Subject: Badfic
Author:
Posted on: 2011-05-25 20:03:00 UTC
What is this nonsense. You'd think people who've actually read the Silmarillion would know better.
Whatwhatwhatwhatwhatwhatwhatwhat?
*facepalm* I shiver in fear as to what would have been going through the authors' minds when they wrote these.
To qualify my previous statement: Not because I'm hating the author, but I am generally puzzled as to what could possess a writer to write such pieces? Genuine inspiration? Or is it something else?
I do not want to read Reassuring Galadriel. No, I do not.
But I'm curious. Maybe I do...
No.
But how bad can it be?
Four minutes later: No, I did not want to read that.
Why do people write these things?
The people who write these disgusting fics have too much time on their hands. Oh, and they also have brains the size of a walnut.
That was below the belt.
We do NOT bash the authors. Authors are people who, though they may write bad fanfiction now, may learn from their mistakes and go on to write something truly wonderful.
Saying that they have "brains the size of a walnut" is saying that they do not have the ability to learn. That is mean spirited, uncalled for, and rude. Critique the writing, not the writer.
Now, if you have questions about that, please feel free to ask.
-Phobos
While yeah, I believe it's not cool to insult the writer of these things, there IS something that I'm fairly sure anybody here can blame here without fear.
Their developmental stage, as writers, and as people.
There are plenty of suefics that are downright misanthropic, and nearly ALL suefics do not consider the happiness/well-being of canon characters with all that they barge into the canon and usurp the story focus from people who were actually trying to live their lives. So many of them exist only so a real-life person can pretend to be 'better' than they are. And so many have ulterior motives, as perpetrated by the author.
Example. There is this fic that I am desperately trying to spork at the moment. It is Legend of Zelda. What this author does is pair off ALL female characters with OCs or kill them off, and is is very obvious she is doing so so that Link's only choice of mate is the Mary Sue... by way of availability. She cuts off all possible choices. Where one would normally say 'you can't know what the author was thinking when they wrote this,' ... no. You really can. Not only is everybody immaculately paired off, when Zelda becomes available again (her OC 'husband' is killed off for the sake of making a bad guy look more evil) she is immediately and very defensively stated to be pregnant and thus can't date Link. And then when the author forgets about the pregnancy, she decides to make Link and Zelda brother/sister (half-elf-half-hylian brother sister to boot) such that they 'can't' get it on. Previously unattached characters such as Midna immediately grow husbands, not after the plot of the story, but as if they had been married all along. Midna is inexplicably the 'Twilight Queen' with a husband when there had been no hint of it in the game Twilight Princess.
The author's ulterior, selfish motives are clear. But would it be wise to say the author's a selfish person? Yes... temporarily. Not permanently. This person's developmental stage is stuck in the egotistical, selfish stage normally associated with early adolescence-- you know the one I'm talking about. The one that explains why everybody suddenly became idiots in middle school/early high school.
When I want to criticize this mindset, I usually take the Mary Sue as a manifestation of it. The Mary Sue wants to hook up with Link, so the Mary Sue makes sure all other women are hitched as to not even give him a choice.
If this author is not really that bright depends how long they are stuck in those developmental doldrums. I hate to insult authors, but if somebody is still acting like a selfish fanbrat at age 25, not all might be well with them. I have an older cousin who acts as if he thinks he is dark, paranoid, gritty and 'extreme' because he thinks it's cool... not realizing he comes across as a moron. Not due to any mental issue or brain development. Just because that's what he thinks is cool. It's really not.
Why wouldn't this 26-year-old doofus make a Gary Stu that is a manifestation of his 'screw actually being a human being, I'm more awesome than you and I am going to prove it!' attitude?
So yeah. Most suethors will grow up to be nice, quirky people. Heck, I am still in the process of growing up to be a nice, quirky person. But many of the authors writing that fanfic that makes you scream 'how could you be such an insensitive moron!' or 'you really enjoy being a horrible, manipulative person!', at THAT darkest stage of suethordom... are temporarily not that great of people.
