery of a very careful and loyal fan. Because he (she)pick up so many clue to prove Garfield and some other animals in this cartoon never speak at all, they seem to have mysterious abilities, and they just use intent to communicate with each other, even with their master--Jon.

His(her) discovery reminded me, and then I reviewed one of episodes of Garfield: It is true. I should pay attention to this detail in my fan fiction later.

Twice Told Tale The Truth

In this story, Garfield brought a big trouble to his master-Jon once again. When finding the price of yogurt was too expensive, Jon decided to go back home to make yogurt by himself. But he did not know anything about making it at all. When he was putting every food to mix the yogurt, Garfield played a trick on Jon attempting to sneak some food from the kitchen. However, an unexpected thing happened, the swiftly expanding yogurt spilled out of the house. After them fled from the house, Jon and Garfield reproached each other.

The plot of this story is full of the comic effect and vividly describes the features of the main characters.

The Cake

The writer might be attempting to play tricks on Garfield in this three chapters’ story: Garfield was ignored by his owner, who made three delicious cakes but not one of them was served to him. Poor Garfield, the writer just wanted to evoke his jealous and watch his reaction.

No doubtful, there are many active descriptions about the reactions and actions of Garfield's jealous, but the ending of the story appears a bit dull, for the writer only enjoyed to lead the reader's heart gradually to go down following with one by one punishes on Garfield, rather than made a climax at the end to bring a surprise to the readers, such as giving a big prize to Garfield, and so on.

Garfield Goes Home

I think this is the one of the best fanfictions about Garfield as whatever its genre, its plot and its speeches are excellent.

The content of this story is very simple: Garfield died and lay in the coffin. After Jon spoke with great affection to him, he woke up and went home with Jon. I noticed the writer created an effect of dream; all the speeches that Garfield wanted to speak out were indicated in italicises and had no punctuations at all (Jon's ones have). And, Jon's words and actions were affecting and hearty and without any nonsense.

I like this story: filled with emotion but not lacking humorous and amusing details.

Lord of the Lasagna

This story is interesting. Its beginning imitated the way of telling old stories and narrated a legend about an evil lasagna sorcerer long time ago. However, the picture swiftly switched to the modern time: Jon bought a package of lasagna, and Garfield was too impatient to wait to open and eat it. All of a sudden the zombies emerged and caught Jon and Odie away, but the lasagna was so delicious that Garfield still kept eating it instead to rescue Jon and Odie.

The story has no ending as if the writer indented to leave someone else to continue it.

Garfield's Piano
It was a good idea that with the help of Odie, Garfield could play Jon's piano on the sneak in this story. However, I think there is a scenario unreasonable: Odie excitedly jumped onto the top of the piano and almost made it fall down. Fortunately, he could push the piano back together with Garfield.

I wonder how these two pets could knock down such heavy instrument. So I think even though the story is fictive, the writer should carefully consider if some important parts of story can consist with the reality.

Garfield and John in: MAIL MADNESS

Although this story appears very unbelievable, its plot is absolutely up to the standard of the comedy.

Starting from a boring night, the story lead the reader to experience Jon's horrible feeling gradually: first time, he received a normal bill--plain; second time , he received two bills-strange; third time, he received a huge pile of envelopes--very confused; forth time, "a huge dump truck, filled to the brim with letters and envelopes " arrived--mad. While during the whole incident, Garfield didn't speak anything, he just secretly mocked Jon for his stupidity all along. At the end of the story, Garfield used his "clever" idea to solve this issue--throwing a lit match into the heap of letters. Everyone can image the end, but the story just said Jon fainted.

It is a very dramatic story.

Another Bad Monday

Actually, I don't like to create Garfield as a superhero. Because I think in all the original works, such as comic cartoons and DVDs, Garfield is a greedy, lazy, humorous, intelligent and very fat orange-color cat. He always likes to use petty tricks and sometimes he is kind and warm-hearted but sometimes he is a bit mean. Garfield is just as lovely as normal people but has a lot of shortcoming.

However, in this story, Garfield was portrayed as James Bond (007) captured an escaped cult leader who grabbed Jon's new car. I think it is too far away with the original character.

Although I don't appreciate to such creation, I have to admit the depiction of action in this story is wonderful.

Looks can be deceiving

This short story has two special point: First, it is a poetry (a modern poetry)--completely different genre comparing with the above stories I have analysed. The other is it was about Odie--Jon's dog. Among many "Garfield" fanfictions, there are a few of story talked about Odie. So, this story can let the reader understand more about Odie.

In this poem, an argument was produced whether Odie was smart or dumb. The reader could not find the answer until the last two lines, pretty amusing!