*cringes*

[mogwai_do]

Tell me it's not just me, please. I read far, far too much fanfic (shocker), but it seems someone announced badfic week and didn't tell me. Some examples from just this last week and these are almost painful just to cut & paste:

"You don't know how much I want that magnificent mound of man meat pummelling into me"

"Sherlock slips his dominant hand over John's flaccid love truncheon" this one also featured his "thick sausage".

I just... if you can't type the word cock you probably shouldn't be writing slashfic, also how old are you and where on *earth* did you get those phrases from!?!

vicarious instead of precarious - which in context changed the sentence quite considerably and it happened repeatedly in this fic.

defiantly instead of definitely - I see this a lot and it's really starting to annoy me now.

Also, how hard is it to spellcheck things? Really? Not that hard I'm thinking. Definitely not as hard as trying to read some of this stuff...

And then there're the stories themselves:

We have the buggery without any preparation at all (actually and specifically without prep and not in a rape or BDSM scenario), which y'know, doesn't strike me as a wildly enjoyable idea, despite what the author seems to think.

We also have the massively out of character characters, where if they didn't keep mentioning the names every few lines, I would have no clue who they were meant to be, or even which show they were from.

There is more, but I can't bring myself to detail it all anymore, I'll just end up crying.

It's possible I'm just being a snobby bitch and it's true, no-one is forcing me to read this stuff, but still... I will overlook a variety of errors for a good story, but some things... I know some of my early stuff is bad, but I don't think it was ever *this* bad. Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong though - I'm happy to take concrit.

Comments

[evilawyer]

"Man meat"! "Love truncheon"! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Okay, see, I almost always assume that bad fanfic that includes goofy stuff like those euphemisms is written as parody (or crackfic, as everyone likes to call it). I take it for the slapstick laugh-fest I think it's meant to be UNTIL I see other indications that the writer was taking their story and themselves far, far too seriously.

Misspelling and missing words, well, I don't like them although I'm certainly in no position to cast stones. It doesn't help that I only occasionally use a beta because the time lag, no matter how brief, gets in the way of my "Get it out of my brain and free up mental space!" attitude toward writing and posting. Use of the wrong word, though, gets to me big time. It throws off the whole tone, can wreck characterization and is just jarring. Once upon a time, I used to jump in there without hesitation and point out they might want to consider another word. I'm must more careful nowadays, since so many people can't stand constructive criticism (by which I mean, it hurts them to the core and gets their hackles up, and I'm not good/don't really want to interact with people who are that fragile) and since it finally struck me that so many fanfic writers posting in the less esoteric fandoms aren't English speakers. Still, I figure they're practicing their English, so a little editing would be nice.

Ah, you speak of the "fanfic improbability factor". Or so I've dubbed it. Ecstasy without lube, unemotional characters acting crying and carrying on, absolute shitheads portrayed as warm and caring. This always puts me off, too. I understand that fanfic can be used as a tool to minimize cognitive dissonance, and using it to do so makes perfect sense. Make the characters "better" or flesh out their reactions to an event or to each other when canon didn't have enough time or was directed elsewhere --- that's all fine. But take a character and completely ignore their canon presentation? Pretend that s/he isn't the way s/he is? It's a dull read and, frankly, they're something about it that makes the fic and the author seem incredibly immature no matter what her/his chronological age is. Which is why I hang back on the periphery of fandoms,at least by comparison to a lot of folk. Sherlock BBC, for example. After the first series (still have to watch the second series), I read so many fic that wrote Sherlock as being sexually repressed and simply in need of a good, lubeless screwing to unleash his inner sexy horndog and/or John as being a weeper who cried at the drop of a hat. I'd read and ask myself, "What Sherlock were they watching?" Bad fanfic, I can just stop reading. If I try to get into discussions with people who write like that about their perceptions, I know that sooner or later I'm going to get frustrated and bitchy with them. Not worth it --- I'd rather save my frustration and bitching for real life.