With Regards To Trends And Fadfics · 10:37am Sep 4th, 2014
It's been a while since I've gifted(?) you folks with a good, long rant, so I figured that I might as well write you up one while I stayed up all night long, so I hope you're fucking happy. And boy, do I ever have a topic for you this time... You see them in the new or updated stories box all the time. The stories that often follow the exact same formula every time, with only some minor variations. The ones that, despite being (for the most part) shoddily-written and with barely any substance, will get upvoted and circlejerked anyway by the "fans" of whatever trend or bandwagon that story happens to be riding at the time, and letting the good, original stories get thrown under the bus. You all know what I'm talking about, of course.
Fadfics.
Yes, "fadfics." The aptly-coined term for those "trending stories" or "bandwagon stories", which lack any originality in the basic premise itself. This is going to turn into a bit of a "what grinds my gears" bitch and moan blog, so, fair warning there. You people obviously aren't expecting me to be completely nice about this if you're following me, of all people, so maybe such a warning isn't even necessary. It is going to be long, though. In fact, I've got more than plenty of stuff to say about all this. Now, with that said, let's dive right into this bullshit-filled phenomenon...
So, where do we begin with fadfics? What are they, and why are they a thing? Who writes them, and what are their reasons? Why are fadfics so toxic to good but fledgling writers? Well, I'll answer these questions as best as I can. Let's start off by answering what they ARE, and what they ARE NOT, shall we?
Fadfics ARE:
- A total waste of time.
- A total waste of space.
- Written purely for the sake of joining a bandwagon, which is almost guaranteed to get writers free followers and upvotes.
- Part of a passing trend that will carry no long-term significance or meaning.
Fadfics ARE NOT:
- Original in any way.
- Meant to provoke any insightful, rational thoughts and messages.
- Full of creative and inspired ideas.
- Written well, in most cases.
It's pretty simple, really. As you can probably tell, fadfics aren't exactly top-quality writing. Why is that? Well, the answer to that is even simpler, but I'll get around to explaining that in a moment. First, let's just cover the phenomenon from the beginning. Let's say that someone writes a story with a different and fairly new concept. Said story gets extremely popular. Other people see the story, and decide that they want to write a story based on that same concept. That story is what we call a fadfic. Depending on the popularity of the original story (and of any other early fadfics, by extension), more and more of these stories will crop up, due to the high interest. This, unfortunately (and unsurprisingly), has some downsides. Namely, for one, the concept itself soon becomes overused and boring, and no longer unique, thus killing the appeal to anyone who's already read more than two or three of these. (Just goes to show, I guess. Come up with a neat idea, and others will milk your success dry.) For two, this also tends to overwhelm and snuff out a lot of other, actually ORIGINAL stories.
Why might this be a bad thing? Well, just think about it, for a second. Imagine you are a fledgling author, having just written a new and interesting story. You're quite proud of it, of course-- and why would you not be? You spent quite a bit of time working on it, after all. And now, you just want to get some feedback, and share it with the world. After it's posted and approved, well, you would probably be both excited and nervous. But, what happens when your story hardly gets attention? Maybe a few upvotes or downvotes, and a comment or so if you're lucky. That could be pretty much it. But when you look at the stories page, another story RIGHT NEXT TO YOURS has nearly quadruple the number of comments and votes, or even more. Why is that, of course? Because a majority of people decided to pick that one story to read over yours. When you check out this story, you find - to your surprise - that the story is based on another story's concept entirely. People are either heaping praise on the story, or begging for more. Confused, but intrigued nevertheless, you decide to give it a look... only to find that there are spelling errors galore, the description is vague, the dialogue is stilted, and it just feels rushed and poorly put together, compared to your own story, which you had put so much more care into working on. Eventually, your story gets pushed out of the recent stories box with barely fifty or so views, while the other story quickly makes it to popular and eventually featured. Disappointed and discouraged, you may wonder, "Why is that story more popular than mine? Why is something that looks like it had no effort put into it getting more attention than something I spent so long making sure was perfect?"
It's a valid question, of course, and one with a number of different answers.
Firstly, the "fad" phenomenon. Or the "bandwagon effect" if you'd rather. For whatever inexplicable reason, a large number of people develop an interest to a certain idea or concept at the same time. Interests come and go, as everyone knows, but when everyone develops an interest in the same thing, it can lead to an avalanche of sharing that interest with friends and such. Those friends will continue to pass it on to their other friends, so on and so forth. The internet makes something like this INCREDIBLY easy, since sharing can be done instantly, to people around the world. Fads and trends come and go faster than ever online, and users tend to adapt rather quickly. In regards to fadfics, people will see a story, develop an interest, and then share the story with others-- or in FiMFiction's case, fave and upvote it, which helps bump it into popular or featured, where more people will see it. FiMFiction has seen numerous explosive trends in popularity with certain fics. While a lot of fads do taper out substantially, they rarely seem to end completely.
