The Sometime Myth of Extreme Badfic
I‛ve been seeing a lot of rants recently about "those stories!"
You know...those stories. The ones so completely not spellchecked that even the canon characters names aren‛t spelled correctly. The ones where Snape (Spock, Fraser, Jim) is crying every five minutes and calling Harry (Kirk, Ray, Blair) his little love muffin. The ones where rape is seen as a normal prelude to romance. The ones where the rather nice canon love interest of Character X is portrayed as the demon spawn of hell (Buffy/Angel universes excepted) so that X is free to hook up with Character Y.
It‛s not that I doubt the ranters. I believe "those stories" exist. In fact, I‛ve seen them. But they seem to have become invisible to me over the past few years, and I‛m not really sure why. Unlike a lot of my friends, I don‛t just follow recs to find stories (...that would be bad form for a reccer, wouldn‛t it?). I browse through many communities in many fandoms. I look through fanfiction.net. Hell, I‛ve even been known to put search phrases into google occasionally (e.g., "snape was drunk") to see if I can find a particular type of story, and yet in all my rambles, I almost never see Extreme Badfic.
How is it that these stories have become so elusive? Are they actually less prevalent these days than people make them out to be? Are certain fandoms/pairings more likely to include Extreme Badfic than others (I read a lot of different pairings in many different fandoms, so I‛m not quite sure I buy this possibility)? Or is it just that after all these years in fandom, I‛ve learned to see the warning signs the second I click on a story link and so now I hit the back button before my brain even registers that it had caught a glimpse of one of "those stories?"
You know...those stories. The ones so completely not spellchecked that even the canon characters names aren‛t spelled correctly. The ones where Snape (Spock, Fraser, Jim) is crying every five minutes and calling Harry (Kirk, Ray, Blair) his little love muffin. The ones where rape is seen as a normal prelude to romance. The ones where the rather nice canon love interest of Character X is portrayed as the demon spawn of hell (Buffy/Angel universes excepted) so that X is free to hook up with Character Y.
It‛s not that I doubt the ranters. I believe "those stories" exist. In fact, I‛ve seen them. But they seem to have become invisible to me over the past few years, and I‛m not really sure why. Unlike a lot of my friends, I don‛t just follow recs to find stories (...that would be bad form for a reccer, wouldn‛t it?). I browse through many communities in many fandoms. I look through fanfiction.net. Hell, I‛ve even been known to put search phrases into google occasionally (e.g., "snape was drunk") to see if I can find a particular type of story, and yet in all my rambles, I almost never see Extreme Badfic.
How is it that these stories have become so elusive? Are they actually less prevalent these days than people make them out to be? Are certain fandoms/pairings more likely to include Extreme Badfic than others (I read a lot of different pairings in many different fandoms, so I‛m not quite sure I buy this possibility)? Or is it just that after all these years in fandom, I‛ve learned to see the warning signs the second I click on a story link and so now I hit the back button before my brain even registers that it had caught a glimpse of one of "those stories?"