Terrible fiction that you (unironically) enjoy despite its awfulness. Or maybe because of it.
So I've been thinking lately, ever since jane_elliot's discussion post about whump and TerriblyMisjudged!kink, about Idfic and narrative kinks and guilty pleasures, and Lord King Badfic*, and the lengths we -- or at least, I -- will go to satisfy our kinks. I will read utter trash and love it if it has a regency-era marriage of (in)inconvenience, a character being Terribly Misjudged, or a woobie character getting the living snot beaten out of him *while* being terribly misjudged. Or vampires. Vampires who are terribly misjudged and get beaten up a lot and you know, it's been way too long since I read one of DreamsofSpike's "Spike Gets Tortured A Lot and Then Gets Tortured More and Everyone is Mean to Him Especially Xander, and Then... More Torture! And Buffy Heals Him With Her Magic Hoo-Haa" fics. (I like Xander an awful lot, but I like Spike getting chained to a wall and tortured even more, and her fics never quite cross my back-button threshhold for Xander-bashing, though it's often a near thing. Plus, they're all really long)
And then there's this one Magnificent Seven author who wrote this endless h/c epic that was updated at incredibly long intervals (like, six-to-nine months, or a whole year, between updates) and which has been an abandoned WiP since at least 2004, but which I used to absolutely stalk for updates back in the day. Every instalment, Ezra would sustain some new life-threatening injury, and the other Seven were all wracked with guilt for not realizing Ezra's woobie awesomeness sooner, and Ezra was, in general, a huge canon Sue. He got shot, and beaten, and blown up, and nearly drowned, and god knows what-all, and all of the action of the fic took place pover about a three-day period. Reading it was the literary equivalent of eating an entire bowl of brownie batter -- ultimately nauseating, but it's so delicious that you just can't stop. Oh man, I loved that fic. I haven't re-read it in years, and I'm not sure I'd be able able to wade through the massive OTT-ness of it now, but one of the writer's bits of fanon backstory, that Ezra was a Confederate artillery man, remains an immutable part of my personal headcanon for the show.
If you plotted quality against emoporn/kink-fulfillment content on a graph, I suspect the result would look something like this:
With the emoporn/narrative-kink content required to keep someone reading increasing as the quality decreases, until you get those fics that are just godawful, terribly written, and full of ooc characterization and technical flaws, but that are so compelling that you just Can't. Stop. Reading. And so you bookmark them in your web browser favorites (because someone might see it if you bookmarked the fic on delicious, and then they would judge you) and read them over and over in secret, even though you know in your soul that they suck harder than a black hole.
Published fiction does this, too. Category romance novels contain a lot of it.
So, flist, reveal your secret shame:
Tell me about a piece of terrible fiction (in terms of quality, not in terms of having an ethical/moral/ideological stance you find icky) that you read and loved anyway. Not loved in a "OMG, this is such a glorious trainwreck/I read it for the lulz" kind of way, but truly, unironically enjoyed. Then tell me why you loved it. Things read prior to the age of fourteen don't count, nor do any fics from Steve/Tony fandom (in fact, any fic where you *know* the author is on my flist should probably be avoided -- I want to revel in trashy fic in all its Id-tastic glory, not start wank).
If you want to keep your secret shame secret, anonymous posting is enabled -- or rec me a Lord King Bad Fic something that centers around a gloriously trashy Id-tastic concept that by rights ought to produce cringeworthy badfic and yet is well written, IC, and made of awesome -- a guilty pleasure without the guilt, in effect.
I'll go first:
Lord King Bad Fic (badfic concept, good execution)
crimsonclad's Commutative Property. Rodney gets an eating disorder. And yet it's actually *good* and doesn't make me want to cry tears of blood.
Flat-Out Badfic (professional)
Laurell K. Hamilton's faerie pr0n series. The heroine is a huge Sue, there are far too many essentially interchangeable men with My Little Pony hair and eye colors, and at least 1/2 to 2/3rds of every book is sex scenes that often do little to further the plot, and there *still* hasn't been any Merry/Sholto tentapr0n, but LKH's Unseelie court is, weirdly, one of the more compelling urban fantasy versions of faerie I've read, especially the Lovecraft-inspired Sluagh. Maybe it helps that unlike the Anita Blake books, which started out as mystery/thrillers and degraded into masturbatory erotica starring an increasingly Sue-tastic Anita, the faerie pr0n series is erotica from the get go, so there's no inherent bitterness over shark-jumping when I read a new one. I don't actually read these for Id-pr0n -- they're pure mind-candy, cotton candy fluff with the occasional bit of re-worked or bastardized celtic mythology thrown in to entertain my folklore/mythology geek side. Also, I kind of want Frost to die, annoying whiner that he is, and read a long fanfic series entirely devoted to a Doyle/Sholto/Rhys/Merry foursome. With tentapr0n. What's the point of having a character with tentacles in an erotica series if he never gets to use them onscreen? LKH, you've written human/wereleopard-in-furry-man-leopard-form furry pr0n in the Anita books. I promise you, tentapr0n is actually somewhat more mainstream than that, at least going by anime.
