Subject: Oh, I do sympathise.
Author:
Posted on: 2012-03-25 10:23:00 UTC
I honestly can't remember my own fanfic, but my first effort at an original story was a monster containing nearly ten Mary Sues, dozens of plot points pulled from various undesirable places, and more self-inserts than you can poke a stick at (I went around asking various friends and fellow students if they wanted to be in it). It was terrible, and I'm sorry I ever thought of it.
Has anyone here ever been called out/harassed/attacked by an author or an author's fans for PPCing something they wrote? If so, how did you respond to it?
Does anyone try to communicate with the authors before PPCing their fics? I mean, does anyone sit down and write a review of the story saying, "This needs work because of x, y, and z"?
(I tried this once and got a very polite, detailed response, although I didn't see any immediate improvement in the quality of the writing. He/she misspelled my name, for one thing.)
One of the fics on the claimed badfic list under my name is actually something I claimed with the author's permission to spork it.
I actually wasn't planning on asking at first, but then the author posted a rewrite of the fic I claimed on fanfiction.net without taking down the original version. While the grammar errors are still there, storywise it is so much better, and it improved on pretty much all the plot/characterization points I was going to bring up in the mission. So I gave a brief review, and was like, 'oh, BTW, I do stuff with this thing called the PPC can I use your fic'.
She said yes.
(Don't you wish we had more people like this?)
Which is silly, though I think they're just upset in general.
It was absolutely horrific, my six Mary Sues "fell" into the Naruto universe and had senseless, Mary-Sue-esque adventures, and one was the "six-tailed cat" Jinchuuriki (I was eleven, shut up). I rewrote it a bunch, making it a more surreal type of thing with believable (I hope) characters (AND NO SONGFIC CHAPTERS, still can't believe I thought that was a good idea), but then I forgot to save the old version... too bad, because I really, really wanted to request a sporking of it. It was terrible.
My very first fanfic was a Fire Emblem crossover fest in which I involved all the American FE's (and one of the Japanese ones--without having played it first), and it made absolutely no sense and was needlessly dark. It also had a plethora of Sues/Stus.
I just wish I hadn't deleted it about... four years? Has it really been four years? Otherwise, I would put it up on the sporking block right now.
I honestly can't remember my own fanfic, but my first effort at an original story was a monster containing nearly ten Mary Sues, dozens of plot points pulled from various undesirable places, and more self-inserts than you can poke a stick at (I went around asking various friends and fellow students if they wanted to be in it). It was terrible, and I'm sorry I ever thought of it.
I meant 'my own first fanfic'.
... mine got put into the Naruto Hall of Shame. It's still there, although I believe that's just lazyness on the mod's part-I did fix it up quite a bit.
I wrote my first fanfic at the age of six, about the weird characters in some interstitial on Cartoon Network. They scared me, and so I was trying to make them less scary in my head or something.
It made absolutely no sense and was written in Chicken-Scratch. Sadly, I think I threw it away.
Later on, after another reviewer had basically seconded me, the story was taken down because of "flames."
The reason was later changed to "because of a new idea."
I still haven't seen that new idea.
I have, however, been monitoring a situation with an individual calling themselves "Sonic Rhymeboom", a name which I can only assume was taken from a conversation I had in the IRC. Said person (referred to as "Sonic" from now on) has been going around and reporting PPC missions to the subjects of said missions. So far Sonic has hit Tray and Guvnor's pokemon/zombie crossover mission, Herr's "Rainbow Dash goes to the Mushroom Kinkdom" mission, Miah's "Sateda" and "Burn Notice: Season 8" mission, Nesh's "Magic World" and "Cosmic Love" missions, Firemagic's "Saigo no Tanjoobi" mission, Ellipsis Flood's "Comic to Fruition" mission, and July's "The Forgotten Child" mission. It is, of course, entirely possible that a few missions have been missed, but I think that gets the point across.
Thus far, all of the comments/reviews/whatever you want to call them have been almost direct copies of one another, with minor alterations here and there. The first one, Tray and Guv's mission, was done as an anonymous review under the name "A Fan", but it's clearly the same person. As far as I know, the only thing to come of it so far is that the authors of the fic Tray and Guv tackled wrote a revenge fic, in which their Sue and Stu killed Tray and Guv's agent. Not sure if anything more came of that.
Said revenge fic writing authors have recently deleted said fic.
Wow, must have missed stuff in my absence. I guess in the end it doesn't matter, beyond abuse they can't really do much.
Can we block them somehow? No, really. This ain't cool and could lead to another Suevasion.
Well, they can come and get some if they want.
Jokes aside, no we can't block them. But it doesn't mean we have to pay attention to them after we've sporked their stuff.
We should be listening to authors after their stories have been sporked. Yes, the person who responded to Tray and Guv was petty and juvenile, but that doesn't mean we can blanket-ignore everyone we please. Sometimes, people make good points; although we never intend to be bullies, I bloody well hope, that line can get fuzzy, and it can be crossed. And if someone comes to us and goes "Hey, that line of bullying? You just crossed it," we'd better be willing to listen. For example, when a bunch of people began to write essays about why the term "Mary Sue" was sexist (and, yes, why the PPC was a bunch of bullies), most of us disagreed... but because as a community, we listened to their criticisms and thought about what they had to say, a very productive discussion about bullying, and that line we try not to cross, came up. I think we've been a lot more aware of potentially sexist terminology and tropes since then, and I'm glad the whole thing happened.
Also, to be honest, my response to people going "You did what to my story?!" is to think "...Wait, nobody told you?" I seriously think we should be giving concrit on stories before we go after them - doing that kind of pretty much takes all the wind out of jerks like Rhymeboom's sails, and keeps us from looking like hypocrites. After all, if we do care more about goodfic and writing quality than simply blasting things we don't like, concrit should be our first response anyway. If people ignore the concrit, or respond with the typical response of upset children everywhere, then... it's different. But it seems like our standards really should be to try to help before going in for the kill - we concrit each other, we should give fanfic authors that chance, too.
So I'm sorta opposed to responding to angry badfic authors with various comically oversized weapons; I think as a community we can do a lot better than the people we complain about by responding to criticisms, instead of attacking them.
*climbs off soapbox*
...er, carry on.
Remember, folks, we're anti-badfic, not anti-author. If any authors do show up here to complain, our best defense is to welcome them like we would anyone else and treat them with civility.
Also, listen to VM, she is wise. I've been making more of an effort to leave reviews myself because of all the stuff she mentioned. So far nothing has come of it except that it makes Sonic Rhymeboom look like a spiteful idiot, but that suits me well in itself. Having thought it through, there are really very few good reasons not to leave reviews in the face of all the reasons to do it.
~Neshomeh
The Forgotten Child one Artell and I actually commented and talked to the author of it.
They know we did a mission- and that we decided the character wasn't a Sue.
Quite a few of my older missions involved reviews. Dunno why I stopped.
Right-o. I kinda meant the flamethrower to be a joke, so I apologize if it came off as aggressive on my part.
I completely agree with VM's points. What I meant by "not paying attention" is if they come to call us names, that we don't have to be bothered by them. Responding with concrit is a good idea.