Reading List?
I'm making a Want-To-Read book list for books to purchase when we get settled into the new house. My books are packed and won't be out the boxes for a while. It's so strange to see empty bookshelves. Well, they aren't that empty. There are boxes on them. >_>;
I've been reading mostly Mass Effect fanfiction lately, and( Oops. ME fanfiction rant. )
I've been reading mostly Mass Effect fanfiction lately, and( Oops. ME fanfiction rant. )
As for ME fan fic, yeah, what's up with that? The recs page on TV Tropes now has a bunch of shlock and they suck the dick of certain authors who admittedly are not that good at all. It's p. sad when a horrible self-insert fic gets more glowing praise than popehippo's beautiful and truly original fan fic (I know 'original fan fic' is an oxymoron, but bear with me here) about the salarian and his asari step-daughter from Illium.
That said, I think a majority of ME fan fic these days is just lacking. I don't know what exactly, but it's lacking. There's really no drive to do anything that goes outside the boundaries of what's popular. I also agree that it seems like a majority of the writers these days just do not care about the science of it all and prefer to handwave it because it's "too difficult to research". (And this pet peeve extends to porn fics, too. If I see another 'Mordin has a dick' story when it's clearly stated salarians have cloacas, I'm going to facepalm so hard I'll put Picard to shame)
Look, I get that research can be a pain in the ass when you're jonesing to write something (I should know: I've had to track down a ton of the older, pre-Johns era 'Green Lantern' comics to learn what little scraps I can of the DCU's alien culture, which sadly, is so lacking in details. Mass Effect has spoiled me in that regard) and people may think "Why would I need to research the minute details for a fic"? It shows that the writer cares about the world and lore, and that they want the fic to stand out amidst a sea of unresearched shlock.
I also think ME fan fiction doesn't want to move outside of the comfort zones in terms of content, plot concepts, and general exploration. People crib dialogue wholecloth from the games -if not retell the games entirely themselves- and that's a shame, if not the apex of laziness. I'll readily confess that I lifted dialogue from Samara's loyalty mission in 'Wayward Child', but when I revised the text a couple years later, I changed the dialogue so it was similar, but not word-for-word. And frankly, retelling a game wholesale is just plain lazy. But if you're going to do it, at least put a new and unique spin on it like sinvraal did with her stories, in that she retold them from different POVs and interpretations of events.
.... And I've rambled. Sorry! D=
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All of this, basically.
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Rambling is perfectly acceptable. =)
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It just kills me that there's this world of opportunity, and people squander it by writing the same plot lines involving Shenko and Shakarian. I get that they're the two most popular pairings in the fandom and I totally understand getting hooked into the romantic subplots, but there's MORE to Mass Effect than just that. And while there are plenty of decent fics where it's an aspect but not the focus; if I come across another twee-sounding story about Shepard building Tali a house on Rannoch, Shepard and Garrus adopting krogan babies (don't get me started on THAT one), or Shepard and Kaidan having a baby (or adopting, if it's M!Shepard), it'll be too soon.
(I know the whole 'don't like, don't read' thing. I don't read the stuff, but skimming through summaries on FF.Net and even AO3 now makes me cringe)
I will say I am very interested to see what comes of the ME Big Bang fan fic project. Considering stories for that have to be beta'd beforehand, that may cut down on the research fail and there could be some good gems in there because of it.
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