Sure! It wasn't like "Saw" leg choppage LOL; he lost his leg to bone cancer. Nothing inappropriate about that. Actually, Lurlene McDaniel, who was my favorite YA author as a tween, published a novel during that same time period when I was thinking of rewriting Broken about a swimmer who had his leg amputated due to cancer and later committed suicide. Broken at least had a happy ending LOL.
Editing to add I also read a fantastic YA novel last year that I almost forgot about called "The Running Dream" that was about a track star who loses her leg after a car accident and learns to run again with a prosthesis. It took me right back to researching for Broken. But yeah, choppage can and has been done in YA fiction.
I guess I always want to remember it as "Saw" leg choppage, even though I know it's not. OMG, poor Nick if he had the cancer, then the leg choppage, then the car accident, then the lung transplant, and then committed suicide. I'm laughing, but it feels so mean!
I remember hearing that one was good! I always love a good YA novel even as an adult.
I think you could keep the characters in a band if you changed the names. A boyband might still be too obvious, but a rock band or something would be less recognizable. Personality traits and even physical descriptions would be less obvious, especially to readers who weren't BSB fans and didn't know it was originally written as a fanfic. I think it'd be much easier to de-Backstreetize a story that doesn't revolve around them being famous and touring and stuff, so a fantasy might be more doable. Is that what you're hoping to do with PBox?
I've toyed with it as it's spent more and more time in my head/heart, but especially after Nick came running back to gnaw at my brain and as I've been editing. Without giving too much away on my future plot plans, a lot of the entire story (PBox et al. if you will) and its central themes revolve around them actually being boy bands even though most of it's set in a fantastical world. Like PBox was actually about the idea [spoiler ahead, skip it if you care about being spoiled and don't want to know! If you don't care, go ahead and look at it.] [spoiler]"why does the media treat boy bands like 'your time is up and now you're locked up like monsters and no one really remembers you' even when that boy band says 'hey, as long as there's music, there's value in all music, even after it's forgotten'."[/spoiler] I give away a lot about PBox, but I feel like that might a spoiler more than who lives and dies at this point. And I know it's not your thing, so have all the spoils! That and a lot of the beginning has some suspicious seeming similarities with a manga that one of my friends handed me after I let them read some of PBox saying "I think you'll like this." And at the time I was like "Oh no!" and then "Oh well, it's a fanfic and I can always just say the truth, that I hadn't read it at the time." But if I did try to publish it, I would definitely have to overhaul some aspects of the beginning a lot for that reason. That and minimizing all the song imagery would be a hassle!
But as I've said, toyed. And I definitely thought about asking how it went for anyone who's done it. But again, I didn't want to derail my progress at this time and I also can't imagine Nick as anyone other than Nick and a "Nic
kolas" is a dead giveaway (versus a Nic
holas). Also my poor husband would be so confused why my published novel has his name for the main character, not even considering Nick Carter... But I think if I did, I'd go for his appearance over name, since as I said both simultaneously seems suspect.