MST - Television Tropes & Idioms

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Not so much a form of Fan Fic as a style of commentary on another's Fan Fic, usually tongue-in-cheek but sometimes quite vitriolic.

Most writers of Fan Fic post their works in venues where they hope to receive feedback in order to improve their skills. The MST is a specific variety of story commentary based around the format of Mystery Science Theatre 3000: three or four characters "watch" the fic unfold, and make snarky and/or constructive comments on it. The usual tone is one of lampoonery, sometimes verging on ridicule if the story deserves it. Extreme examples can mimic the entire structure of an episode of MST3K, right down to the message from the Mads and the invention exchange.

Originally, MSTers used the actual cast of MST3K, but as time went on, using alternative casts became more and more popular. More often than not, alternative cast members come from the series the Fan Fic being MSTed is based on, although they're usually something completely different; popular anime characters, professional wrestlers, a Cross Over of several different series, or even original characters created for the role. The setup for alternative casts will usually mimic the "mad scientists inflicting it on a trapped audience" format of MST3K.

Usually, the format goes like so:

> Line from the original Fan Fic

CHARACTER: Snarky comment!

(Incidentally, the format for lines from the original Fan Fic likely has to do with modern Fan Fic's Usenet and internet-mailing-list origins; the > is used at the start of each line quoted in a post in old e-mail programs.)

Naturally, some MSTings get MSTed again, a practice known as "meta-MSTing". (Compare with Retsupurae).

An MST takes quite a bit more work than the usual comments and criticism a story may receive, and is usually reserved for stories that are either unusually good or extraordinarily bad. Because of its often inflammatory content, the creator of an MST will usually get the permission of the author first.

The practice isn't always limited to Fan Fic, either; for example, particularly annoying spam may be given this treatment. Another common class of targets are posts espousing off-the-wall conspiracy theories. Obviously, the permission of the author isn't sought in these cases.

The practice is known as MSTing or misting. In some fandoms, however, it is known as a sporking.

While the practice (and the community surrounding it) has waned in recent years, you can still find new MSTings floating around if you know where to look.

For the more traditional snarking of bad movies MSTing, see Alternate DVD Commentary.

Examples:

Anime and Manga

On The Satellite of Revolution, the cast of Revolutionary Girl Utena gets snarky on horrible Utena fanfic. Also, Mikage as the mad professor is several kinds of great.
The DVD Commentary track for the anime Bakemonogatari, consists of the characters MS Ting their own show, with dialog written by the original author.
Card Captor Science Theater 3000, by CardCaptor Schlueter (aka Syaoran-kun). It mostly focuses on anime fanfics, with the riffers being Sakura, Syaoran, Tomoyo, and Kero, and Eriol and his guardians replacing the Mads. Features many running gags, a semi-coherent story, and tons of living plushies. One tip: stay away from the tea!
While not done in classic MST format, the unimaginatively-named Review of Sailor Moon V by Horosha (NSFW) holds to the spirit of the trope by portraying the Sailor Senshi sitting around Hikawa Shrine one night reading copies of Troy "Silver" Stanton's fanfic series Sailor Moon V: The Dark Adventures of the Sailor Scouts. Unusually for this trope, the source material is actually really good, and the girls are rather impressed by Troy's work.
A Total Waste of 6 Min 35 Sec is a deliberately awful Anime Music Video that has pop-up dialogue making fun of itself.

Comic Books

The Freelance Police Riffery Theater is a young but promising MST starring the Freelance Police.
And another: this Marvel Adventures comic has the various Avengers "trapped" in a ceremony honoring Captain America, watching an old Patriotic Fervor propaganda film of him and making commentary. Of note: "So if something cool happens, then you really did it, and if it's lame, the movie guys put it in. Right."

Film

Robert Benchley in Road to Utopia interrupts the film a few times for Lampshade Hanging and sarcastic commentary.

Literature

A non-fanfic example: Jeff Vandermeer's novel Shriek: An Afterword features the story's protagonist snarkily commenting on the narrator's work.
The Vampoife Dood Who Lifed starts out with the characters MS Ting an awful fanfiction created by the author his/herself, then morphs into an actual story... though there's still quite a bit of snarking.
The Black Pawn Movement MSTs various rant and complaint videos of Twilight fans. The spinoff Dn A riffs much broader fare.
Arguably the only safe way to enjoy The Eye Of Argon.
One particularly brave young man took on the infamous Lord Of The Rings fic Celebrían. Read it here. If you dare.
Though not a fanfic, Mark Twain's review of Last Of the Mohicans 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.
The many Harry Potter fanfics in which the Marauders somehow get hold of one of the canon books and read through it, making snarky comments in a Script Fic format.
Some of the better Lord Of The Rings MSTs were done by Al's Waiter.

