Subject: My approach
Author:
Posted on: 2020-11-18 22:36:31 UTC
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.)