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Mine eyes have seen the glory - godawful fanfic

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ONLY NICE THINGS

00:55 / 05.12.02

I feel disloyal for doing this, but:

I was assigned to review this story and then I started reading it and then I rolled my eyes at the whole found-baby/Mary Sue cliché when Legolas found the abandoned girl in the woods and took her home and named her Laura and and then I got to the first bit of dialogue and when I regained consciousness it was three weeks later and then I cried hard, white-hot tears like bullets.

Legolas got up and went into Laura's room and said"good moring"and then Laura said "good moring too".Then Legolas said"whats a matter"and then Laura said"Legolas I want to know how to ride a horse".Then Legolas said"Ok"and then Legolas said"first you get dresses and have something to eat and then we will go for a horse ride lesson".Mean while Strider and Gandalf was rideing towards where Legolas lived and then Strider said"Gandalf I did not know Legolas had a sister"and then Gandalf said"I did not know aswell".Mean While at Mondor the dark lord was planing to kidnap the princess but not Legolas.Then the boss of the Orcs came and said"I'll get her for you sir"and then the Dark lord said"yes you can".

Please Hammer don't hurt them.

Murray Hamhandler

01:09 / 05.12.02

That is so great. I make no claims of being a great writer, but...well, I have to say I feel a little better about my own writing now. It's a wondrous thing to see what someone w/no concept of the mechanics of fiction writing can churn out.

The Apple-Picker

01:27 / 05.12.02

Yay! Another place I can go to laugh at people who write worse than I do! Godawful fanfic is a godsend.

02:08 / 05.12.02

Well, I didn't make the list (yet). But wow. Those were actively bad.

02:14 / 05.12.02

Uh, guys? Don't you feel like a little kid wrote that? Do you really want to scoff at a sweet, glamour-struck little kid who just wants to tell stories about hir favorite characters?

Hey, who wants to write some godawful fanfic?

07:36 / 05.12.02

Superb. Someone recently told me of some Star Trek gay slash story where Kirk enters a parellel universe where he meets another Kirk. And they fuck. If anyone knows this story and can provide a link I would be so so grateful.

07:40 / 05.12.02

My god. What a marvellous... resource.

How else would I have ever discovered Team Medi, possibly the most ridiculous thing in the world ever? (With equally bollocks cover art...)

09:20 / 05.12.02

God, Haus, this is just what I needed after the Resonant trauma. I have just laughed until I was sick.

(And, scarily, Twi is there! I love Twi! I used to follow her around the internet!)

11:14 / 05.12.02

...and the Orcs tied Laura with some chains and then one of the Orcs striped her and then he raped her and then Laura said"go away you bastard".Then another Orc came with a whip and whiped her hard...

I hope this wasn't written by an adult...

...and then Laura said"Do you want to be my boyfriend"and then Legolas said"yes I will be your boyfriend"and then Laura and Legolas kissed again...

Definitely written by a kid...

12:30 / 05.12.02

So what's an example of very good fanfic then? Is there a really famous story that everyone loves that I could read?

13:14 / 05.12.02

This is a pretty good example of good fanfic.

Though since it's been published, I'm not sure it counts. The author would likely strike me for using 'fanfic' as a descriptor...

The Apple-Picker

13:18 / 05.12.02

My sweet lord. I've only read through one category yet, The Matrix. It was pretty entertaining. I especially liked this part:

"Hello" he said in a calm Monotonous tone. He was tall that's for sure. He was also Buff the only way I can illustrate this is that he had kind of Muscly arms with a six pac

Neo's arms defy biological convention, and our author makes an attempt at the Emily Dickenson of Prose title.

13:32 / 05.12.02

Jesus. Some of that is not just godawful, it's actively disturbing...

13:32 / 05.12.02

Herewith, the semi-legendary "Batman Saves the Day," an honest-to-God submission to DC Comics, rescued from the paper-shredder by an intern.

13:34 / 05.12.02

I'm really getting into these, but allot of them are banned at work no surprises really considering some of the quotes given.

So what's with cockhead then? Seems that a few of the people use that description, why haven't I heard it before? I thought people just called "head" - I must be getting out of touch

14:05 / 05.12.02

This reminds me of a story that one of Husb's students gave him to critique. The story was exactly the same story as The Lion King, except that Simba was half-hyena and half-lion. I remember that Simba gets ostracized from the pride and goes camping, which he likes and which leads to the line "Simba was a happy camper."

The Natural Way

14:13 / 05.12.02

Jack: THANKYOU!

"Batman smothers him..."

Oh, yes! I would hump Macfayden a 1000 times for a laugh sooo good.

