What are your personal "red flags" before reading any fanfic?

and : I'll third it.

Edit: well this pagetopper makes no sense.

Edited by SapphireBlue on Aug 5th 2018 at 4:56:24 AM

That makes it the perfect pagetopper!

Re: High school/"mundane" AUs: Just curious, but would you guys find the fic to be better if the story still takes place in the original setting? It's AU in the sense that the main plot/conflict never takes place in the universe, so the characters can live mundane lives?

Edited by Adept on Aug 7th 2018 at 12:32:41 AM

While that's definitely a type of AU, I'd say that's less a "mundane" AU and more a Slice of Life What If? story.

Edited by MetaFour on Aug 6th 2018 at 2:22:39 PM

If it's well-written, I don't really care what kind of universe it's in.

But most of the time I see high-school AU, I see it written by high schoolers and jr highers, who see it as a kind of wish fulfillment of putting the main characters in their own shoes (or what they think their own shoes are) and then giving them all the cool stuffs.

Considering that I like some official works that have the characters at a younger age (Tiny Titans), I would not mind if the characters are younger as long as they still have their skills, talents, and personality traits.

x 5

Nope. Mostly because, when it comes to anime and manga fandoms at least, a lot of the characters start in a school setting, even if the story doesn't spend a lot of time there. And I know you can do a decent story that focuses on the (relatively) mundane high school side of things without excising the fantastic elements, just leaving them in the background. It can be done, I've seen it.

Quite frankly mundane A Us for fantastic series are just the authors displaying the failures of their imagination for the world to see.

Thats pretty much what I was referring to ask an exception in regards to high school A Us.

Either the highschools have to be fantastical in someway. Like I have seen a few highschool AU fics that take place in a very dystopian world so they don't function like a standard high school. Or the original work the high school fic is based on is so depressing that I actually wanted to see the characters in a more mundane situation were they could be happy.

There has been an couple fanfics that were highschool based that were just really well written as well. Those are the very rare total exceptions.

Edited by Wispy on Aug 6th 2018 at 5:55:45 AM

School settings can be interesting. Just look to Hogwarts or even Avengers Academy (doesn't matter if it's the game or comic. still fits). All it needs is to feel like it fits in that world. For example, in the Marvel Universe, expect alien invasion drills to be common place.

They can work, but in most cases, they end up being more like generic teen dramas, especially if it's an entirely mundane AU for a setting that wasn't.

See my post on them earlier. Done right, they can be good. But especially in fanfiction, they are mostly done by high schoolers and jr highers who use them as wish fulfillment in my experience.

Which is worse: high school settings written by actual teenagers or high school settings written by thirty-year-olds trying to be hip with the times, man?

Both are their own flavor of bad. Personally, I prefer "adult has forgotten what it's like to be a high-schooler" over "high-schooler is blatantly using wish fulfillment," but I understand people preferring the opposite.

And of course it depends on degrees. Scott Pilgrim is pretty shameless wish fulfillment (not actually high school, but close enough), and it was awesome. On the other hand, 21 Jump Street was all about how even being out of high school for just a few years can result in the culture passing you by.

Edited by Discar on Aug 9th 2018 at 9:25:40 AM

The only good HSAU fics that I have seen have all been done by people who were in high school relatively recently (within the last five to ten years), so they have a reasonably-fresh perspective, while also being old enough and practiced enough at their craft to actually make it halfway decent read.

On one side of that, you have fics like My Immortal, written by a high schooler with zero experience turning it into one giant colossal cavalcade of fuckups and hilariously bad writing. On the other side, you have fics where, as said above, you have 30-somethings trying to be all "How do you do, fellow kids?" and failing miserably.

Was My Immortal even confirmed to be made by an wannabe goth high school girl? I always hoped that it was made by an very elaborate troll cause I don't want to imagine how someone can be that bad at writing.

If it was tho then damn. She really really missed the point about what being goth is about (psssssh its not all about the EDGE).

Edited by Wispy on Aug 11th 2018 at 3:01:37 AM

I dunno, actually. All I know is that there's a convoluted story behind who the author is...

We know nothing about My Immortal's author except her name and her friendship with Raven, all of which we only know of through the fic itself.

There was a story going around last year that this lady had made it to reconnect with her brother and stuff, which was supposedly verified by gaining access to her Fictionpress account, but it was all very quickly debunked (by the very brother she tried to claim she was using the fic to find, no less!) and we still have zero idea who "Tara Gilesbie" really is. A ton of people are trying to claim credit, but no one has very definitively proven they are TG without getting debunked.

I honestly do think the author was serious, because if it really was a troll, someone would have claimed credit with all the proof we need by now. Several years after Half-Life: Full Life Consequences came out, Mattimer revealed that he was squirrelking and proved it with screenshots of access to his account and stuff, as well as by finally posting the last entry of Halo: Halos in Space. If Tara were serious, it makes perfect sense to why she wouldn't want to out herself (even though some authors, such as Jenna Silverblade did without a problem).

Or maybe Tara just forgot about it. I rarely think about the badfics I wrote ten years ago. Or maybe she simply isn't in the right social circles on the internet to know that her badfic got the meme treatment. Whatever the case, I really don't see any other outcome besides this fic being written out of sincerity.

Edited by Rytex on Aug 13th 2018 at 10:13:27 AM

The story behind that fic is more interesting then the actual fic itself.

I guess it’s also possible that it started out serious, but then the author got a few years older and/or had a “what the heck am I writing?” moment, and turned it into a joke partway through. If I’m remembering right, it got even weirder as it kept going.

That would depend on how long it was being updated, though, and I don’t know that off the top of my head.

Edited by SapphireBlue on Aug 13th 2018 at 3:36:23 AM

IIRC, all of it was posted within a year. Not really enough time for a writer to go "WTF is this? Let's just troll now!"

Anyway, yeah, the outside drama was the best. Tara and Raven had a falling out over Tara's sweater going missing, which leads Tara to rename Enoby to "Ebony Dark'ness Dementia TARA Way" and get Raven killed off, only for her to suddenly pop back in once they make up with zero explanation. And since Raven was proofreading (which, to be fair, was pretty evident, considering the spelling was mostly on point early on), the general legibility of the fic just disappeared.

Then there were the two hackers, including one who tried to hold the story for ransom for views on his own fics (but forgetting to let the viewers know exactly whose fics needed to be read), and the other one who gave the story a "good" end (where everyone died, the end).

I just thought that My Immortal was an example of Poe's Law. Seriously, when you misspell Sirius as Sodomize, it makes people question.

Regardless of whether that particular fic was meant to be deliberately bad written, I really dislike when writers use Rouge Angles of Satin (intentionally or not) and try to handwave it by saying "it's a parody, so anything goes". In fact, add that to my list of red flags if I haven't already mentioned it.

This is most likely the reason I can't ever treat a badly written piece of work as So Bad, It's Good, because I'm not excusing superbly bad grammar/spelling, and a fic that fails the most basic grasp of the language falls straight into So Bad, It's Horrible.

Edited by Adept on Aug 14th 2018 at 11:47:57 PM

As far as I’m concerned, My Immortal is a classic, and while many have tried, it’s very, VERY difficult to write a fic as hilariously-bad as that. Most copycats and trollfic writers in general try way too hard, and it shows.

While I definitely agree and understand, what do you think of Dramatic Readings?

I never understood the So Bad, It's Good trope. I tend to, if I find an fanfic (or any other work) bad, just straight up drop it and not bother with it.

I mean I guess you can find an amusement in a bad work. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's good per say, just that your making your own good out of it.

Edited by Wispy on Aug 15th 2018 at 12:43:23 PM