Pony Fanfiction Thread

I think the author is trying to call it porn in the same way that anti-civil-rights movements called MLK a criminal (which he technically was) or pro-lifers call abortion murder (which it technically is). It's a form of Guilt by Association. I made a thread about people pulling that kind of crap. As I myself am very vocally in favour of porn, that comparison didn't weigh much, but the repetitive structure the author so ungraciously draws attention to did strike me as relevant.

The author is very fond of goon-esque patterns of expression, which I find are not conductive to rational and civil investigation, but the points he draws are relevant. You are right that it is self-evident to us that what Ender is doing and going through is wrong, but saying that the Mr. Card intended it to come off that way borders on Death of the Author; we can't know that for a fact. What we do know for a fact is that many fans, (including myself, initially, and I don't care if that's "revealing too much") identified with Ender and his struggles in a rather uncritical way, and that a non-negligible number of readers leave the book with the wrong aesops entirely.

edited 6th Oct '12 10:36:33 AM by TheHandle

Um, I'm seeing a contradiction here; at first you're saying that we can't know what Card intended the message to be, and then you go right to saying that a lot of readers take the wrong message from the story. If we can't know what the author intended it's impossible to claim someone took the "wrong" message from it because we have no idea what the "right" message is supposed to be. The closest you can come is saying that "they took away a message that I disagree with, or that I think isn't what the book was saying".

In any case, this is a derail, so I'm not going to say anything else.

You're right. I meant "the wrong message from our moral standpoint", not "a message other than what the author intended", and it was a mistake to implictily assume that our moral standpoint is the only right one, even though we may feel that way. That subjectivity needs to be acknowledged in the text. Thanks for pointing this out.

Okay, that's entirely understandable.

As an addition to my entertainment point from before, I read The Old Man And The Sea on my own for entertainment. That's how I found out why the classics are classic. Not because of anything I learned from English class or literary analysis.

I'll confess to reading classics partly for my own entertainment and partly out of a misguided notion that it made me better than those who didn't. Being a teenager with little life experience, I'd only understand the stories at a visceral level, but at least I was fresh and innocent to the literary devices, styles and tropes, which hit me full-strength. It's hard for me nowadays to feel similarly aroused or shocked.

Anwyay, most classics are more "milestones" than "role models", and there's a lot of things they did that a modern author should not emulate unless he's overtly playing*

Wanderer D once presented a piece of dialogue between Rarity and Fancy Pants as excellent, only to reveal that it was directly lifted from Pride And Prejudice. Not for an instant did I buy that piece of dialogue as being authentic, let alone excellent. It felt strange, forced, weird, and unnatural. I don't care how much of a fancy pants Fancy Pants and Rarity are, I felt in my bones that they would never talk that way. Their registers may be different, but they don't use Antiquated Linguistics; those are percieved as jarring for a reason.

edited 6th Oct '12 10:58:02 AM by TheHandle

PSSH

OLD MAN AND THE SEA

I READ LES MIS FOR MY OWN ENTERTAINMENT

UNABRIDGED VERSION

And then I realized it was an incredible story, and couldn't put it down.

edited 6th Oct '12 11:17:10 AM by Jimmmyman10

Yeah, there's enough cultural shift that in a lot of classics you definitely don't want to emulate every element. Still, I think there's a lot to be learned there, though. Trying to see how another era understood literature gives you a much better understanding of writing.

Also, the "classics" span the ages, from The Odyssey to Catch 22; you can find something for almost every era.

That Ender's Game article wasn't entirely useless and aggravating. It gave me this link. I haven't read the entire thing yet, but so far it is very thorough. It contains a lot of stuff that I still don't agree with, but the author backs it up impeccably and I don't know that I would actually be able to write a refutation. It's definitely making me re-consider some of the base premises of A Still More Glorious Dawn Awaits. It's got a lot of useful thinking I think I can incorporate.

Edit: Ugh, I hate this. I'm still in robot mode and I want to be writing right now. I can't write when I'm in robot mode. It is quite literally beyond my capabilities. More than that, I have difficulty even enjoying other stuff I read. It is entirely possible that the best thing I could do with my day is to sit on the couch and watch hours and hours of daytime television to try and kill my train of thought.

edited 6th Oct '12 11:27:31 AM by CDRW

A message is a funny thing. If you set out to preach through your story, readers will generally see your message and may reject it out of hand. But if you set out to purely to entertain with your story, you're still going to convey a message: your beliefs about the nature of Real Life generally find their way into the story as unspoken assumptions of the fictional universe. Instead of telling the reader what you believe, you're showing them. In this form, the author's message tends to be more subtle, and is thus more likely to unconsciously influence the audience's mind.

FIM has examples of both. The overt messages are the aesops that show up in each week's letter to Princess Celestia. As for implicit messages, the first one that pops to mind is "Girls don't need to conform to stereotypes of femininity, but they don't need to rebel against them, either." This is never explicitly stated, but it's consistently demonstrate through the Mane Six's variety of personalities and interests (some of them stereotypically feminine, some of them not), none of which are portrayed as bad.

An oddity is that, if I recall correctly, that particular implied message was one that Faust intended to include from the get-go. So if it really was intentional, then I applaud the showrunners for keeping it subtle.

