Fanfic woes
Feb. 17th, 2007 05:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wiseheartDon't look behind the tag. Nothing to see there, honestly. Just my usual seething about the injustice of fandom(s).
I've come to believe that it doesn't pay off to put lots of work and thought and love into one's stories. It doesn't matter whether you write good stuff or not. It doesn't matter whether you're Teh Ebol Slasher or a raging homophobe. It doesn't matter if you're writing genfic, het, slash, drabbles or epic novels. Whatever you might write, if you're cursed (as I am), you'll always, always happen to be read by people who prefer the exact opposite.
The Atlantis fandom is flooded by godawful shipper stuff, where grown men are bawling all the time because their Twu Wub (TM) doesn't love them. I actually saw one where the main problem was Shep returning to Earth without telling Rodney he wubs him. Or the other way round, I'm not sure. Not that it would count, of course. And another one where Rodney's main problem is that he's too fat and Shep has to comfort him. *gags* Apparently, they have nothing more important to do in the frigging Pegasus galaxy.
There's fluff, BDSM, kink, high school fic, group orgies, rampant AUs that have nothing to do with the show than the characters' names - just nothing about why they're there in the first place. Okay, there are exceptions. A few. But as a whole, the Atlantis fandom is a sorry place to be. There's no characterization, no serious plots, no world-building, no nothing.
And I've really thought people would be interested in well thought-out stories with detailed background. I'm an idiot, obviously. Or, as McKay would put it, a bloody moron. One that doesn't learn from her previous experiences in other fandoms.
As I can see it, in sci-fi, there are two sorts of readers. The men want hair-raising adventures and technobabble, and they're totally freaked out when there's as much as a hint of romance in a story, even het. Slash is much worse for them, of course; after all, in het romances they can drool over the description of big tits.
The women want sex. Period. Either tooth-achingly sweet fluff, or pr0n. The kinkier and dirtier, the better. With godawful how-to-do description of the mechanics on boy-on-boy action. The so-called "beauty" of the participants is described in lovely detail (which is a matter of taste, anyway), and the boys (assumedly grown men) behave like hysterical school girls.
Honestly, I usually read a very broad palette of genres. I'm one of the rare people who actually enjoy Mpreg. The only things I don't read are Real Person stuff, underage pr0n and torture. But it's increasingly difficult to find stories on the Net. Stories with an actual plot beyond the question how the participants (regardless of gender) finally can get into the sack together.
Granted, fanfic always contained a great percentage of utter crap. But it seems to me that things are getting worse. Back in the good old times of the original Battlestar Galactica we used to have wonderful, novel-length stories like "Mapping the Genome" by Anna and "Out of the Past" by Karen. They were AUs, with a wonderful twist on canon, yet as close to canon as possible, and excellently written, both in style and grammar-verse.
The Andromeda-fandom already showed signs of deterioration, but there still were good writers and good stories. Anna's stuff again, and "The Recreation of the Warrior" by Kit Mason, to name only two of the authors. Oh, and Liane Burwell. But the crap percentage was depressing there, too.
Today, nobody seems to want to write - or read - longer stories. By the time one gets really interested in something, the story is over, because the author can't be bothered to dwell on it any longer. Nobody has patience, authors and readers alike.
This is the place where I would whine about nobody carig for my stories, but I'll save you the routine. You know the whole thing by heart already. It's still depressing, though.
I've linked the few stories I still like to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
telekis_vendiak. Just in case someone wants to read good sci-fi. There are a few Tolkienfic recs, too, but fewer. I've all but stopped reading Tolkienfic... or writing it.
I've come to believe that it doesn't pay off to put lots of work and thought and love into one's stories. It doesn't matter whether you write good stuff or not. It doesn't matter whether you're Teh Ebol Slasher or a raging homophobe. It doesn't matter if you're writing genfic, het, slash, drabbles or epic novels. Whatever you might write, if you're cursed (as I am), you'll always, always happen to be read by people who prefer the exact opposite.
The Atlantis fandom is flooded by godawful shipper stuff, where grown men are bawling all the time because their Twu Wub (TM) doesn't love them. I actually saw one where the main problem was Shep returning to Earth without telling Rodney he wubs him. Or the other way round, I'm not sure. Not that it would count, of course. And another one where Rodney's main problem is that he's too fat and Shep has to comfort him. *gags* Apparently, they have nothing more important to do in the frigging Pegasus galaxy.
There's fluff, BDSM, kink, high school fic, group orgies, rampant AUs that have nothing to do with the show than the characters' names - just nothing about why they're there in the first place. Okay, there are exceptions. A few. But as a whole, the Atlantis fandom is a sorry place to be. There's no characterization, no serious plots, no world-building, no nothing.
And I've really thought people would be interested in well thought-out stories with detailed background. I'm an idiot, obviously. Or, as McKay would put it, a bloody moron. One that doesn't learn from her previous experiences in other fandoms.
As I can see it, in sci-fi, there are two sorts of readers. The men want hair-raising adventures and technobabble, and they're totally freaked out when there's as much as a hint of romance in a story, even het. Slash is much worse for them, of course; after all, in het romances they can drool over the description of big tits.
The women want sex. Period. Either tooth-achingly sweet fluff, or pr0n. The kinkier and dirtier, the better. With godawful how-to-do description of the mechanics on boy-on-boy action. The so-called "beauty" of the participants is described in lovely detail (which is a matter of taste, anyway), and the boys (assumedly grown men) behave like hysterical school girls.
Honestly, I usually read a very broad palette of genres. I'm one of the rare people who actually enjoy Mpreg. The only things I don't read are Real Person stuff, underage pr0n and torture. But it's increasingly difficult to find stories on the Net. Stories with an actual plot beyond the question how the participants (regardless of gender) finally can get into the sack together.
Granted, fanfic always contained a great percentage of utter crap. But it seems to me that things are getting worse. Back in the good old times of the original Battlestar Galactica we used to have wonderful, novel-length stories like "Mapping the Genome" by Anna and "Out of the Past" by Karen. They were AUs, with a wonderful twist on canon, yet as close to canon as possible, and excellently written, both in style and grammar-verse.
The Andromeda-fandom already showed signs of deterioration, but there still were good writers and good stories. Anna's stuff again, and "The Recreation of the Warrior" by Kit Mason, to name only two of the authors. Oh, and Liane Burwell. But the crap percentage was depressing there, too.
Today, nobody seems to want to write - or read - longer stories. By the time one gets really interested in something, the story is over, because the author can't be bothered to dwell on it any longer. Nobody has patience, authors and readers alike.
This is the place where I would whine about nobody carig for my stories, but I'll save you the routine. You know the whole thing by heart already. It's still depressing, though.
I've linked the few stories I still like to
telekis_vendiak. Just in case someone wants to read good sci-fi. There are a few Tolkienfic recs, too, but fewer. I've all but stopped reading Tolkienfic... or writing it.
