Comments | claudiapriscus: Fic summaries bias

claudiapriscus

Fic summaries bias

Dec 17, 2010 20:10

It's a very random topic, but I ended up thinking a little about fic summaries- namely, what catches my attention, and what automatically makes me skip it. And I'm not talking details here, like "oh, it's an xyz-fic, I hate those". Nah, I'm specifically of how they're formulated ( Read more... )

random is random, fandom

Comments 6

goldenusagi December 18 2010, 04:43:45 UTC

I dislike the question formula in fic summaries. Mainly because it sounds like they're trying to be suspenseful, but the question has practically already been answered. "Will Dean realize his mistake before it's too late?" Probably. "Dean and Castiel are trapped in a cabin, what will happen?" Sex, I'm guessing.

And this is just a personal bias, but I'm not crazy about using a one sentence quote from the fic as the summary. No one ever did this in Buffy fandom, but it's all over the place in SPN fandom, so I guess everyone likes it. But to me, unless it's just a really *awesome* sentence, it's unlikely that it will sum up the entire fic.

claudiapriscus December 18 2010, 05:29:42 UTC

Yeah, it makes it so predictable. It's boring.

I've done the sentence-from-the-fic thing once, but it was an act of desperation. I couldn't think of any summary that would be true to the tone. I'm usually fairly against it, unless it reveals something about the story. One exception I can think of is this one ( http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4822628/1/The_Obeisance_of_Memory):

"AU of season 4. “Look, I’ve got no idea who your brother is, but uh, I think I might be him. Just, y’know, alive.”"

From that, you get the sense of the tone (though maybe I'm just projecting, since I know what the tone is), and it's pretty obviously an amnesia AU fic.

hells_half_acre December 18 2010, 04:45:19 UTC

I've been trying to figure out my biases myself. I haven't narrowed it down to phrasing though - only topics. Anything to do with vampires, I skip over. I really hate vampires. (I don't mind them on the show, but that seems to be my limit).

The problem is that I really suck at writing summaries myself...so, I always feel bad when I'm so critical of other people's summaries.

Oh, I just thought of one, it's not so much a summary as a fic-trope and probably is very similar to your bias against "but how will Dean react to X"...it's summaries along the lines of "They thought life was perfect, when suddenly a visitor from the past changes everything. Will they be able to learn and move forward?" Basically ANY of those types of sentences drive me off. Especially if the summary is a question: "How will Dean recover from X?" or "What has Sam been hiding that could change everything?" Ugh.

Anyway, yeah, those are just off the top of my head.

claudiapriscus December 18 2010, 05:31:13 UTC

Yeah! The question summaries! I'd ban 'em if I could.

Though I wouldn't worry about being critical here, at least. I mean, for some people, that might be the cat's meow. But I tend to automatically skip over them.

honeylocusttree December 18 2010, 23:46:30 UTC

Personally, I skip it if I absolutely have no idea, based on the summary, what the fic is about. Or if something is misspelled. And 9 times out of 10 if someone quotes directly from the fic without giving a hint of the premise--like, any hint.

claudiapriscus December 20 2010, 02:01:39 UTC

Definitely on the misspellings. If I'm bored, I'll read fics that don't give many clues what they're about in the summary, just out of curiousity, but usually only if there's something that triggers my interest (e.g, an intriguing title, or some unusual collection of characters or that have an AU tag.)