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This was the fandom that started it all. I’m not sure why this little film, of all films, had such a profound impact on me. But after a few years of being offline and immersed in offline things, I found I was so fascinated by the film that I wanted to get online to learn more. I’d never had a particularly high opinion of fan fiction prior to this (probably because I had only met a very few fanfic writers, none of whom were especially good) but I found myself devouring the existing fanfic (most of which, sadly, has vanished from the Internet since then) and wanting to contribute my own stories. Things just took off from there, and I soon realized that the character I was most interested in writing about was Jack. In ironic timing, this was right as Vin Diesel’s star was taking off and suddenly all of the Pitch Black sites became Vin sites, and I soon even found myself somehow in charge of one of those… but with the exception of a handful of stories, Jack was always at the heart of what I wanted to write.

In late 2003, I was incredibly disappointed to learn that not only had Rhiana Griffith been replaced by another actress in the role of Jack (something I had learned months earlier), but she’d actively auditioned for the part. I did not take this well at all. It unfortunately came at a point in my life when a lot of things were going wrong (health troubles, hitting a dead end at my job, and realizing that my relationship of more than a decade was dying) and so on top of all of that, it was a disproportionately crushing discovery to make. It took me a long time to reconcile myself to it. First I had to regroup, moving my priorities away from Vin Fandom and into the areas of greater interest to me (for example, launching the Rhiana Griffith Fan Club website, something I regretted not doing a year or so sooner in lieu of becoming AoVD’s webmistress)… and then writing stories in which I found plausible ways to make the “Kyra” character who ultimately appeared in The Chronicles of Riddick turn out not to be Jack, after all.

Time has helped, as did these stories. I made a deal with myself that I would never write Kyra as a villain, tempting as it might have been, because that would just make the sense of injustice I felt over it fester. So I became rather fond of many of the iterations of Kyra that I created, almost as fond as I was of Jack, and that was a salve. Seeing Rhiana Griffith flourish in her offscreen life — she’s an internationally successful fine artist, has a Master’s degree, and runs a highly respected art therapy studio! — has helped a great deal. Alexa Davalos has proved to be a solid and talented actress in roles she’s taken on since then; that, and her commentary on the CoR DVD release (which I needed a while to get around to watching) showed me just how seriously she took the role and how much she wanted to do it justice. I still have a lot of issues with how disposable Hollywood treated (and still treats) actresses and female roles, but in the wake of “Me, too,” I also suspect that Rhiana may have dodged a bullet by being pushed toward a path that didn’t lead to Tinseltown.

In truth, while I doubt I’ll ever be all that drawn toward the larger Riddick franchise (do not get me started on how the 2013 sequel treated women and animals…), I’ve ended up extremely fond of the AUs I created branching out from the CoR universe, and I plan to continue some of them. New chapters of “Identity Theft,” “Falling Angels,” and “Three Sisters” will definitely be forthcoming as I have time.

Technically, all of these are already listed under The Chronicles of Riddick, but they do rely on or refer to events that only happened when the animated short film is included in the franchise time-line. Usually this means that there's a subplot about Jack coping with the fallout of having taken a life. At this time, I don't have any stories that only refer to the Dark Fury plotline; when RGFC returns, there will be a few of those in its archives by other authors.

If you haven’t seen Dark Fury, you really should. It ended up being my favorite part of the Chronicles of Riddick hoopla. Peter Chung is an anime god, Tress MacNeille gave us a spectacular villain, and (sadly unlike the main film) it showed Imam and Jack the courtesy of not killing them off after we’d rooted so hard for their survival in the prior film. (Seriously, killing off the survivors of a prior film is a major Bad Sequel Cliché, and one of the things I still haven’t forgiven CoR — or Alien³ — for doing.) And, of course, Jack looks and sounds like Jack, something that was both a salve for Rhiana fans, and super confusing at the time since it made Kyra-as-a-continuation feel less plausible than ever. Anyway, it’s gorgeous and you should watch it.

Another of those “I don’t know why I’m so into this, but I am” films that led to some fun fiction. A friend of mine was very into a Josh Lucas fan site back around the time that the film came out. There wasn’t much fanfic on it, and most of it was real-person smutfic (🤮) so I decided to put up a few short pieces about the Dylan Johns character. But I was on my way out of having much of a presence or existence in fandom, so it never went beyond these two pieces.