How Do Authors Reinterpret Prince Dakkar In Fanfiction?

I got sucked into this fandom lane late one night after re-reading a battered copy of '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea' on a rainy commuter train, and the thing that keeps pulling me back is how wildly malleable Prince Dakkar is. To me and a ton of other writers, he’s a living prompt: a tragic royal turned submarine captain, steeped in loss and fury, and full of untold interior life. In fanfiction that interior gets peeled back, stitched up, and reimagined in about a hundred different genres — from steampunk retellings to quiet hurt/comfort pieces where the whole plot is just a cup of tea and two people trying to sleep in a humming iron hull. I read a gritty retcon once where his princely title is reclaimed as part of a liberation arc, another soft fic where he becomes the reluctant parent figure to a motley crew rescued at sea. Both felt true because they let him be more than a cipher for vengeance.

What’s fascinating is how writers choose which parts of the original to keep and which to discard. Some lock onto the revenge motif and run full-tilt into anti-imperial thrillers, painting Prince Dakkar as a revolutionary mastermind sabotaging colonial ships. Others foreground the heartbreak: flashbacks to a burned kingdom, lullabies in a language the reader doesn’t immediately understand, short, heartbreaking scenes of him standing on a deck watching the ocean swallow his past. And then there’s the sexier corner of the archive — slash and het pairings that turn Nemo’s cool detachment into simmering pining. Those fics often change voice: first-person journal entries, letters smuggled back to the homeland, or the captain’s private log that reads like a lullaby to a lost love. The language changes too — some writers keep Verne’s elevated tone; others use clipped modern prose to emphasize trauma and dissociation.

I also love when writers fix, rather than just retell, the original’s blind spots. Fanfiction is where people correct Orientalist descriptions, restore Dakkar’s South Asian identity with proper names, rituals, and food, and weave in local myths to give a sense of home that Verne glossed over. There are AUs where he never takes to the sea — instead, he runs a covert resistance from within a British court, or he’s transposed into a cyberpunk city as a tech baron whose submarine becomes a submarine-shaped server-fortress. Different moods, different decades, different feels — but the throughline is almost always the same: a man trained in royalty and wounded by empire, finding family and anger in the steel belly of the ocean. If you write him, the two big things I’d recommend are: read a few historical sources to ground cultural touches, and let the fic be comfortable with contradictions. Nemo is both cold strategist and grieving son; both are honest and interesting.

There’s a quieter, more scholarly streak in a lot of Prince Dakkar fanwork that appeals to the part of me that reads late at night with a tea mug that’s gone cold. Those authors approach him like a historical puzzle — a prince whose title was erased in some translations and whose motives were refracted through 19th-century European eyes. They tend to reconstruct the man who might have been: the child of a dispossessed kingdom, educated in the colonizer’s language but never fully of it, shaped by exile and loss. Those fics often move slowly, focusing on the textures of memory. I’ve read scenes where the captain hums a lullaby in an old dialect while refurbishing a binnacle, or where he keeps relics of his past hidden in the sub’s engine room in secret boxes tied with sari cloth. The effect is intimate and sad, a reclamation of identity that sidelines the more bombastic revenge arcs.

A lot of these reinterpretations are explicitly postcolonial, and they do something satisfying — they make Prince Dakkar an agent rather than a romanticized avenger. Writers layer in the historical specifics: treaties, famines, treacherous alliances, and the everyday indignities of colonial rule. Some stories are almost alternate history, where Dakkar’s revolt succeeds or where he becomes the head of a diaspora government in exile, using the Nautilus as a diplomatic vessel. Others are more domestic: he tutors an orphaned child in lost languages, breaks down while recounting the names of those who were taken from him, or learns to grieve publicly for the first time. These choices change how the reader feels about his violence; it becomes contextualized, sometimes justified in a narrative of resistance, sometimes simply mournful and morally fraught.

If you’re writing from this angle, I’d urge care and curiosity. Read primary sources from the period, include real cultural practices and songs with respect, and avoid flattening the character into a single political symbol. The best stories I’ve seen are humane and complex — they let Dakkar be brilliant and petulant, tender and monstrous, loving and unforgiving. Above all, they treat loss as a living thing, something that can shape a life without wholly defining it, and that kind of nuance is what turns a retelling into a vivid reclaiming.

When I’m in a playful mood — late teens energy with a laptop full of tabs and mood boards — I’m obsessed with the AUs and format experiments people cook up for Prince Dakkar. Some creators strip him out of the 19th century and drop him into a modern world as a reclusive tech billionaire whose private oceanic lab is basically a glassier, more murderous Nautilus. Others genderbend him into 'Nema' or make him non-binary, exploring how royal identity and societal expectations shift with gender. Then there are the crossover fics, which are their own circus: imagine Prince Dakkar meeting a brash pirate crew from another franchise, or getting embroiled in a Victorian occult society that has no idea what the ocean really hides. The juice here is in the mash-up — seeing how Nemo’s obsessions play off characters with wildly different morals and vocabularies.

Form-wise, this corner of the fandom loves to experiment. I’ve read epistolary series composed entirely of telegrams and intercepted dispatches, a piece formatted as a ship’s inventory list that slowly reveals a love affair, and a meta fic where the captain writes fanletters to his younger self. People craft playlists — the fic comes with a tracklist that becomes vital to the mood — and others create illustrated snippets, tiny comics of daily life aboard the Nautilus: someone fixing a kettle, a midnight argument over the radio, a stolen dance on the engine room grating. Romance tends to get softer here; hurt/comfort is often domestic. Nemo, usually perfect and impenetrable, is suddenly knitting, laughing, or learning to say “I’m sorry” — and those steps toward vulnerability are surprisingly satisfying.

If you want to experiment, try focusing on small scenes rather than huge plot beats. A good microfic might be a 1,200-word moment where he shows a crewmember a picture from home, or a longer slowburn that’s mostly about two people learning to sleep in the same room without flinching at every creak. Tag your content cleanly if you’re playing with identity or history — readers appreciate both creativity and clarity. For me, the most delightful reinterpretations are the ones that leave some seeds unplanted, where the ocean still feels unknowable and the character holds a quiet mystery. They don’t fix everything about him, and that’s what keeps him alive to me.