My opinions on ficcing · 9:16pm Feb 4th, 2012
Ok, I've been looking through some of the top stories on the site, and I started wondering what, exactly, people liked so much about them. So, I started doing some comparisons. Eventually, I started noticing some trends. The comments I make aren't specific references to the top whatever fic list, they're more general, including fics from other genres.
1: Shipping
Romance sells, and apparently people love it when you focus entirely on two characters gettin' it on in some way. I'm not going to CONDEMN this as an art form, because when it's done well it does actually work. Unfortunately, more often than not we find that the author needs to change the personalities of the characters involved. In this case, what we tend to find is a skeleton fic with interchangeable names. If you could copy and paste the same story but instead of Twilight Sparkle and Rarity you could use Rainbow Dash and Applejack, or Tifa and Vincent, or Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, then you haven't really written a pony slash fic, you've written a generic slash fic that has certain names and words changed to fit a setting and a fantasy pairing.
2: Violence / gore.
This kind of stuff just irks me on a personal level. It's just so...unnecessary. Perhaps this is the same reason I don't like most horror flicks these days. It's just people whipping around their "Nuh-uh I can make the most graphic rape/murder/disembowelment scene" penises. It's a cheap shock that, once the initial novelty wears off, just looks bland and pointless. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of very creative uses of death and gore, but when the focus is JUST on the death or the gore, it tends to become overpowering and, shortly after, annoying or predictable. So here's my message: If you're going to kill off some character, especially if it's a character you've created SPECIFICALLY to die, don't make it obvious, don't make the death the only important thing, and please, please, please don't write a story just to showcase death. Give us some intrigue, some protagonist, some kind of thing to latch on to to keep us reading.
3: Tears
Honestly...not much to say about this one. A story that is supposed to bring tears to your eyes has the opportunity to be really good, but you have to be very careful about how it's executed. A death can successfully work, but only if it's the right KIND of death. Case in point is the story Growing Up by RustedRabbit. Go read it, seriously. I don't want to say anything more about this topic, since it might infringe on the story, so I'll let this sit as it is. Other stuff that might affect the sadness factor are just kind of....sad things. It's hard to explain. Usually, it's things that affect us personally: Longing, waiting, fear, family problems, and so on. But it still has to be written RIGHT! There are stories that I have read that had some very sad things in them, but because the context was wrong or they were written poorly or they were writing the wrong personality traits into certain characters, it just didn't work and didn't affect me the way it could have.
Those are the 3 big ones I've seen a lot of. Just so you know, it's highly, HIGHLY unlikely that I will ever write anything with any kind of sexual under(or over)tones or direct violence. It's just not my bag. I might write something really sad some day, who knows, but mostly it'll be adventurous and action-y with a little bit of drama thrown in. So that's what you can expect from me, and that's my take on the hot topics of fanficcing. Good luck, mes amigos, and go read my stuff! <<
I approve
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