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MST

A type of satire performed by adding humorous running commentary on top of another work. "Humor" here can range between tongue-in-cheek commentary to outright vitriol, depending on the original work's quality.

The term "MST" is derived from the show Mystery Science Theater 3000, which did this to So Bad, It's Good B-movies, but it was popularized by fan fiction writers, who use the term "MST" or "MiSTing" to do this sort of thing to other fanfics. Similarly, they would often target So Bad, It's Good works (although sometimes their targets were genuinely good and they were just having a laugh. They would quote large chunks of the source material and intersperse their own snarky comments, like so:

> [Text straight from the fanfiction]
MSTer: Witty comment!

The homage to Mystery Science Theater 3000 was evident, and early examples of this type of fic would borrow the show's cast to do this. Extremely dedicated writers would even include the Mads and the Invention Exchange. Since then, though, the style has branched out; now the characters commenting on the fic could be from the fic's source material, or they could be wholly original characters. Some fandoms call this process "sporking".

Interestingly, fan fiction writers have a fairly elaborate Code of Honor for doing such a fic. For the most part, this "code" can be boiled down to the following:
  • Don't make a MST just to spite another author, especially just because you don't like them personally.
  • Ask for permission from the original author. If he says no, don't do it. Fan fiction being subject to Sturgeon's Law like anything else, a lot of authors consider their work an Old Shame (or even just realize there is No Such Thing as Bad Publicity); a surprising number of authors will give permission. If they don't respond, you can still probably MST their work, but tread carefully.
  • Always remember to credit the original author, even with fan fiction.
  • Don't hit below the belt with your humor. Sturgeon's Law applies to MSTers as much as it applies to the authors they target.
MSTers who don't follow the code tend to be blacklisted by the community, and enough writers have failed to follow it that some fanfic sites have banned this sort of fic.

Outside of fanfiction, this trope is referred to as "riffing" (not to be confused with the musical term). Text riffs are generally similar to fan fiction MSTs or sporkings; audio or video riffs will have the original audio with the snarky commentary running over it.

Compare Alternate DVD Commentary, The Abridged Series and The Heckler.

MSTers with their own pages:

    open/close all folders 

Examples of MSTs targeting fan-fiction (divided by medium of original work):

    Anime/Manga 

    Literature 

    Live-Action TV 
  • The LiveJournal community house_mst is dedicated to MSTing the very worst of House fanfiction, using characters from House to comment on it rather than the original MST3K characters.

