Fanficrants

[sue_denimme]

I've been looking at fanficrants on and off, though I'm not a member

Comments

[pinguthegreek]

That comes under the humongous lack of perspective category.

[sue_denimme]

Verily. The thought also occurs that apparently most of the fics that inspire the rants are at Fanfiction.net, a place that seemingly exists to prove Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is crap", paraphrased). You *might* find a diamond there, but first you have to dig through a lot of crap. IMO, there's no point getting upset at the crap in the meanwhile, because you chose to dig through it. If that makes any sense.

[pinguthegreek]

That's why I generally don't read fanfic. Good fic is a rare thing indeed.

[sue_denimme]

Then I'm all the more flattered that you'll look at mine. :-)

Seriously, though, the good stuff *is* out there. You just have know where to look, and how. (But of course, the only way to figure that out is by looking...)

[claudia603]

*shakes head*

Not funny. I know it's meant to be humorous, but you know, it's not. I don't get the anger that people have toward bad fic, you know. I laugh and avoid. I can't imagine feeling hostile toward the person who wrote it!

[sue_denimme]

Me either. They might be just starting out and making all the silly mistakes that everyone else makes when *they* first start out. Or maybe they've been writing for years and are still making those mistakes.

In either case, bad spelling/grammar, Mary Sues, ridiculously OOC canon characters, etc. may be annoying, but are they really killing offenses?

[garnet_took]

I've heard some really hostile things said about poorly thought-out and badly written fic, but that is just about the cruelest. Hope I never make someone mad enough to wish me a horrid death.

[sue_denimme]

And what if someone reading it -- maybe the person it was addressed to -- had actually had someone close to them die in a fire? People just don't think.

[rose_cat]

I hate that expression. I realize it's hyperbole, and one of those phrases that people pick up and use without thinking it through (like GTFO and STFU), and it's probably a quote from somewhere, but I still find it unfunny and uncalled-for. It crosses a line somehow, even at fanficrants.

[sue_denimme]

Exactly. I dunno, for a lot of people, somehow being on the Internet seems to make it OK to throw out phrases they wouldn't dare say to someone's face.

[rose_cat]

True. Mood can be hard to convey on the Internet, even with emoticons and the like. But "die in a fire?" I wouldn't say that to someone I knew -- not even to be funny -- let alone to a stranger.

It's kind of like being in a car, I think. People who tailgate and cut other drivers off -- I don't think they'd do that just walking on the sidewalk, with people they'd have to look in the face.
/social commentary

[sue_denimme]

I think maybe something about not being able to see the other person's face makes them not "real", in a sense, whether they're in a car or on the Internet. Some people take that as license to treat other people badly because if they're not "real", you don't have to worry about their feelings.

That's my theory, anyway.