One particularly noteworthy trend is known collectively as the "League of Humans Acting Villanous". (Other variants replaces "Villainous" with another word, eg. Heroic.) This genre rose to popularity for pretty simple reasons. It blended the typical Human in Equestria formula with bastardized crossover elements, which allowed the human in question to acquire the guise and powers of whatever character that the story in question is "crossed-over" with. The trend started with mostly superhero-related characters, but soon grew to encompass crossovers in general, a lot of the worst using the exact same "becoming the costume" formula. These fics were inexplicably popular (and sort of still are, though it has been dying down as of late), despite the vast majority of them being shoddily-written and basically carbon copies of each other, sans the different character in question that the human becomes. Very little stories in the LoHAV are worth reading, since by reading one, you've read about ninety percent of them already. I personally dislike LoHAV as a whole, and I am not a fan of most crossovers or HiE in general, so that fad carries zero appeal to me. If anything, it disgusts me to see them in the box for more than a few minutes.
Why is it so popular, then? Why did people write it so much? From the audience's standpoint, it's a story that combines a "cool" hero character that the human becomes, which imprints onto most of its fans as a sort of hopeless wish-fulfillment. From a writer's standpoint, wish fulfillment is also a big factor, but as the fad took off and became popular, most writers wanted to piggyback off the success of the original, and wrote stories using the concept in an effort to bait more views, likes, and follows. Which, sadly, worked out quite well for a few of those authors. And you know what? That tends to be the main, buried motivation for most writers of these fadfics in general; they want to write something based on a far more well-known story, in a pitiful attempt to gain attention and followers from fans of those stories. I don't give a fuck if you say that you "wanted to put your own spin on it", or "you were just experimenting", no-- FUCK your experiments. FUCK your biased spin on an already-bad concept. You wanted attention, and instead of doing it the right way and coming up with your own ideas, you chose to copy a concept someone else came up with first, and use it to ride your way to popularity with little-to-no effort whatsoever. You should be ashamed to call yourselves writers. You know who you are... (And for the record, I don't actually mind parodies of these trends all that much, since the point of them is usually to mock the trendsetter/trend itself. It's still an obvious ploy for attention, but at least it's one with a message I can (sometimes) get behind, being a fan of mockery and parody.)
Another thing; side-stories. Fadfics in disguise. Past Sins, Conversion Bureau, Fallout: Equestria, Winningverse, Five Score... you know the kind. Stories that "borrow" the characters and/or setting of an already-established story 'verse are not a lot better than the pointless come-and-go trends. Can side-stories be decent? I suppose they can, yes, depending on how they are handled. I've read a number of good side-stories that managed to still be original and interesting enough to stand on their own. But for the most part? Well, let's just say Sturgeon's Law is running along at full steam, here. It's called Recursive Fanfiction; fanfiction of fanfiction, basically. There are just SO MANY of them. If your story gets popular enough? You can expect to have piggybackers and copycats, all of whom pretty much just want to snag a piece of the pie. Sequels, rewrites, "reimaginings", spin-offs... most of it is trash. Just look at any old Cupcakes or Rainbow Factory spinoff. Seriously, why the fuck do people keep writing these? Almost all of them have no imagination whatso-fucking-ever-- fuck, I've read a few that DON'T EVEN CONSIDER THE EVENTS OF THE STORY THEY'RE RIPPING OFF. How do you even screw up that badly? Holy fuck, these writers drive me insane...
But, before I completely lose my shit here, lemme lay down the reason why this annoys me so much. Fadfics like LoHAV or even this new "A New World, A New Way" bullshit are cancerous to original, good writing by lesser-known authors. Before you even start snidely remarking about "oh, there's no originality on the net" or whatever, kindly fuck yourself with a spoon and let me clarify. By "original", I mean stories that aren't just some copy of another person's world, and actually have effort or genuinely interesting ideas put into them. I mean stories that can take a concept that sounds generic in principle, and manage to make it enjoyable and thought-provoking. I mean stories that actually treat the readers like intelligent, emotional human beings-- not just pander to the mindless masses because it's what's currently "hip" at the moment. Fuck that. If you want to write for an audience, fine. But treat your own work with SOME level of respect and care. You should be writing stories you would be PROUD of. We all have our off days, and we all have those old shames we've written in the past, but the idea is that you have to write the things that you feel most comfortable writing, and write it to the very best of your abilities; don't you DARE use a half-assed excuse like, "Oh, I wasn't really being serious" or "Eh, it sucks but I posted it anyway". We all need criticism and support to learn and grow from our mistakes. How the fuck else could we learn? It's fine to experiment and branch outside of your comfort zone, but not to follow a pointless trend for the sake of following a trend. Nothing worthwhile in the long run ever came of that.