    Miscellaneous/Multiple-Media 
  • A MSTing For All Seasons is a website collecting the MSTing works of three separate authors, targeting everything from the infamous "Oscar" stories to a collection of UFO conspiracy theory postings. They may be some of the best examples out there.
    • Specifically, prolific MSTer Megane 6.7, who's been riffing on fics for nearly a decade (including several MSTs done well after the zenith of the MiSTing community's output). Ever wonder who to thank/beat for finding Oscar's fanfics? Go find Megane; he was the first person to riff "Artemis's Lover".
  • The LiveJournal community badfic_quotes sporks multifandom fanfic and "professional" stories, with a particular love of poorly concieved summaries from The Pit (fanfiction.net), while weepingcock is the smutfic sporking equivalent, hunting down the worst descriptions of sex and body parts that will having you screaming for Brain Bleach. Particularly of note: the dark, dark world of Transformational Porn Fic.
  • The Chongo Show has started a series called "What the Fanfic", a video MST with accompanied animated pictures to match what is being said. Most readings are blin and all comments are improvised.
  • The Daily Insanity, made by Raetekusu. As of now, he only has Chapters 1-11 of My Immortal and a MST of an article comparing Stephenie Meyer to J.K. Rowling, but under planned MSTs, he has My Inner Life, a Sue-fic from Kingdom Hearts, and a couple of more recent fics he's found.
  • Das Sporking has sporkings for sixty-four fandoms and counting, including both fanfiction and published works. It initially had a much smaller range of fandoms to be sporked when the only sporkers were Das Mervin and Mrs. Hyde (who of course could only spork for things they were familiar with or interested in), however the community eventually opened up to allow more sporkers, all of whom brought their own fandoms to the table.
  • Everything What Is Crap (formerly "Shinji's Vault of Anime MSTings", or "SVAM" for short) contains lots of MSTings from various series and authors. The site — which is still one of the largest MSTing repositories on the 'Net — went into archive mode in 2008 and no longer accepts new submissions.
  • Fanfiction.net decided to ban fic MSTings at one point, because they were "disrespectful" to authors.
    • Apparently, they have changed their policy or stopped caring since then, since this story is still going strong.
  • Twitter account fanfiction_txt finds particularly bad lines from fanfiction of all media, and presents them without comment. Tumblr account fanfictionimg then periodically takes some of the cream of that crop and creates little comics out of it, lampooning just how absurd the lines are if taken at face value.
  • supercomputer276 brings you the Game Over MST, starring his Game Over series characters riffing ideas that could have turned out great if only they had a decent writer, ranging from Happy Tree Friends to Klonoa.
  • It Came From English 101! does this with the MSTer's own English essays, as well as fanfics.
  • The Lardpirates' Heckles section, which covers particularly bad webcomics (mostly Gonterman) to especially offensive fan fiction of One Piece, Final Fantasy and Phantom Brave. More are sure to come!
  • The blog Library of the Damned riffs on fanfics from a variety of fandoms, ranging from video games to children's TV shows.
  • Bennett the Sage on That Guy with the Glasses does Masterpiece Fanfic Theatre where he brings "the very best of the very worst of fanfiction" by reading horrible, usually NSFW, fanfic aloud, while every now and then white text pops up over the video as a snide comment in an MST fashion.
  • The MSTing Mine is an effort to archive every MSTs ever posted to the MST3K Usenet groups.
  • There is the relatively new Pocket Dimension of Horrible Fanfiction, that covers such fics as My Inner Life, The Quest for the Holey Grail, and a couple of Kingdom Hearts fics in production or finished.
  • The forum Refia is dedicated to writing up new and fresh MSTings of both recent and classic fanfics, mostly of The Lord of the Rings and Doctor Who canon.
  • Retsuraed is described as "halfway between an MST and an Abridged Series". Besides the usual snarkyness, the people reading the fic often like to add additional "scenes" to it that poke fun at the blatant plot holes and Fridge Logic in the fics.
  • So What Colour Is Your Toothbrush, handling everything from Detective Conan and Harry Potter to Warrior Cats and Axis Powers Hetalia.
  • The Stephen Ratliff MSTing Archives include pretty much every Stephen Ratliff-based MSTing ever written. Also the MSTings of the infamous Peter Guerin Daria fanfics, such as The Misery Senshi Neo Zero Double Blitzkrieg Debacle.
  • Topless Robot's Fan Fiction Friday Feature does this for fanfic. It moved to io9 with creator Rob Bricken, but similarly to the Fanfiction.net example did not last long due in part to the "disrespect" issue.
  • WeHeartFanfics, an MST Youtube channel created by independent game developer Banov and some of his college friends.
  • MSTings have also been done in webcomic form.
  • The Polish blog Niezatapialna Armada Kolonasa Waazona focuses mostly on fanfiction (much of it for Harry Potter) and on Real Person Fic (most of them about singers and boy-bands), though they've also reviewed published literature.
  • The Satellite of Hate is an interesting inversion of the usual MST - here, Joel is an evil villain who is imprisoned on the Satellite of Hate, and forced to read well written fanfiction in an attempt to rehabilitate him.

    Video Games 

    Web Comics 

    Web Original 
  • MSTs are the main attraction on the blog The Half-World.
  • Project AFTER is a site dedicated to ridding the world of terrible fanfiction by MSTing it. However, instead of using a cast of characters, it is just the author of the MST commenting on the work. Its forum also includes a section where fans can post their own MSTs.