The cock-ring books Anne Bishop's Black Jewels trilogy.
The female lead is the biggest Mary Sue of all time. More than Anita Blake, Lestat, and Ayla combined. More than Rhapsody from Elizabeth Hayden's Rhapsody books, who is so beautiful that random passers-by are struck speechless by her loveliness, yet thinks she's ugly (and is the queen of two different countries, the wielder of a magic sword of power, and at one point has her virginity magically renewed). The naming scheme is so campy it borders on ridiculous. The world-building is obviously all done in the service of enabling specific kinks (think Xanthe's "Coming Home" universe, if it starred a colossal Mary Sue rather than starring John and Rodney, and was much sillier and more OTT). The male characters have manpain so epic it's ridiculous (one of them is actually driven to a complete mental breakdown and temporary insanity by the strength of his manpain -- seriously, he goes crazy from guilt because he thinks he raped and killed a girl, except he actually didn't even touch her and is totally innocent, and in fact saved her life from the *real* rapist/attempted-killer). There are talking unicorns. The female lead is the prophesied savior of the talking unicorns. And the people. And the talking tigers. And the talking magical spiders. And the dragons.
I own the entire series and re-read it semi-regularly. The best bits are the parts where Daemon is crazy with (undeserved) guilt and everyone's mean to him because they think he's an evil rapist. No one has ever suffered like he has suffered, you guys!!1!11!!! (except Francis Crawford of Lymond, but Dorothy Dunnett's name ought not to even be uttered in the company of these books, so far above them is the Lymond series in terms of writing quality).
Which reminds me: Lord King Bad Fic (professional)
The Lymond Chronicles. Over the course of six books, Lymond is shot, poisoned, arrested for treason and nearly hanged when in reality he's totally innocent (this may in fact happen more than once, IIRC), has his child stolen and raised by an evil psycho who then forces Francis to choose between the lives of his own kid and another totally innocent child, forcibly addicted to opium against his will, and is Terribly Misjudged by absolutely everyone ever. At one point, he actually goes temporarily blind from angst. No, seriously.
And yet the series is beautifully written, well-researched, and in general much, much better than the above summary makes it sound. And the female characters are three-dimensional and interesting.
*Term originally from vidding. To make a Lord King Bad Vid is to use all of your extensive technical skill to make a vid about a concept you would have loved back when you were thirteen, like, say, a sappy Bella/Edward shipper vid to Evanescence's "Bring Me to Life." Or a Dan/Adrian vid to Evanescence's "Everybody's Fool." (Admit it, some of you on my flist secretly long for this vid to exist and be really, really terrible). Or any shipper vid set to an Evanescence song, really.
And then there's this one Magnificent Seven author who wrote this endless h/c epic that was updated at incredibly long intervals (like, six-to-nine months, or a whole year, between updates) and which has been an abandoned WiP since at least 2004, but which I used to absolutely stalk for updates back in the day. Every instalment, Ezra would sustain some new life-threatening injury, and the other Seven were all wracked with guilt for not realizing Ezra's woobie awesomeness sooner, and Ezra was, in general, a huge canon Sue. He got shot, and beaten, and blown up, and nearly drowned, and god knows what-all, and all of the action of the fic took place pover about a three-day period. Reading it was the literary equivalent of eating an entire bowl of brownie batter -- ultimately nauseating, but it's so delicious that you just can't stop. Oh man, I loved that fic. I haven't re-read it in years, and I'm not sure I'd be able able to wade through the massive OTT-ness of it now, but one of the writer's bits of fanon backstory, that Ezra was a Confederate artillery man, remains an immutable part of my personal headcanon for the show.
If you plotted quality against emoporn/kink-fulfillment content on a graph, I suspect the result would look something like this:
With the emoporn/narrative-kink content required to keep someone reading increasing as the quality decreases, until you get those fics that are just godawful, terribly written, and full of ooc characterization and technical flaws, but that are so compelling that you just Can't. Stop. Reading. And so you bookmark them in your web browser favorites (because someone might see it if you bookmarked the fic on delicious, and then they would judge you) and read them over and over in secret, even though you know in your soul that they suck harder than a black hole.
Published fiction does this, too. Category romance novels contain a lot of it.
So, flist, reveal your secret shame:
Tell me about a piece of terrible fiction (in terms of quality, not in terms of having an ethical/moral/ideological stance you find icky) that you read and loved anyway. Not loved in a "OMG, this is such a glorious trainwreck/I read it for the lulz" kind of way, but truly, unironically enjoyed. Then tell me why you loved it. Things read prior to the age of fourteen don't count, nor do any fics from Steve/Tony fandom (in fact, any fic where you *know* the author is on my flist should probably be avoided -- I want to revel in trashy fic in all its Id-tastic glory, not start wank).
