tenlittlebullets | (no subject)

There is a certain quality cutoff for writing where I just shut up and enjoy the damn story. With anything below this cutoff, how bitchy and critical I am is actually directly proportional to how good the writing is. Why is this? Do I feel cheated when everything is fine except for a few horrid annoyances? Do I consider the author more of a lazy jackass when it's plainly evident they could have done better? Do my standards get unreasonably higher once I perceive some quality in what I'm reading? In fanfiction, do I feel like good writing as a vehicle for shitty characterization makes said shitty characterization more acceptable to the fandom in general, and therefore a bigger problem than just one flawed fic?

I don't know. It's probably a combination. But when I see a badfic author post a horrid first attempt, get con crit, and do better the second time around, it gives me hope for the future. When legions of marginally competent fic writers churn out maudlin, plotless vignettes, I'll kill an afternoon reading them with no opinion whatsoever. When a good writer produces an elegant trainwreck of consistent but horridly OOC characterization, I'll have fun reading it but feel rather bitter when I'm done. When I buy a highly recommended vanity-press book that's quite good but has glaring flaws that would never escape a competent editor, I feel cheated. When a published author makes millions of dollars and gains a huge fanbase with a bunch of really shitty novels, all I can do is laugh. That and hurl the book across the room with great force.

...why yes, I am reading Pont-au-Change. And rereading a few popular, well-executed LM fics that make me want to put the characters in a deathmatch with their Brick counterparts solely because I know they wouldn't come out alive.

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Ah, fanfiction woes. I don't read much LM any more but I'm reading a lot of RENT at the moment and quite a bit of it is shite. It's annoying to crit other people, but when you see them actually taking your feedback on board I do get the warm and fuzzies. XD

RENT...characters are probably easier, but most of the better fandom writers have good characterisation but no literary merit at all. This does make for entertaining PWP though.

Meh, my fic standards are impossibly high. I've pretty much resigned fanfic to the guilty-pleasure corner of my brain. I'm afraid to post a lot of my latest stuff, because it's crap: too angsty, too fluffy, too sappy for its own damn good. If I can hardly stand to read it once it's written, I don't want to know what other people think about it. Yeah, most of my stuff is maudlin plotless vignettes, to be perfectly honest, and I don't flatter myself that I'm that great of a writer. I'm not sure if L'Avenir will ever see the light of the day in its completed form, because I am so fond of it and yet I don't really know if I want to unleash it on the world.

I actually read Cassie Claire's Draco Trilogy today -- well, okay, only the first one -- and was mildly disappointed. It was okay, but I expected more what with all the gushing. This is not Les Mis, but then again I read fic in about a dozen different fandoms, so.

... This was a pointless ramble and a waste of time. Oh well. :D

Ahaha. Most of what I write is maudlin, plotless vignettes as well, but I can't seem to break out of it. If I had plots, I could probably write better, but I don't. :D

I was in the thick of the Potterfandom right when CC was in the middle of writing Draco Sinister, and got a bunch of her fangirls attacking me because I was frank about not liking it too much. It's overrated, the best parts are ~~plagiarized~~ references to pop culture, and it's so divergent from HP canon that I wonder why she didn't just write it as an original.

~~Who needs plot, anyway?~~ Yay for maudlin plotless ~~crap~~ fic! :D

Yeah, the pop-culture ripoffs were probably the thing that disappointed me the most. I can't say I dislike the divergence from canon -- I think I do way too much of that to complain about it in other people -- but it's not that great of a fic. I'm just reading it pretty much to say that I have, and of course, to 'get' all the stupid little references that people make at me.

Ugh, the stupid little references. The other really annoying thing about the DT is the fanservice--I followed it on fanfiction.net when it was a work in progress, and every chapter the reviewers would clamor for, say, Draco in leather pants. And she would oblige in the next chapter. Bleh.

Divergence is fun, but only up to a point. When almost nothing from the original canon remains recognizable, I tend to lose interest--because I'm in fanfiction because I'm interested in the original canon and want to see variations on it, not something nearly unrecognizable. I stopped reading Christian Caron, for example, about halfway through Flaming Rebels; it was obviously lots of fun for the people involved, but unlike them I had zero investment in who the characters had become. If such a reinvention of the canon were fresh, interesting, and well-executed enough to stand on its own as a novel--on par with published novels, I mean--it could hold my interest, but I've never seen such a thing.

I will always have a soft spot in my heart for Caron, simply because I refused to read slash before I finally caved and read it. I think I read it back before it was actually 'completed' on the website, too, because the second time I read it there was stuff I missed. In any case, I enjoy it mostly because of the divergence and how much the authors had fun with it. Obviously it's about as far from canon as one can get, but by this point, I've become so disillusioned with fanfic that I really don't expect to see a whole lot of stuff that's really good and adheres to canon more than 90% of the time. So, yeah, pretty much just a guilty pleasure, and I may as well enjoy the crack as well as the AU as well as the few truly goodfics that actually exist.

...as one of the said people, that's actually rather refreshing to hear. XD

Hey, at least it's not Cosette.