    Western Animation 

Examples of MSTs and riffs targeting other media:

    Anime/Manga 

    Comic Books 
  • Deadpool's text boxes have shifted from mere thought boxes to this role in the later years.
  • For Mister Kitty Stupid Comics the format is:
    > Panel from comic book
    Snarky comment!
  • The Bongo Comics Simpsons series had a B-story where Bart and his friends turn up for the latest in the Space Mutants franchise, only for the movie to put on an old Troy Mc Clure film called Gladys the Groovy Mule. Bart and friends even cast distinctive silhouettes in the first row while they snark.
  • The Marvel Comics UK reprint of the comic book adaptation of the 'Transformers'' episode "The Big Broadcast of 2006!" had a Simon Furman framing device in which the Quintessons denied it ever happened.

    Film 
  • The Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God DVD commentary is done by three actors portraying three iconic characters from D&D; Krusk, Lidda, and Jozan.
  • The Ghostbusters (1984) DVD commentary even goes as far as adding silhouettes of the actors at the bottom of the screen.
  • Hellzapoppin': The protagonists get a glimpse of the film they are about to star in themselves. They watch it and deliver sarcastic commentary. This is probably the earliest example of riffing on film.
  • Brendan Fraser does this throughout his commentary track on The Mummy DVD.
  • Robert Benchley in Road to Utopia interrupts the film a few times for Lampshade Hanging and sarcastic commentary.
  • The intro and menus for This Is Spinal Tap DVD feature the original actors, in their Spinal Tap personas, commenting on the credits.

    Literature 
  • Dragons Lexicon Triumvirate has one on ConjugalFelicity, which can also be found on ImpishIdea along with another one that appears to have ended prematurely.
  • Older Than Radio: In Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, narrator Pip and several other crowd members riff on a particuarly bad performance of Hamlet. "The ghost appeared to have died with a bad cough which he carried with him to the tomb."
  • John Nowak and Matt Plotecher's MSTing of Tom Swift's War Tank tears into the original series' hallmarks of Patriotic Fervor, Ethnic Scrappies, Canon Sues and the magnificent colossus of all-consuming stupidity that is Ned Newton. It has its own tropes page, here.
  • Kippurbird has done sporkings of every book in the Inheritance Cycle, as well as shorter ones of various other books.
  • Mark Twain:
    • Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences is some sort of proto-MST.
    • In Roughing It, Twain gives The Book of Mormon the same treatment after he is given a copy when he is travelling through Utah.
    • He does a devastating critique of Christian Science which, along with taking apart its medical and religious principles, just plain mocks Mary Baker Eddy's writing in Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures.
  • ImpishIdea, contains several sporkings including one for Maradonia Saga.
  • The Maximum Ride series has several; such as one on Soulish Exhortations, one on ImpishIdea and one on Das Sporking.
  • Jeff Vandermeer's novel Shriek: An Afterword features the story's protagonist snarkily commenting on the narrator's work.
  • The Polish Speculative Fiction e-zine Fahrenheit has an occasional section named Zakużona Planeta (lit. "The Duzty Planet"), for sporking particularly bad submissions. It's a literature journal, so the comments focus mainly on explaining the flaws in writing, as opposed to simple mockery. They still tend to be hilarious, however.
  • A proto-form of this kind of critique in Poland might be the writer Feliks Kres, who, in his magazine column "Galeria Złamanych Piór" ("Gallery of Broken Quills") once or twice published fragments of particularly bad reader-submitted stories, and commented on them this way. Kres quickly decided it was pointless, but many subsequent Polish sporkers cite him as an inspiration.