14:17 / 05.12.02

This has opened up a new world of timewasting for me, its great. There's a Lion King story on that site that Haus posted, its about a human who turns into a lion and then at the end finds out he's a jedi so he turns back into a human and has a light sabre battle!! Can't beat that, oh yeah and there is some lion sex chucked in too....

15:12 / 05.12.02

I don't want to sound all superior n' stuff but..

..some of this stuff actually reads like it was written by some strange, sub-human creatures trying to figure out the processes of human interaction through absorbtion in pop culture, and failing due to an actual lack of the necessary bits of brain..

15:24 / 05.12.02

Uh, yeah. Like I said, little kids.

15:28 / 05.12.02

...or, more likely, through a lack of practical experience in the processes of human interaction—for which absorption in pop culture is no adequate substitute.

That, I'm afraid, is at the heart of my knee-jerk distaste for fanfic: tell me, instead, about something that happened to you, directly to you—not at the mediated remove of the page or the screen, but in the street, in your kitchen, in your bed.

15:37 / 05.12.02

Oh yeah, Jack, because all fanfic writers are sad fuckers with no friends, no social life and no chance with love. Riiight.

ONLY NICE THINGS

15:47 / 05.12.02

And, conversely, all fiction not about Legolas and Gimli is about real things that actually happened to the writer. Like the Naked Lunch.

What a very, very strange contention....

15:52 / 05.12.02

*cough, spit*

Excuse me. Somebody seems to have put all these words in my mouth...

ONLY NICE THINGS

16:01 / 05.12.02

I quote:

tell me, instead, about something that happened to you, directly to you—not at the mediated remove of the page or the screen, but in the street, in your kitchen, in your bed.

I assumed that you meant you preferred this sort of fiction, that is to say not-fan-fiction. Possibly you were just asking. In which case...well, a bulb just went in my kitchen.

16:03 / 05.12.02

And I quote:

more likely, through a lack of practical experience in the processes of human interaction—for which absorption in pop culture is no adequate substitute

16:09 / 05.12.02

Somewhere in my stash of old zines/magazines/porn/comix/etc., I've got a mimeographed homoerotic Starsky & Hutch fanfic. Spiral bound. It's horrible, and I've got no proper frame of reference, since Starsky & Hutch was on the telly when I was too young to "get it".

I believe the woman who gave it to me was a rather large, unfortunately-scented woman who had a nascent beard growing and a nasal voice, but she was one of the few who made my job in cash posting at that hospital much more tolerable.

::a::

16:10 / 05.12.02

Well, there's art about art, and there's art about life.

Art about life can, of course, be cloaked in metaphor, or refracted through all kinds of lenses--science fiction, fantasy, and hallucinogenic drug-addled madness among them--in fact it doesn't have to be about your life, either: just about life. Somebody's.

And yeah, I would say that, for all its phantasmagorical elements, Naked Lunch is more about Burroughs' life than it is about the books he's read. And the Rings books are more about Tolkien's feelings about the English countryside and its people than about the various Medieval sagas and eddas in which he was steeped.

16:12 / 05.12.02

Cholister: my comment followed on from Rizla's post, two above mine, which was an attempt to explain the awfulness of this particular fanfic—not even of fanfic in general, and certainly not making any generalizations about "all writers of fanfic."

Try again.

16:19 / 05.12.02

Uh, Jack, what about "That (presumably referring to the last sentence, the one I previously quoted), I'm afraid, is at the heart of my knee-jerk distaste for fanfic" - not this fanfic, not some fanfic, but all fanfic, all of the time, presumably.

16:21 / 05.12.02

So I don't like fiction--fanfiction or otherwise--in which the author appears to have learned all s/he knows about human interaction from TV or books.

What of it?

16:27 / 05.12.02

But that's not what you said, is it? You said fanfic, just fanfic, without limitation or a qualifier. Fanfic. Can you never just admit that you didn't pick your words carefully enough? Or at least that you meant what you said in the first place?

16:34 / 05.12.02

Okay, then:

Fanfic, any fanfic, is utterly without any redeeming merit except as practice for producing real fiction, and fanfic writers are wasting valuable time that they could be spending writing something of their own. That's their lookout, of course, but it's a waste, and waste saddens me.

To fanfic writers I say: live a little. Throw away the crutch, pick up thy bed and walk.

You had to fucking push me, didn't you?
Happy now?

16:36 / 05.12.02

I'm done now. I shouldn't have opened my mouth in the first place, because it's impossible for me to stay civil in the face of the inevitable self-serving, self-pitying, hyperdefensive arguments that invariably arise.

Shutting up now.

16:38 / 05.12.02

Actually, yes. If you think something, then fucking say it. At least then we can all see where we stand.

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