Live-Action TV

The Glitterdome is an archive of MS Ts 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.
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.
The spinoff-of-a-spinoff-of-a-spinoff MPT3K involves MSTing done by alternative Fan Fic versions of a number of companions and related characters from the Doctor Who Canon and Expanded Universe, as well as fan-created characters. It gets a bit complicated...

Multi-Fandom

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 MSTing Mine is an effort to archive all MSTs posted to the MST3K Usenet groups.
Everything What Is Crap contains lots of MSTings from various series and authors.
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".
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.
MSTings have also been done in webcomic form.
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".
The forum Refia is dedicated to writing up new and fresh MSTings of both recent and classic So Bad Its Good and So Bad Its Horrible fanfics, mostly of The Lord Of The Rings and Doctor Who canon.
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.
Topless Robot's Fan Fiction Friday feature does this for fanfic.
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 Ridicule Archives, which usually parodies lemons.
It Came From English 101! does this with the MSTer's own English essays, as well as fanfics.

Music

Video On Trial is Much Music's version of this, every episode 5 folks (which sometimes may include a musician that may be mocked) reviews 5 videos and mocks them. Oddly enough Linkin Park was not mocked by them
The Distressed Watcher of [[That Guy With The Glasses]] has a new series called Sour Note where he and his friend watch new pop music videos and talk over them with mocking comments.

Professional Wrestling

Although short-lived, Lynxara's Mystery Wrestling Theater 3000 was a fun series geared towards wrestling fans. Its two best (and most memorable) entries are its longest: the So Bad It's Horrible "Coming of Munihausen", and the even worse(!) "A sorcerer, a demon, and Emeralds".

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 King Theseus, his new wife Hippolyta the Queen of the Amazons, and some guests. The play is an extreme example of So Bad Its 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.)
- That could also be a Lampshading of the Too Dumb To Live behavior of Romeo And Juliet in the eponymous play. A very harsh lampshading.
- And of course, this falls directly under The Zeroth Law Of Trope Examples. Authors MS Ting Shakespeare fanfic are now encouraged to use Theseus and Hippolyta.
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.

Video Games

The Livejournal pages heartless_fics and snakesonasora are dedicated to the MSTing of Kingdom Hearts fics. The two most famous fics are "Naga Eyes", AKA "Snakes on a Sora", which has a naga Riku horribly raping Sora, and "Immortality In Fickle Affection", AKA the Kooshball Penis Hydra Fic. More information on both here.
MST3K Presents: ''Detective is an Interactive Fiction example
This site, particularly this mocked story, is a good example of how not to write an MST.
- Meta-MSTed. Your Mileage May Vary .
  - The meta-MST is just as unfunny as the MST. That's almost Zen.
Escapist Magazine has Un Skippable, which is pretty much MST 3 K with game intros and no silhouettes. "It's zombies, right?"
Retsupurae is this for LPs.
A brand-new Pokémon community was just created recently. It goes by the rather unimaginative name "Sporkémon" and can be found here.
Broken Pixels, a Too Good To Last series on 1UP.com where three guys would play bad video games for comedic value. Features Seanbaby.
- Broken Pixels has received a spiritual successor of sorts called Shame Night, a live Ustream show shown every Friday.
rt_rocket is a LJ that, although originally meant for something else, now does sporkings of Earthbound and Kingdom Hearts fanfiction as riffed by Earthbound and Sonic the Hedgehog fancharacters, and sometimes even the MST-writers themselves. Has a lot of injokes and can be a bit confusing sometimes because of up to five people and their characters bickering, and some definite OOC-ness if a canon character joins the ranks, but worth it.

Web Comics

The Way Of The Metagamer includes a Fake Crossover with MST3K, in which the comic MSTs itself.
SP Pf once had a sprite comic that was named, you guessed it, Mystery Comic Theatre.

Web Original

Machinima Commentaries does this for machinima, although the MS Ters are not assuming characters.
Another non-fanfic example: the Whateley Universe now has a story "Tales of the MCO", in which the students are watching the aforesaid anti-mutant show and MS Ting it the whole time.
The Sturgeon Awards has its own MST of Obama Admits He Is A Muslim.
Linkara does this often while reading the comic being reviewed aloud to the viewer.

Western Animation

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 Maclure film called Gladys the Groovy Mule. Bart and friends even cast distinctive silhouettes in the first row while they snark.
Mystery Fiction Theater N is currently riffing Faithful Hearts by legendary Suethor DisneyFan01. They may eventually do the retreaded version Faith of the Heart but haven't decided yet.