I guess my ultimate point is, I don't think entertainment and propaganda are completely at odds, because you'd be hard-pressed to find a story that doesn't preach something. And if the author does deliberately try to include a message in their story, it can still make for a good story, even if it's bloody hard balancing act.

Speaking of anachronic techniques and Les Miz, it helps to understand that the massive padding was due to the fact that the work was a weekly serialized story, paid by the word.

That's right, Realist Fiction and Penny Dreadfuls: manga avant-la-lettre.

Though, honestly, Balzac, Dickens and so on read more like pseudo-documentaries on historical and social issues than actual stories.

edited 6th Oct '12 11:34:30 AM by TheHandle

Yeah, it's for that reason that whenever I write I make a really determined effort to be aware any ulterior motives and try to downplay them unless it makes sense to include them in the story. I've written more than one thing where I wasn't trying to make any particular point and it ended up being in there anyway. Heck, even ADB ended up doing that; it's pretty easy to read a couple different messages into how Twilight handles her situation (which is ironic, because I'm the last person you should ask for advice on the subject), even though I only wrote it that way because I thought it was natural for the characters.

I know, right? Moby Dick is especially bad; it takes a couple of chapters to get to the whale, and even then like half the story is an Info Dump about whaling. Granted, I respect Melville's ability to weave images together and he's really good at allusion but holy crap is there a lot of filler in that novel.

edited 6th Oct '12 11:37:06 AM by JapaneseTeeth

I think Jules Verne had the same thing in regards to naming sealife in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. I just recently read through it, and I found that skipping over every page that was going over sealife meant that I didn't miss a single thing plotwise.

Yeah, I remember my brother's English teacher had them read Moby Dick...then cancelled the assignment because the book was so boring XD

edited 6th Oct '12 2:28:03 PM by theLibrarian

Okay, I've finished my first draft of the final part of Make a Wish, clocking in at just over 5k words (that's big for me, shut up ). Now I just need to proofread the crap out of it and post it. I just can't believe that I actually finished a big story like this. I feel so accomplished!

Oh, that reminds me! I need to start writing my King Arthur crossover again. I've spent the entire day playing Shogun 2 on my laptop XD

I remember reading the 20,000 leagues enthusiastically, and I would nerdgasm at the fauna and flora (especially bread tree, I mean, come on, get out, it's a freaking bread tree, such a thing exists... the nautilii were also very very awesome), and the description of the iridescent ice cap underwater was so freaking cool and all the details about how the nautilus was built and worked and crap...

But the endless processions of fish were so boring they bored me in spite of myself. That is a crime. I used to be an underwater documentary buff, and even I was bored. Verne did something wrong there.

...

Do you know how long it has been since I've had a conversation about classic literature? Not since High School. Do you know how long it was since such a conversation didn't involve a teacher? Never. I have never had a casual conversation about the books of classic literature with a non-teacher human being. And it's not a conversation of awe and respect where we say how cool the old masters were, but one where we frankly weigh the pros and cons of what they did.

You folks... I'm fortunate to know you.

Ahem. *cough* Sorry, I've just watched Goodbye Lenin and I feel incredibly sentimental and nostalgic and stuff. I didn't mean to be disruptive or anything. Let's carry on.

Wouldn't it be cool to write a The Gods Play Chess story where fictional Public Domain Character were used? In the style of the Leage Of Extraordinary Gentlemen?

Also, does anyone know any good, abridged versions of those great classics I've never read? There's quite a few of them, and I don't want to waste time mucking about with whaling. I want to get to the good part, like they did in the Framing Device for The Princess Bride. "The Good Parts".

edited 6th Oct '12 2:58:18 PM by TheHandle

idk, if a Cluster F-Bomb pervert troll is your idea of a decent person. Then okay.

As for the rest of the conversation! :D

Well, books are just books, but it's always great to find people who've read the same ones as you and can discuss them in any meaningful way. The less recent they are, the less likely they are to be read, it seems, unless they're School Study Media. I'm just happy to find other people who enjoy reading at all.

Frankly, it always astounds me that people can spend almost every minute of their free time on the internet, which is 90% reading, and then claim that they don't enjoy reading.

edited 6th Oct '12 4:04:52 PM by Sessalisk

We should totally start a thingy where we all pick and read something together one chapter at a time and discuss it. Only with pony fanfiction. I've always wanted to participate in one of those things.

I would absolutely be down for that! That's an awesome idea.

That actually sounds like a really fun idea! Even if it's a type of story I know I won't enjoy, it'll be great just being able to discuss it with other people, and potentially bitch about it to other people!

Most recent actual book I finished reading is American Gods. Been sort of on-and-off reading Les Miserables. I'm not a very good reader, honestly.

Sure, totally.

edited 6th Oct '12 4:07:18 PM by Pannic

Ooh, seems like that idea is more popular than I expected. A few issues to work out though, things like "How would we do it, surely not in this thread right?", "How often would we do it?", and "What story?"

Also, remember that 250 word chapter I put up? I just got this comment on it.

That's exactly the reaction I was going for from my readers.

I keep meaning to try out both of those books, but actual print media has been thin in my diet lately, and then it's mostly manga, and this book.

edited 6th Oct '12 4:11:51 PM by CDRW

Technically it would be about pony fanfiction. So long as we don't bury the posts where people need fanfic help and all that shit it should be fine, right?