If you want to keep your secret shame secret, anonymous posting is enabled -- or rec me a Lord King Bad Fic something that centers around a gloriously trashy Id-tastic concept that by rights ought to produce cringeworthy badfic and yet is well written, IC, and made of awesome -- a guilty pleasure without the guilt, in effect.
I'll go first:
Lord King Bad Fic (badfic concept, good execution)
crimsonclad's Commutative Property. Rodney gets an eating disorder. And yet it's actually *good* and doesn't make me want to cry tears of blood.
Flat-Out Badfic (professional)
Laurell K. Hamilton's faerie pr0n series. The heroine is a huge Sue, there are far too many essentially interchangeable men with My Little Pony hair and eye colors, and at least 1/2 to 2/3rds of every book is sex scenes that often do little to further the plot, and there *still* hasn't been any Merry/Sholto tentapr0n, but LKH's Unseelie court is, weirdly, one of the more compelling urban fantasy versions of faerie I've read, especially the Lovecraft-inspired Sluagh. Maybe it helps that unlike the Anita Blake books, which started out as mystery/thrillers and degraded into masturbatory erotica starring an increasingly Sue-tastic Anita, the faerie pr0n series is erotica from the get go, so there's no inherent bitterness over shark-jumping when I read a new one. I don't actually read these for Id-pr0n -- they're pure mind-candy, cotton candy fluff with the occasional bit of re-worked or bastardized celtic mythology thrown in to entertain my folklore/mythology geek side. Also, I kind of want Frost to die, annoying whiner that he is, and read a long fanfic series entirely devoted to a Doyle/Sholto/Rhys/Merry foursome. With tentapr0n. What's the point of having a character with tentacles in an erotica series if he never gets to use them onscreen? LKH, you've written human/wereleopard-in-furry-man-leopard-form furry pr0n in the Anita books. I promise you, tentapr0n is actually somewhat more mainstream than that, at least going by anime.
The cock-ring books Anne Bishop's Black Jewels trilogy.
The female lead is the biggest Mary Sue of all time. More than Anita Blake, Lestat, and Ayla combined. More than Rhapsody from Elizabeth Hayden's Rhapsody books, who is so beautiful that random passers-by are struck speechless by her loveliness, yet thinks she's ugly (and is the queen of two different countries, the wielder of a magic sword of power, and at one point has her virginity magically renewed). The naming scheme is so campy it borders on ridiculous. The world-building is obviously all done in the service of enabling specific kinks (think Xanthe's "Coming Home" universe, if it starred a colossal Mary Sue rather than starring John and Rodney, and was much sillier and more OTT). The male characters have manpain so epic it's ridiculous (one of them is actually driven to a complete mental breakdown and temporary insanity by the strength of his manpain -- seriously, he goes crazy from guilt because he thinks he raped and killed a girl, except he actually didn't even touch her and is totally innocent, and in fact saved her life from the *real* rapist/attempted-killer). There are talking unicorns. The female lead is the prophesied savior of the talking unicorns. And the people. And the talking tigers. And the talking magical spiders. And the dragons.
I own the entire series and re-read it semi-regularly. The best bits are the parts where Daemon is crazy with (undeserved) guilt and everyone's mean to him because they think he's an evil rapist. No one has ever suffered like he has suffered, you guys!!1!11!!! (except Francis Crawford of Lymond, but Dorothy Dunnett's name ought not to even be uttered in the company of these books, so far above them is the Lymond series in terms of writing quality).
Which reminds me: Lord King Bad Fic (professional)
The Lymond Chronicles. Over the course of six books, Lymond is shot, poisoned, arrested for treason and nearly hanged when in reality he's totally innocent (this may in fact happen more than once, IIRC), has his child stolen and raised by an evil psycho who then forces Francis to choose between the lives of his own kid and another totally innocent child, forcibly addicted to opium against his will, and is Terribly Misjudged by absolutely everyone ever. At one point, he actually goes temporarily blind from angst. No, seriously.
And yet the series is beautifully written, well-researched, and in general much, much better than the above summary makes it sound. And the female characters are three-dimensional and interesting.
*Term originally from vidding. To make a Lord King Bad Vid is to use all of your extensive technical skill to make a vid about a concept you would have loved back when you were thirteen, like, say, a sappy Bella/Edward shipper vid to Evanescence's "Bring Me to Life." Or a Dan/Adrian vid to Evanescence's "Everybody's Fool." (Admit it, some of you on my flist secretly long for this vid to exist and be really, really terrible). Or any shipper vid set to an Evanescence song, really.