Subject: Can you give me some solid advice for determining if an NSFW story is bad?
Author:
Posted on: 2020-11-17 19:38:53 UTC
Because I'm asexual, so anything sexual kind of grosses me out. I'm aware of this, so I know I'm biased. That's why I want to know how to tell if these stories are actually bad.
Up until I know, I won't talk about anything NSFW again, I promise.
The same things that make SFW badfic bad make NSFW badfic bad.
Specifically, you should be on the lookout for SPaG errors, plot holes and logic errors, characters that are OOC for no reason, and Mary Sues (for Sues in particular, I direct you to our wiki page on the subject). You’d also want to think about the plausibility and explanation quality of ships or crossovers if they’re in the fic.
To put it simply, analyze the NSFW parts based on the quality of the writing as opposed to how you specifically feel about it. Be mindful of your evaluation of the fic to catch yourself if you try to judge its quality in a biased way. Maybe get someone else to read the fic to see if they agree with you.
I don't want to step on your toes; just to add that the wiki also covers this question in more detail in various relevant articles. Specifically, I'd start with the YKINMK article and the Slash-Sporking Guide (even if you don't intend to spork slash).
I also want to highlight Trojie's fifth ground rule:
5. Try to avoid sporking something you wouldn't read if it were written well. This is a rule I've come up with only in the last few years, and for one reason: if you don't like the subject matter, why are you so upset it's been done wrong? In fact, if you aren't a habitual reader of similar things, how do you even know it has been done wrong? I tell myself this so as to avoid sporking things because of any internal prejudices or biases I might have.In this case, I think "don't like, don't read" may justly apply. If you're not into stories about romance and/or sex, that's okay! There's no reason to force yourself to read things that hold zero appeal for you. Granted, it's hard to find fic with zero romance—and believe me, this annoyed the heck out of me as a younger ace person, so I sympathize—but you can still avoid things that are rated R, M, NSFW, lemon, or anything else suggesting that there will be actual sex.
For myself, my feelings have mellowed and transformed to the point where I can enjoy well-written sex scenes (and enjoy laughing at badly written ones), but that's not to say yours will, or should. There's no reason to force it.
~Neshomeh
P.S. Devs, if you're reading, can we make the blockquote style less in-your-face? The bold and large font is a bit much, which is why I copied Thoth and styled the quote this way instead.
P.P.S. Edited to fix a link.
I have been known to enjoy a good NSFW fic from time to to time. But my guide to quality assessment for any sort of spork is more or less as follows:
Is it going to be fun to spork? It really, really doesn't matter how bad a piece of NSFW fic is if the resultant mission wouldn't be entertaining to read. Personally, I think that pure squick usually goes beyond the point at which missioning is entertaining. The flaws have to be something you can make enjoyable to mission.
What's the intent of the fic? You need to understand where a fic is coming from to do a mission properly. "This fic has a really terrible plot" is perfectly reasonable criticism of a fic with aspirations to telling a meaningful story, less so if the intent is just to have some NSFW fun. On the flip side, if the sex elements are the focus, it's a more important to get them right then it would be if the fic's elements there were more token.
The most important question: Do I buy it? An NSFW fic could be perfectly technically executed, but it will all fall flat if I am unconvinced by the events thst are occurring. If I don't believe that these characters would act this way, that is, to my mind, the ultimate failure. A fic like that would be ill-suited to missioning unless you had a really strong approach, but it's usually a strong factor in my assessment of any fic. Fanfiction is about existing characters, and if you're trying to tell me that a character is Harry Potter when it blatantly isn't... well, I'm not exactly buying into your fiction.
This is a big failure in a lot of AU fic, which tends to tack the character names and descriptions of onto the same set of tired archetypes and spit out a bland generic story of the sort that could be found in a bargain bin somewhere. It's not so much giving us a new take on the characters as it is steamrolling everything that makes those characters themselves out of them.
Which brings us to ABO, something I deeply and truly loathe with the burning passion of a thousand sons. Fighting Space Wolves. Shockingly, good (or at least decent) ABO is possible, but the concept is deeply and fundamentally flawed, and it is painful to watch characters I like stuffed into 50s gender role nonsense except it's gay now so that's fine.
Sorry, had to get that out. The point is, good NSFW fic is well-written, believable, and accomplishes whatever it sets out to do, like all good fiction. Bad NSFW fic does... like, the opposite of that.
(as a sidenote I only used code for quotes because I didn't realize there was a blockquote. I thought > quoting would work, as it does in a lot of markdown. But it does not.)
Thank you so much for the advice!