Subject: One night of the drop of rain
Author:
Posted on: 2021-11-29 15:42:20 UTC
A drop-dead hilarious Hetalia badfic that may or may not be a trollfic. Featuring butchering of the English language to the point of incomprehensibility, a plot that likely still wouldn't make much sense even if the fic wasn't unreadable, and this line:
_ TRANSLATION ERROR _ said the England in the surprised.Make of it what you will.
I don't know anything about the Hetalia fandom, but now I want to kill this. English is sometimes inconsistent, illogical, and irritating, but it is my first language and seeing it get mangled like this just makes me furious.
...that while getting mad at badfic is understandable, I feel like it kind of defeats the purpose of PPCing, which is to have fun poking fun at badfic. There's a reason why the MST3K mantra gets quoted so often around here - it's just a fic, so we really should relax. :) I've had my share of brain-breaking badfic before, but I know what skeeves me out or makes me angry and why, and I take care to avoid that, because while anger can lead to some funny snark sometimes, most of the time it's just exhausting and not fun for a reader to engage with. This is all my opinion, mind you, but I do feel like we should keep in perspective what the PPC is about and why.
Besides, as far as I'm concerned, Engrish is a pretty funny thing. (By which I mean that I'd never poke fun of someone not being great at speaking a foreign language, because I'm no better when it comes to my own secondary languages aside from English, but there's a reason why everyone laughs their butts off at bad bootleg translations.)
I mean, we all have our pet peeves, even if I think that language-mangling is funnier than it is worth my anger. I mean, I just bought a book that is an intentional parody of bad writing, and if it had been published in English I'd be covering the Board with my recs, because it's exactly the kind of mangled storytelling we love to poke fun of. So even if I don't quite get why Engrish is such a big deal for you, I won't call you weird for being annoyed by it. But I just wanted to say that if a badfic makes you genuinely angry, chances are you won't be able to give it the good-natured parodying the PPC stands for nowadays. Obviously it's everyone's own business how they handle badfic, but I personally find angry sporkings very uncomfortable to read. So I guess what I'm trying to say is to exercise caution if you're approaching a fic that makes you angry, and to consider if it's worth getting angry about in the first place. Usually, it's not. :)