There's a reason why early adolescence and bad suefic often go together. More often than not, it's that lack of empathy/thought that characterizes that developmental stage taking a manifestation in writing. Not all early teens are like this, but the ones that are sure do gather in FF.Net like flies on your ice cream.
***Just a note, throughout all of this, it is still not cool to insult writers, no matter what one may think of them. But I believe knowing the author's motives and mindset allows one to fully understand, to grok the story itself and allow for a funnier interpretation. It becomes a tale that wildly makes up ridiculous things in order to try and get some kind of goal rather than a story that makes one wonder 'WHY WOULD ANYBODY DO THIS?'
that it's about immaturity. I didn't start writing fanfiction until I was fourteen, so I can't compare my treatment of canon characters, but when I look back at the things I wrote when I was twelve and thirteen, I see an immature writing style, bad plots, and overly powerful and/or angsty main characters. I can only assume that a lot of the bad writers of fanfic just haven't gotten past that stage.
What I understand least are the good writers who don't care about canon, especially the ones who write stuff like these two badfics.
Well, I can think of two reasons why somebody with basic grasp of storytelling would write really terrible crap.
1) Their emotional attachment to a stupid idea is stronger than their common sense. I know plenty of smart people who have some kind of lingering obsession with stupidly impossible things. Once again, not insulting the author, just the badness of their phase.
2) Despite their skill at writing, they have really terrible exposure to a variety of works. As hard as it is to believe, there are some people out there who read fanfic and books and stuff... but don't explore or try and improve beyond the semblance of being good. One particularly embarassing example is a friend of mine. He graduated college this year, and he is a self-proclaimed fanfiction snob-- he favors hundreds-page-long epic fics. Unfortunately, he also thinks that the Star Wars Extended Universe books and characters are high art (most of them are anything BUT) and is a fan of fanfictions that portray Hermione Granger as some kind of super-human apocalypse mutant witch, and stories that turn Harry Potter into a jaguar animagus and make him go to Brazil with Bill Weasley to swear, drink, and hit on women a lot... all the while running with a 'jaguar pack.' And I won't even get into the fic that contains the line "the rattata savagely lunged for Ash's neck, fangs bared!"
(The only fanfic he ever wrote was the beginning of some AU where Kuzon from Avatar the Last Airbender was frozen in time like Aang, and turned out to be some kind of super soldier with a dark past who can't trust anyone. Commence canon rape, and the stealing of everything cool the canon characters do. Thank goodness the later chapters didn't make it onto the internet.)
Once again, the author's not a bad person. In fact, he's a pretty OK person. It's just very possible to have experience and knowledge of the basic mechanics, SpaG standards, and plot flow of a story, but little exposure to the goodness of a WELL-CRAFTED story, and no drive to get exposed to boot.
So yeah. >_>;
Can we avoid using phrases like 'canon rape' in the future? It's just a bit of a nitpick-- could be triggering for some, and IMHO it is kind of trivialising.
--VM
(because we clearly haven't filled our quota for 'Board drama yet.)
Using wiki term.
Bring it up with the person who made the article, I guess?
Wow. Yeah, I shall.
Not to be a dramallama, I'm not sure if it's that appropriate to change the wiki page or rename it. So many things link to it with those words, and not all of them are 'wrong' or 'insensitive' invokations.
Plenty of things talk about a metaphorical 'rape' of sorts. It's not really appropriate to whitewash everything just because somebody may have a trigger to an offhand, metaphorical usage of a potentially charged word.
It's like saying that because there are people who mourn the WWII holocaust, the word 'genocide' shouldn't be used.
Just saying. There's sensitive, and there's oversensitive. It's not good to devalue the word 'rape' by using it casually, but maybe it's better if we use canon 'rape' with the proper gravity.
Taking bits out for no reason other than it has the potential to offend somebody leaves a bad taste of Fahrenheit 451 in my mouth.
I'll try to remember that.