Tour of Trouble Three: On Fanfic (Shudder)

WHY O WHY do I pick on the fanfic people? Clearly a deep flaw in character. I STILL get hate mail about this one.

But to me, the thing about fanfic is ... it's bad. All of it. So close to all of it that, yeah, you might as well say all of it. It's like When Leonard Nimoy recorded albums. I'm sure somebody could make the argument that, hey, you know his cover of...X...actually wasn't too bad. But it doesn't matter. Ed Wood might have very well, in one of his movies, wrung a real human emotion out of somebody and done a great scene. But it doesn't matter.

What matters is the overall impression. And the overall impression of fanfic -- all the fanfic I've ever read -- is that it's puerile, overwrought, florid, hamfisted, tin-eared, illiterate, badly spelled, laughably punctuated, intellectually bankrupt pig vomit.

I'm not sure I've made myself clear enough.

Fanfic makes the Baby Jesus cry. It's snuffed it. Bereft of life, it's gone up the pole and shuffled off to meet its maker. This is an Ex-Genre.

And please, ValP or whatever mu-mu, caftan wearing keyboard ranger who's reading this right now, shuddering with rage at my callous disregard for all the people paying homage - don't send me the good stuff. I don't care. I really, really don't.

A writer, someone who trades in words, is always going to be rankled a bit by bad writing. But bad writing involving great characters that professional writers have worked at, invented, discussed, outlined, drafted, and pored over, is just -- yucky.

I think people trying to repaint Monet's waterlilies are yucky, too, by the way. Hell, I think anyone who tries re-painting Warhol's soup can is yucky, too. I would rather see someone's bad watercolor of the view of the bluejay in their yard than see their bad attempt at the Warhol soup can. I'd rather see their bad attempt at the bluejay than their pitch perfect copy of the Warhol soup can, too.

While we're at it, too, let's drop the intellectual dishonesty on the paying homage front, too. Because that's not the drift of most fanfic. Trying to find a neutral exploration of fanfic in any universe is like trying to find someone who's neutral on the subject of abortion or Israel or Islamic fundamentalism.

Read the rest, it just gets worse:

Wherein Kirk and Spock Make the Man Love With The Cast of Heroes and Jane Eyre pokes Rocky Balboa.