Lots Of Reviews, Poor Prose

Thoughts on these kinds of fics?

For example, My Immortal, probably the internet's most infamous Harry Potter fan fic, notorious for its terrible prose, and yet it was highly-reviewed before being deleted. So successful that there were spin-offs, remakes, quality rewrites, and it was even reposted by several others.

What is this fascination with bad fan fiction? Why do the fics that probably took 5 minutes to write earn more than the more novelish ones?

Writing a bad fanfic is easy. Writing a HILARIOUSLY bad fanfic is... maybe not hard per se, but it requires its own unique skill set or just a lot of luck.

How many badfics are as infamous as My Immortal? And how many of those are actually sincere, not the work of someone writing deliberately badly for shiggles?

Partially Kissed Hero.

This phenomenon kind of pisses me off.

For instance, I tried, honestly tried to read some of the Super Smash Brothers fandom's infamous "Missohn From God" and took a peek at its sequel and I literally could not read it. I wanted to see the "so bad it's good" ness of it, and... for me it was "so bad, it's horrible" due to literral unreadability . The er-hem, creative, spellings were like another language.

From what I've seen, on AO 3, it has over 300 comments and on fanfiction.net everyone does MSTK-ings of it.

Yet, some of the most brilliant little one-shots by writers in that section, and in the various Nintendo sections it is connected to get maybe one or two reviews from fandom-friends.

And my work? When my work gets around 40-50 reviews, or more (I think I've only ever had one fic in years that broke 90, and all those are multichaptered pieces) that's when I start getting a little suspicious about it's actual quality, despite what reviewers tell me because of this "popular fic phenomeonon." Don't get me wrong, I like that people are having fun and entertained, but as long as the "My Immortals" of the fandom overshadow everything else... THIS is why fanfiction will always be seen as "Crap for Geeks" rather than legitimate writing-practice.

A lot of those AO 3 reviews seem to take it seriously, too. I don't get why people are so obsessed with that one - it's not even a good trollfic.

I think part of the deal with My Immortal is that no one knew for sure if it was a troll or not. It probably was, but doing that kind of thing wasn't popular at the time. Nowadays, if you see something that's that brand of terrible, you know it's a troll.

You see all these people trying to recreate My Immortal, but it doesn't work. That was a one-time thing - you can't pull it off again now that people are so used to it.

How many badfics are as infamous as My Immortal?

Cupcakes, Peter Chimaera's works, Agony in Pink, Oscar's works (although I'm not sure how well known are them today), Gonterman's body of work, Garfield Royal Rescue (although this one is awesome too), Thirty Hs, Goku meets Anna Frank...

edited 24th Oct '14 8:29:38 PM by NapoleonDeCheese

And those are just a drop in the ocean of boring bad fanfiction.

Thirty H's gets points for being eloquent nonsense. And I'd forgotten about Garfield's Royal Rescue - that was hilarious.

I hate when the opposite happens as well. Either the ones who keep subscribing think they shouldn't bother to leave a review, or are simply lazy. Probably a little of both.