I'd like to ask you to take a look at this mission, which is into a badfic I wrote, or this one, which was written by a PPC Boarder (and PPC'd on request), or for that matter SkarmorySilver's first mission, into a story by himself.
'Suethor' isn't a word that tells you anything about a person, and I kind of regret not jumping up and down on it when it was first coined. All it tells you is that someone has written a bad piece of fanfiction - and there are three reasons people do that.
1/ They're trolling, or deliberately trying to provoke a reaction. That's really not as common as some Boarders think.
2/ They know it's bad and don't care. This seems to be how most Boarders think virtually all badfics are created, and I believe - I have to believe - it's why people use 'Suethor' as an epithet. But they're wrong. It's very rare that someone literally doesn't care, and they're usually very obvious - they include comments like 'this is the WILD and CRAZY story me and my friends came up with on a sugar rush last night in which Legolas is our new maths teacher and he totally loves all of us!'. Most badfics fall in category three:
3/ They write badly because they don't know how to write well. Look back at Rings of Power, my linked mission. I have a whole bunch of writing from about that time which consists of:
-Group of people encounter situation.
-Every single thing which happens in the area affects them.
-No-one can solve anything without their help.
-They get all the good stuff.
I did the research. I knew the layout of Lothlorien, and the timeline of the books. I didn't make up nonsensical, non-canonical stuff. But I hadn't learnt enough to let the protagonists operate in the world, rather than warping it around them. If they ran into trouble, it was specifically aimed at them - because that makes for added tension, right? R...right?
The vast majority of badfic writers are young, and still learning to write - heck, I was probably sixteen or seventeen when I wrote that, not even that 'young'! But it's very rare that people can write really well without lots and lots of practice. No, reading a lot doesn't help: it takes practice to realise that you are doing it differently to Terry Pratchett, or J.K. Rowling, or what have you. And you won't notice by reading back your own story, either.
So yeah, we kill Mary-Sues, and exorcise Bad Slash, and break up Disturbing Acts of Violence, and all that other stuff - because it's fun, and because it lets us highlight what's wrong about it, and as catharsis on behalf of the canon characters. But we always, always need to remember that authors aren't out to get us. The vast majority of them just want to write, because they enjoy it, and they have a fountain of ideas in their heads which they need to get down. The only way for them to learn how to do that well... is to do it badly.
hS
