Reviews Fanfic / The Mysterious Case Of Neelixs Lungs

Average fic, bad presentation

As a fan-fiction, "The Mysterious Case of Neelix's Lungs" is average. Nothing special, but not awful either. It contains interesting ideas, and might be enjoyable for fans of Stadi, Ayala and Cardassians. For my tastes, it was too slow, with too much emphasis on dialogue and details, and not enough on action of any kind. I also found the Cardassians to give the entire series the feel of a Deep Space Nine re-hash. But none of these are sins, or unusual for fan-fiction.

What put me, and at least one other reader, off of this story was the obnoxious and clumsy presentation. Namely, author's notes filled with long rants against "Star Trek: Voyager" (in particular, the characters of Janeway and Chakotay), often getting information completely wrong about the show, demonstrating that these writers don't even know the show they're trying to "fix." Posting personal messages to people in their author's notes, rather than using the website's messaging system, and other such sloppy mistakes, indicate that they don't know the website they're trying to post this "fixer fic" on either.

Just as bad, if not worse, is the authors' attitudes that they are "fixing" the show. Nothing is wrong with writing an AU fic featuring a minor character you like, killing major characters you dislike, or indulging in your fetish for X alien species, as long as you acknowledge that that's what you're doing. But killing the show's leads most of us "Voyager" fans love, and shoehorning in a ship of Cardassian characters despite the obvious Deep Space Nine similarities, is not "fixing" the show. It is indulging in personal likes. These writers have a painfully/hilariously bad case of Small Name, Big Ego.

For all of the effort that these two have spent promoting their fanfic all over the Internet, they would gain far more positive attention by simply presenting the story itself in a clean, professional, tactful way.