Go ahead, laugh :P

[penguin2]

Guess what? I've had another epiphany. This one came a couple of days ago:

I accept fanfiction as a concept.

As a concept, mind you. There is still no excuse - nor will there ever be - for the clumsy, feculent, inappropriate, character-disrespecting, childish fic-maunderings of the average fangirl (of any sex). But then, there's sod-all excuse

Comments

[iampunha]

As a former fanfic editor, I'm so glad (though so not surprised) you came around.

95 percent of everything is crap. The other 5 percent is at least good enough to be considered not crap.

[penguin2]

Amen to the last two sentences. Sturgeon was far too kind :-)

[penguin2]

A touch, a distinct touch :-)

[quatranoctal]

I am of very much the same opinion, and was going to take a shot at mangling Sturgeon's Law before iampunha beat me to it. There is good fanfiction out there, but it's obscured by an insane amount of crap, so you have to look for the warning signs of bad fanfic when you're reading it. And, sadly, the fact that it's fanfic is one of the warning signs.

Some series fare worse than others - by definition, fanfiction is written by fans, so the quality of fans influences the quality of fanfiction. Hence I daresay Deadwood and Firefly fanfic is, on average, a bit better than Harry Potter or Naruto. And, of course, you need to be prepared to run as far and as fast as you can when the sentence begins "Though [male character] had always thought of himself as straight, the strange feelings coursing through him ..."

[penguin2]

Urgle! I have no intention of actually reading fanfic. It's just that I've accepted its right to exist!

Seriously. Apart from Real Life(TM), work, all my usual researches-for-fun, and additional work in the form of genrelism and paid editing, I'm in the middle of writing an unslashable Book...

[quatranoctal]

Can't be done. Unless it has fewer than two male characters. And even then ...

(I'm not even going to bring Rule 34 into this, because I've already thought up some ghastly counter-examples to my above statement, and that rule pretty much states that the unimaginable has already been imagined.)

[penguin2]

Well, the primary characters in the first half of the story are male and in love. As it happens.

I have no idea what Rule 34 is. But then, that's probably not surprising. You and I inhabit different parts of the sphere of reality :-)

[talithakalago]

The real question here is:

Where ARE all the sheep!?

No, seriously, I think there are places in the world for fan fic. I think fan fic is an important release for people and helps them be happier and generally a tiny bit more intelligent. Even the really, really bad stuff.

It's better people write CRAP than nothing, because the process of stringing a sentance together is still forging new connections in their brain pathways and that's always a good thing.

Admittedly my reasons for acceptance are different from yours...

But neither of us are trolling fanfic.net for it yet, and that's what matters.

[penguin2]

It's better people write CRAP than nothing, because the process of stringing a sentance together is still forging new connections in their brain pathways and that's always a good thing.

This is an interesting and humanistic and admirable sentiment, and it makes me snarl with skin-crawling revulsion. The way I see it, that means that all the totally unqualified brain surgeon wannabes in the world should practise brain surgery because the process of cutting people's heads open and...well, the rest is obvious. We'll probably never see eye to eye on this, I know...

Back in the days before the internet, the only people who foisted their writings upon the wide world were those who were "good enough" to get published by a professional publishing house, and even then the bookshops and libraries were filled with bad, incompetent writing. This current-era meme of Anyone Can Be a Writer is making the problem so much worse ~cries~

BTW, I notice that you've been misspelling sentence all over the place :P

But neither of us are trolling fanfic.

[talithakalago]

Will we never see eye to eye on this because I love humanity and you wish it was possible to drown every living human soul in a pool of their own stupidity and saliva? Grin.

(I’m surprised I’m spelling ‘the’ correctly at the moment. You don’t even want to KNOW what my doctor has me on. My uterus is trying to kill me and he seems to think getting it high is an obvious solution. I could be selling this junk on street corners to make a very tidy profit!)

[penguin2]

Nah, I just want the unsuitable can't-pass-the-audition ones to do that. That will leave about twenty million HomSaps. 's just about right for this bijou planet of ours :D

And everyone on the interwebses knows that word is spelt teh...

~giggles and runs away~

[cosmic_llin]

Blimey.

:P