I didn't mean to imply that there's no such thing as good fanfic, only that getting pissed about bad fanfic is not the same as, say, getting pissed because you spent 20 bucks to see a movie and it was terrible. And like, obviously I can't stop you from bitching and moaning, because I am not omnipotent*. Just... you know... be nice about it? Or at least constructive? Please? (*yet)
idk, i feel like here, in a setting where the actual author will likely never see our commentary, constructiveness isnt much of an issue? if this was in the comments section of a fanfiction id agree wholeheartedly, but as it is....
Ehhhhhhhhh okay, fair enough. This is something I get overly sensitive about (a combination of my own experience with criticism and watching the friend I mentioned get absolutely ruthlessly savaged for no good reason).
Yeah, this- I'm not going to expend the emotional and intellectual energy on trying to help someone improve who hasn't asked me to and who, ideally, isn't even seeing my whining anyway. Maybe they don't even want to improve, maybe instead of practice for "real" writing it's just a fun id-wallowing end in itself for them. That's one hundred percent fine! But it means that concrit would be wasted on them.
Not really to do with @South-lands anymore, just a general musing on the subject of the quality of free stuff: Neither I nor anyone else pays a cent for the weather, but we sure do whinge when it's sucky!
I will have you know I pay rent for that weather! To be serious though yes I agree concerning the devaluation of fic. Especially when we pretend that published works are any less selfish or pandering.
Ah, but see, the weather comes to you, and you *have* to deal with it. Fanfic doesn't fall out of the sky and put dents in the roof of your car! (At least, I hope not?)
That one doesn't sound too far-fetched. Anyway, Little Miss Mary made me cry. The PPC sporking also made me cry.
Fanfic has quite literally kept me awake for two nights running and that's not a joke. Poorly labelled gore is bad for kids.
A bad Pokémon fanfiction made my parents think I was reading Nazi propaganda and I almost got grounded.
They were skimming it over my shoulder and saw "Führer" at some point. The plot of the fic was that Lugia, who was somehow a passenger airliner, got sent at various points in time by whichever Pokémon it is that does time stuff, except it was in stuff from the real world, and the fic ended with a cliffhanger as they got sent in the middle of a battle, in Normandy, on June 6th...1945. It Was Bad.
Reading fic is a huge part of how I engage with a fandom. No individual story will make everything horrible, but huge enough trends can sour me on an entire fandom. Not talking about Sturgeon's Law, crap can be enjoyable, but things that can appear even in technically-high-quality writing. And I can't necessarily know if a given fic has the thing without reading it. So in a sense it does happen to me like weather.
Like I'm starting to lose my excitement about The Adventure Zone- even the frickin' canon!- because of these trends and the stories they're in can even be quite good aside from what I would consider a characterization error, but. Meh.
What kinda trends? I've been holding off getting into Adventure Zone fanfics and shit till I catch up, and I guess I'd kinda appreciate a head's up about, i dunno, the general fanwork landscape?? IDK.
