What do you think about this?

I do agree with the slash part (mostly), but it's like preaching that writing fanfics is a worthless endeavor.

This article mashes its palm right down on my berserk keyboard, but I'll try to be dispassionate.

Neither is original fiction.

The bit about slash has some Unfortunate Implications. How are gay uncanonical relationships more disturbing than straight ones?

Thirdly, the author says that A Very Potter Musical and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies are "more than just fanfiction". This smacks of moving the goalposts and No True Scotsman to me. "I like these works, so they can't be fanfiction!" And again, plenty of fanfics are just as bold and unconventional in terms of treatment of the source material.

EDIT: Self-thumped paragraph for mean-spirited snark about personal tastes.

In short, I'd say the author seems to only have experienced the bottom of the barrel when it comes to fanfiction. Well-written article, though. I got a few laughs out of it.

edited 27th Apr '12 2:08:50 PM by DoktorvonEurotrash

Uncanonical gay relationships can be disturbing when 1) the source material is intended for children and 2) the characters paired in question are either close blood relations,have HUGE age differences(especially if one is underage), or both. But then, so can uncanonical heterosexual pairings that go the same route. The reason why not many people are bothered by the latter is that it's not as rampant as the former, hence are easier to ignore.

But yeah, the No True Scotsman logic just me.

edited 27th Apr '12 7:40:14 AM by ladycoffee

Why is it disturbing to have gay relationships in material for children?

Gay relationships in children's media on its own is okay. It's just when fanworks create noncanonical gay pairings using children's media.

^ Arashi No Yoru Ni pulled it off quite nicely...

But young homosexuals aside, I think that this author was taking a pretty cheap shot at fanfiction because he personally doesn't like it (and therefore no one else should ever like it ever.) Yes, there is a lot of godawful fanfic on the internet, but there's also tons of godawful original fiction out there too. A lot of fanfiction writers are newbies, trying to find their pace in writing and experimenting with their ideas. That doesn't mean they're necessarily bad writers or obnoxious, unintelligent people (as his tone seemed to imply) but that they are new to the field and doing what any art has to do; learning as they go.

To say that stories written by fourteen-year-olds are irredeemable sins against literature is brutally steep: akin to criticizing a middle school baseball team for their lack of master technique. And to say that all fanfiction "ranks right below Greeting Cards and Monopoly Instructions on the list of Worst Types of Literature" is just as petty and shortsighted as the author makes his targets out to be. Basically, he's telling us that an entire genre of writing, one that a lot of great young authors took their first steps with, is completely invalid as any form of literature and anyone who pays any heed to it is a mindless sod.

I'm a fanfic writer (Sort of) and I have never wrote a slashfic ever. Because I am terrible at sex and I know it.

I imply, not show.

I use it to practise for making something actually good later on in my life.

edited 27th Apr '12 11:18:07 AM by Steventheman

Is there some deep difference between canon and not-canon that makes them bad? I am genuinely at a loss here. I mean, yeah, they're not canon, but that simply makes them superspecialextraunreal, as opposed to normal unreal. It doesn't change the morality of a gay relationship a bit. It shouldn't really make it any creepier.

edited 27th Apr '12 11:38:56 AM by Night

I dunno, I was just clarifying what the poster before me was trying to say. I haven't even read the article yet.

I sorta suspected as much of you, but my original point was that the guy/girl above me was drawing a non-existent distinction between canon and non-canon on what makes a relationship creepy.

As someone who has enjoyed some fan works (from the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to the Terrible Secret of Animal Crossing) but holds the vast majority of fanfic in contempt, here's why fanfics get a bad rap:

- The vast vast vast majority of it is awful. This is also true of other media, but at least published works get edited and at least basic quality screening. At best, most fanfic is just uninteresting or boring. More often, it features character derailment, gratuitous sex and violence, go against major themes of the canon work, etc. And the worst is downright unreadable.

- A huge proportion of fan fiction functions simply as wish fulfillment for overzealous shippers. This is only interesting to a very small minority of a fandom, and many do not really view romantic / sexual wish fulfillment as a compelling reason to create art. Furthermore, it irritates people who like the canon shipping.

- A large percentage of said ships are morally repugnant - heroes shipped with completely awful villains that glosses over the horrible actions of the villains, children shipped with adults, characters shipped with close family members.

- Similarly, Draco In Leather Pantsery is insanely common and morally bothersome to many - they are uncomfortable with awful people being portrayed favorably just because they are badass or hot.

- Fanfic writers are often some of the most vocal - and therefore potentially irritating - elements of a fandom.

- It's not original fiction. Original fiction is not inherently better, but bad original fiction is less objectionable to the average fan. Bad original fiction does not pervert characters and worlds that fans of the original work fell in love with. Bad fanfic, on the other hand, might turn your favorite character into a pedophile.

EDIT: At least these are my reasons. I've heard many of them echoed by others, but I'm sure other people don't share all my peeves and probably have a few I don't.

edited 27th Apr '12 1:38:59 PM by Cthulboohoo

Unless you're writing fanfic for kids, and put in mature stuff, I think you can do anything you desire. Because why not?

If it makes people happy, and no one is hurt by it, then I see no issue.