People will say I'm hating on the idea of a trend because I just don't like the original concept of said trend, and instantly have a hate-boner for everything related to it. And the answer is, of course, no. I'm not. Do I like any of these "trendsetters"? Fuck no. But that doesn't mean I hate them. I'm more than happy to leave well enough alone. However, I do hate the fact that people are mindlessly picking up the trend and doing NOTHING to actually enhance the original in any way. You are all telling the same goddamn story, OVER AND OVER AGAIN. And when that SAME story continues to get featured, and that SAME concept continues to kick all the infinitely more interesting stories under the bus, while that SAME story continues to receive the same mindless praise over and over... it kind of irritates me, naturally. And what's worse? Half of the people writing these write as if they've failed English class more than once. They are just new, inexperienced people that decided to pick up a pen with no thought or consideration and promptly defecate out a thousand words or so of generic, copycat slop, then (in some cases) abandon the story after a few more chapters and never get back to writing again. Common problem with fanfic writers, I agree, but the problem only intensifies with the onset of a new trend. Hell, sometimes the problems aren't even popular fanfics; sometimes recently popular shows/games/whatever become instant fanfic/crossover bait, which everyone goes and writes all at the same time without changing jack shit about the item they're writing about. (All those Five Nights At Freddy's crossovers, anyone?)
Once more, with feeling: I do NOT hate the trendsetters. I do NOT hate the concepts. I do NOT instantly condemn a story just because it's become popular. I DO hate, however, the poor quality and unoriginality of most of the writing involved. I DO hate the fact that honest authors trying to tell a good story are getting overshadowed and smothered. And I REALLY hate this constant fucking circlejerking between the squealing fanboys (and girls) of these trends, driving any old shitty ripoff up into featured with no effort at all. THAT'S what I hate. You are invalidating the efforts of all the genuine writers on this site. And for what? In a few months, hardly anyone will even care about this trend anymore. Your efforts are ultimately wasted, anyway. So, at the end of the day, you gain nothing of value, and many writers that COULD have gained something don't get anything. It's a lose/lose situation, and you've just wasted your time, and your readers' time. All of that effort COULD have gone into making something unique. Maybe not great, but still unique. I'm hesitant to use the phrase "don't start trends, make them!" here, since that implies that you should go ahead and make the next LoHAV or something. Instead, I'll simply twist that saying a little bit and instead say, "If you feed the crowd your food, you'll eventually starve." Lame phrase, I know, but I'm fucking tired right now.
And in the event your story gains an inexplicably popular fanbase, and you start seeing fanfics following your concept? Try not to let it get to your head, and don't promote/condone the hell out of them. Otherwise, I'll be here once again, bitching about the trend you started with an appropriately pissed-off tone and muttering a pox upon your house under my breath as I type.
~Blinkie
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Okay then.
To just clarify, I'm fine with trends if a few of the side stories actually do something interesting, or end up having a good sense of humor. In that sense, even though there's a lot of shit, there are diamonds in the rough.
I also love parody, like Final Draft's "A Generic Story," which points out a lot of the typical cliches of fics that new writers create in a clever way.
Even so, I don't like trends if they just act as dumb, pointless filler, so I agree with you, man.
LET US RIDE TO OUR BROTHERS IN THE HALL!
Behold: irony.
Can confirm recursive fanfiction
+10 Dogecoin
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Yeah, crossovers and HiE tend not to be done too well as the writers seldom, if ever, explain how X ended up in Equestria and is particularly bad in HiEs.
Crossover writers tend to pick overrated franchises and the two most glaring examples are crossovers with Pokemon and... Minecraft.
Some of these fadfics can be intriguing, but I tend to skip both. Your little rant kinda makes me glad that none of my stories will ever be popular enough to get into either box to avoid this kind of thing.
Yes. complete agreement here.
If it makes you feel any better, I did manage to get two of my stories in the box without following fads (unless you consider the entire broad HiE subset a 'fad'), for which I am extremely proud.
On the other hand, my parody of LoHAV did get into the non-mature featured box as well, and the fact that I can't tell if it was because it was LoHAV or because I was very careful to include the line "They're getting stupider by the day, aren't they?" makes me confused and mildly ashamed.
But yeah. I'm working (and I'll keep doing so) on the originality thing. Hopefully I'm not alone.
Kinda can see where you're comin' from, Blinks. Written a few stories that seem to not get noticed (insert sadface here)
But in all seriousness, this is why I tend to dislike pretty much every story that's caused a fad. I don't like Fallout: Equestria or the Winningverse and I haven't even read them. You might say that I'm being unfair to it just because of how popular it is, but when all I see are stories that are pretty much the same damn thing, it tends to dilute any interest I otherwise had in it.
2427189 You're not alone here.
I agree with what your saying here, doesn't matter what you do Fimfic, Twitch, Youtube, fads tend to overshadow the actually good content (Not saying that fads can't have some good content.).
Also I wasn't aware there was a "A New World, A New Way" group. It kind of saddens me to know that soon there will be shitty spin off fics, especially considering how I enjoyed the original. I mean it was nothing breakout amazing...but it was good and I liked it so to see that people are going to essentially pull a LoHAV with it is saddening.
You are the hero fimfic both needs and deserves.
(Walks in, reads rant, Walks out...reads fadfic)