    Live-Action TV 
  • In Community Abed and Troy apparently have a tradition of doing this to horrendous B-movies; Shirley, Pierce, and Señor Chang show up, too. (And yet Jeff, played by the one cast member who had guest starred on RiffTrax, does NOT show up.)
    • Pierce attempts to compensate for his lack of ability at this by writing his jokes with a team of writers beforehand, like the actual Mystery Science Theater 3000 did after its first season.
  • The DVD Commentary by the cast for Farscape often features the cast riffing on the action or dialog. Especially Ben Browder and Claudia Black. Their commentary together on the season one episode "Throne For A Loss" is particularly hilarious.
  • Game Show Network's original series Faux Pause screened obscure, short-lived game shows, paused them at certain points, and riffed on them.
  • FlirtyFroggy wrote a series of commentaries/reviews of Hornblower. Writing and characters are praised very often, but mocked mercilessly when it's deserved. As the author put it: "I mock because I care." It's very snarky, but also includes gushing about Archie Kennedy, because in the author's opinion, he's the cutest and coolest character on the show, and needless to say, this view is mirrored by many fans.
  • The Glitterdome is an archive of MSTs for dozens of TV shows, done by taking screenshots and adding captions. It's mostly sci-fi and supernatural shows such as Buffy and Doctor Who.
    • Hipsoda's Caption Crack is another captioning site, where cappers (as they call themselves) can choose from an assortment of shows, movies, commercials, etc. and even "fave" captions.
  • Some of the DVD Commentary tracks for Mad Men feature the actors riffing on the episodes. It happens pretty much any time Vincent Kartheiser (Pete Campbell) and/or John Slattery (Roger Sterling) are on the commentary, and there are a few episodes where they're together.
  • Mash did this a few times in its early years when home movies were being screened. Used to its funniest as Hawkeye, Trapper, Klinger, Radar and Henry were watching Frank's home movie of his wedding.
    Hawkeye: (as movie first shows line of wedding guests) I've invited you here today as I'm ready to name the murderer.
  • In a case of MST being the regular narration, MTV Brazil used to broadcast Rockgol, a soccer tournament between musicians where the announcers were two comedians. Instead of doing a regular play-by-play, they frequently mocked the "athletes" (including giving them nicknames) or took detours discussing weird topics.

    Miscellaneous/Multiple Media 
  • The fivers over at Fiveminute.net have some elements of an MST combined with an Abridged Series. It's a bit complicated; read the examples at the works page.
  • Comic SJ Perelman would often mock plays or entire novels. He even had a special prefix for the times he mocked a book he had read as a child; "Cloudland Revisited".
  • In a speech before the Reichstag on April 28, 1939, Adolf Hitler went point-by-point through a series of demands addressed to him by Franklin D. Roosevelt. The German dictator paused after reading each item to give his snarky/sarcastic answer, prompting his rubber-stamp parliament to roar with laughter. That's right, MSTing is something Hitler did.

    Music 

    Professional Wrestling 
  • Although short-lived, Lynxara's Mystery Wrestling Theater 3000 was a fun series geared towards wrestling fans. Instead of using the Bots and the Mads, Lynxara used well-known WWE and WCW stars as the riffers with Vince McMahon and Dwayne Johnson serving as their captors. While it did riff wrestling-related fics, MWT3K's two longest (and most memorable) entries have nothing to do with wrestling: the horrific "Coming of Munihausen" (a crossover between Sailor Moon and Overfiend), and the even-worse(!) "A sorcerer, a demon, and Emeralds" (a Sonic the Hedgehog fanfic).

