The Amazing Fanfic Mutator!

A discussion on LiveJournal about the Random Pairing Generator gave me the idea for this thing. It'll fetch a piece of fanfic from another website, grovel through for names that it recognizes and then consistently replace those names with the names of other characters from the same series (and of the same gender). Then it will present the result to you, with an effort to make the page layout look exactly the same as it would if you'd fetched it from the original site. Since the HTML may be odd or the foreign site may not allow off-site fetching of images, it may well look strange or ugly anyway.

At the moment, the thing has several drawbacks. It only handles single-word names. So it'll find and handle "Willow" by itself, but will turn "Willow Rosenberg" into "Glory Rosenberg" (or something along that line). It also doesn't handle nicknames or cute names, so of you point it at a Buffy/Faith fic you'll probably end up with Dawn referring to Anya as "B". And of course it doesn't do anything about appearances or descriptions, so don't be surprised when Cordy turns out blonde or Wesley gets green skin and horns.

At the moment, the Mutator will try to recognize character names from Harry Potter, Charmed, Blake's 7, Dead Like Me, Star Trek: Voyager, Angel the Series, Tenchi Muyo!, Firefly, Stargate SG1, Babylon 5, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X Files, Xena: Warrior Princess and The West Wing

To use it, just paste the URL to a piece of fanfic in the field above, then hit "Submit" and wait. Since the Amazing Mutator has to fetch the page from someone else before it can process and modify it, it's going to take a while before the result appears. Also note that it absolutely must be the page with the fic on it! It can't be in a frame or something.

This is beta software! If it does something strange that isn't described above, please mail me about it or put a comment in my LiveJournal (cdybedahl). Include a description of what you expected, what you got instead and which URL you pasted into the box.

Have fun!

Just follow these links and a predetermined story will be mutated for you. Reload to have the names changed, if they didn't turn out weird enough for you.