Also, lady coffee, don't you tend to draw straight eroticization of kids things?

edited 27th Apr '12 1:46:35 PM by MrAHR

I write fanfiction and original fiction and they're both not terrible (according to college writing workshops), so I'm going to take this article with a grain of salt.

I don't really write a lot of smut stories and I don't go looking for them, so I haven't really seen much smut.

As for the "bringing something new" to the story, I try to. It may not work, but oh well, I tried.

I kind of wonder what prompted this. Was someone shoving fanfiction in his face and forcing him to read it? Otherwise, I don't see why a whole article needed to be written (other than to express an opinion, I guess).

edited 27th Apr '12 5:42:07 PM by BlackElephant

I agree with him on most points.

That being said, he didn't say anything that any other edgy internet dweller hasn't said before.

I personally didn't have anything to do with fanfic until just recently, but here's how I see it-

As a reader, the quality and canonicity barriers are something to worry about, but when you consider that even professional writers make mistakes and most television shows have a writing staff rather than a single writer, it comes down to personal preference. Liking a show/book is no guarantee of liking fanfic based on it, and I think that puts people off.

As a writer (and I'll note I've written plenty but less than one chapter of that is fanfic so far), the ability to and convenience of working with established characters and expanding on established ideas is a nice departure from writing original fiction.

I agree with the blogger in question to a degree (I feel The Protomen wasted their time making an In Name Only megaman fanfic for instance), but they're also severely oversimplifying it.

Having spoken out on this subject before, I'm going to prepare a longer post later (though Cthulboohoo largely speaks for me), but one thing I wanted to say now was that not all fanfiction should be judged by the standards of fanfiction.net. While there's some decent stuff even there, I routinely spend time there for the express purpose of reminding myself that beyond all my theories on the subjectivity of art, there truly still is such a thing as Bad Writing.

But when you move beyond it to more regulated fanfiction communities, the kind that are meant for a single original work and have some kind of quality standards, the proportion of trash to non-trash changes considerably. And I think that it's the lack of those same "standards" more then any inherent flaw of fanfiction that's the reason for fanfiction.net's average quality.

edited 27th Apr '12 9:50:20 PM by nrjxll

I get the very distinct feeling that this man has been purposely searching out only bad fanfiction. He wrote a comment below the article saying something about 93 of 100 oranges tasting like clown vomit. While ignoring epic fictions such as Equestria: Total War or heartwarming tales like The Light in The Darkness (yes the bronies have fantastic fanfics) and focusing on bad Twilight fanfiction. Possibly if he had taken time to type in "good fanfiction" on google, he wouldn't have written this generalization.

And another thing: He complains about how fanfiction is inherently bad and no one will respect you and how any actual good writers should just write normal fiction. He also states that fanfiction is bad bcause it's not real, like the things fanfics are written about actually happened and Edward Cullen lives around the block. This indicates a massive bias that excludes him from being a source of actual information.

In conclusion, don't read unless you want to see someone complain about how they read bad fanfiction.

Agree.

@Clever Pun: Funny you should mention The Protomen: they're my latest obsession. I was just thinking that they're an example of fanfiction that doesn't suck (though you may argue about their relevance to the source material), but then I realised that the author of the article would immediately say that "oh, The Protomen aren't actually doing fanfiction, because they're too good/original/whatever". (If she liked them, that is.)

But fanfic writers and readers seldom understand what makes good literature. They'll call any fanfic good because of stupid reasons like shipping two characters, taking a spineless character and making her aggressive, or enacting a twist on the world. I've been recommended several "good" fanfics and a lot of these fanfics were poorly written (and a lot of them had rape).

I'll certainly be the first to agree that fanfiction readers are generally not the best judges of writing quality.

Although I should note that my objections to fanfiction largely have nothing to do with quality, in the objective sense.

edited 28th Apr '12 2:51:11 PM by nrjxll

Nrjxll and Cthulboohoo have basically said most of what I would have on this subject for me. Fan-fiction is not inherently bad, but it has the greatest potential for badness of any new medium that I can think of. Also, the author of the original piece, while raising decent points here and there that I do agree with, is for the most part being almost comically closed-minded.

Why is his main complaint about shipping the etymology of the word? I mean... what? That... huh?

Anyway... the "write your own damn story" thing. It's a nice idea, but sometimes it just doesn't work. Like, the story I'm procrastinatingworking on right now is a Pokemon fanfic basically about how a minor character was affected by the actions of a major character. To make that my "own damn story", I'd have to write a new version of the canon story just to serve as background, which kinda makes the main fanfic lose... impact, I guess the word is (and also it is too much work). Or I could just snip all the characters and plots out of the fanfic and rearrange them into an original, unrelated story they weren't meant for, but that just seems like a bad idea.

As somebody who has been driven into a murderous rage by some of the "ship" puns on this very site, I can actually empathize with that one a little.

Some of them are pretty funny, but they can get excessive very quickly, especially when you're actually trying to talk about ships and shipping themselves.

I don't agree with the "write your own story" idea. If you're the one writing it, it is your story. Using previously established characters and settings doesn't take the challenge out of writing. Writing good fiction is the same if you come up with the characters or not (generally).

edited 28th Apr '12 5:43:12 PM by Akagikiba