    Theatre 
  • William Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream ends with a bumbling theatre troupe that plans to perform a version of "Pyramus and Thisbe" for Duke Theseus, his new wife Hippolyta the Queen of the Amazons, and some guests. The play is an extreme example of So Bad, It's Good; meanwhile, the royal couple and their guests mercilessly riff on it. (It should be mentioned that it wasn't taboo to talk during the play in Shakespeare's time; and also that "Pyramus and Thisbe" had been adapted for the stage several times, always poorly.)
    • Given the precedence, authors MSTing Shakespeare fanfics often use Theseus and Hippolyta.
  • In the Commedia dell'Arte, there was a character called the Capo or Capocomico, ostensibly a narrator, but in some shows he would join the action, complain to the audience, and sometimes even freeze the action and physically move the actors.
  • Just a few years after the Shakespeare example, it was included in Francis Beaumont's The Knight Of The Burning Pestle in the form of a loud middle-class couple that's supposed to be part of the audience. They decide they have a better view of the show if they sit on stage, then get in an argument with the guy reading the prologue, and soon berate him into changing the play so it focuses on the middle class—which, remember, was a pretty new class at the time—and also into making up a new character and subplot so that their servant-boy can be in the show. They never do shut up, occasionally interrupting the action to complain.

    Video Games 
  • Broken Pixels was a series on 1UP.com where three guys would play bad video games for comedic value. Featured Seanbaby.
    • Broken Pixels received a spiritual successor of sorts called Shame Night, a live Ustream show shown every Friday. Unfortunately, that's now gone as well, due to co-host Scott Sharkey being laid off under mysterious circumstances.
  • Any given Let's Play might be this, depending on the player's opinion of the game and the overall tone of their LPs. Pokecapn and his crew (whether it's all four guys together or just any combination thereof) tend to choose games that are ripe for this sort of treatment, so naturally it's going to happen.
    • Two notable examples are BrainScratch Commentaries and Hellfire Commentaries. Hellfirecomms mostly only has two or three commentators (Except in the recent Sonic comms, which have NTom, FTA, Skyler and SonicMovies) but Brainscratch can have anywhere between four to six due to having a main cast of four members.
  • Two Best Friends Play from theswitcher features two best friends playing games with their insult-exchanging commentary over it.
    • They also did a "Two Best Friends Watch" with their friend Woolie of Metroid: Other M through the in-game Theater mode.

    Webcomics 
  • In Homestuck, Dirk MSTs a Pony Pals book. As the story goes on, he starts going Off the Rails, blacking out and rewriting entire chapters, keeping only the chapter titles. According to Jane, it becomes "a tough, emotionally draining read. But it's cathartic, in all the worst ways possible."
    • This MST has since been defictionalized by sonnetstuck, and is available to read on AO3. A lot of times, it goes deep into a philosophical discussion of the very essence of literature and writing, including the author's all-powerfulness in their work, originality and even etymologies of various writing- and retelling-related terms.
  • Tough The Gutters usually is content with criticizing the comics industry by the way of parody and satire, in this two parter they emulate the MST3K style, taking a shot at a controversial real life speech, with the creators playing the parts of the MST3K crew.

    Web Original 

    Western Animation 
  • The Family Guy episode "New Kidney in Town" has Peter, Quagmire, and Joe watching Charles in Charge on a TV at the Drunken Clam and riffing over the show's intro in this manner.
    Quagmire: I heard the show's sweater budget was like $200,000.
  • The 1988 Mighty Mouse episode "Mighty's Tone Poem" had the hero making four of his arch-foes watch his home movies of clips from first season episodes. As the film rolls, they make commentary on it:
    Oil Can Harry: I'd walk out of this movie on an airplane!
    Petey Pate: I've seen detergents that left a better film than this!
    The Cow: If this were any more of a dog, it'd have fleas!
    • The episode "Scrappy's Playhouse" has Scrappy going to a theater showing old Terrytoons and doing commentary. He's eventually thrown out talking too much.
  • MSTF is an annual event at Botcon, a big Transformers convention, which involves giving the MST3K treatment to Transformers: The Movie, and in later years various other episodes of Transformers.
  • Mystery Brony Theater 4000 is four bronies riffing on My Little Pony G1 and G3.
  • When the Powerpuff Girls were reluctantly forced by the Professor to watch an old silent film in an old revival theater, they began to spout wisecracks and make fun of of the movie. They even sit in the same position at the same silhouette angle of MST3K.

Alternative Title(s): Mystery Fanfic Theater, MS Ting

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