)HOOF OF ARGON · 12:08am May 2nd, 2013
Announcing the Bronycon fic contest, HOOF OF ARGON!
Bronycon is having a very special panel this year, called Hoof Of Argon. Some of you will already have guessed what this is! It is a celebration of the trollfic. Writer pitted against reader in a ghastly struggle with ensuing hilarity for all!
At the con, the rules are as follows. READ THE FIC, out loud, as accurately as possible, enunciating the lines as written. Ponies will read until they begin laughing, at which point they must hand the fic over to the next in line. It's Eye of Argon, ponified!
But which fic is being read?
This is a call for submissions (that's also echoed on EQAD, and should be signal-boosted wherever trollfics are enjoyed). The best fics submitted will be publically read at Bronycon, during this panel, and you'll be able to watch your fic breaking hapless readers, a true blaze of glory for the common trollfic! You must submit your own fic, and cannot submit some other pony's fic. This is not a Trainwreck Explorers thing for finding the worst fic-writer, this is a trollfic challenge for those who are writing stuff like that on purpose.
There is a catch, though, which makes this an even bigger writing challenge.
Bronycon is a PG-13 con. These fics will be read live over a microphone, even if it's late at night. You cannot have the trollfic content be purely about sex and gore, or it will no longer be PG-13 and will be disqualified. Innuendo is probably okay, violence likewise, but it's gotta be primarily about bad writing and not purely gross-out stuff. Many existing trollfics would fail to pass this test. Special consideration will be given to grammar that's challenging to read as written, and hilarious to listen to when attempted.
We will read as many as we can at the con, so please PM links for your entries to Applejinx on FIMfiction, who will forward them to a dark, dank cave where haggard ponies dig through the fetid piles of fic with their bare, trembling hooves, determining winners!
... so the EqD queue is what you'll be digging through?
Jokes aside, you're getting another hug from me this year!
I've never understood trollfics that are straight-up as-unreadable-as-possible trollfics... I'm having trouble even imagining how such a thing would be funny instead of just exhausting.
Though I still have my dream of convincing some AA-list pony celebrity to write a confusing and aggressively meaningless Dada piece.
Sounds like a party.
since I will not be able to attend, I am pre-requesting a video link tho the shenanigans after they occur.
The first submission is in, and OH MY GOSH! We are off and runnin'. Though I hope there are also submissions that are not THIS difficult. I started laughing before the first paragraph was out, trying to pronounce a word.
The funny part is that you have to read it seriously—something about endeavouring to solemnly, dramatically, animatedly read a thing so catastrophic just provokes hysterical laughter. The more serious the better, and the hammier the reading the better… you can get caught up in it, and then all at once the absurdity pounces and laughter takes over. It's a lot of fun, with the right source material. "Eye Of Argon" appears readable but has some really jaw-dropping derps that must be read correctly.
Whoever's sent us our first submission is a fiend, just a fiend…
Is there a deadline for submitting things? If so, when?
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Definitely no chance of getting a fic in after the beginning of August. The con will be underway :)
Okay, PG-13 you say. Avoiding sex and gore is easy, but can I write Spike as a really foul-mouthed pikachu who's constantly using language of which the MPAA does not approve?
Snap, I totally forgot about this. <.< Are you going for just general hilarity, or Spiderses-level unreadability? Because I can do both, it just depends. :B
Also do we post them here, or do you need them to not be public?
That defeats the purpose, almost. I mean, anyone can quickly write up a 1000 word wall with spelling and grammar mistakes everywhere. You gotta find the people who write terribly without even trying and just don't care how infamous they are. The likes of Rawhavoc and darkdrome7 come to mind.
I'm going for Eye Of Argon level ficcing, which means both absurdity and real challenges in reading it 'accurately'. If it's just pure sloppiness it'll be a burden, if it's too readable folks will breeze through, and it really is a sort of art form: it's quite possible to write badly, POORLY.
The best one I got sets a very, VERY high bar. It's not just 'mistakes', the thing absolutely breaks your brain at every turn, all without going beyond PG-13. Bradel, one tactic you could use is to have the hapless author continually frustrated by his foulmouthed Spike and refusing to transcribe what Spike 'said'. It'll be a midnight panel: the point is we simply can't take Sweet Apple Massacre or some such monstrosity, probably not even Spiderses, because it can't linger on any extreme sex OR violence scenarios, not even with a capping-off gag like 'and it really hurted her'. (no, wait— 'and she said ow')
So the question becomes, how far can you go with absurdity AND meta-bad-writer-humor AND unreadability, balancing them all while not blowing away the PG-13 (except maybe glancingly)? Chances are pretty good you can get a fic into this if I don't get swamped, but it is a competition. PM me, and if you have trouble with FIMfiction you can make it a google doc or something.
I showed my crown jewel to some EqD prereaders on the writing track. They said, "HOW DID THIS EVEN GET POSTED" (to FIMfiction). A fair question... (maybe linking me to private fics might work, too? If you can't get past story posting?)
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I KNOW WHAT MUST BE DONE
SECOND APPROVED ENTRY courtesy BOOKPLAYER
http://www.fimfiction.net/blog/184144/my-second-less-interesting-post-of-the-day
Can you beat that for 'Hoof-Of-Argon-y-ness'? The competition is heating up bigtime! Though we still have the unquestioned champion, which is locked in a secret box for the protection of literature everywhere...
So now that we're past the con, what stories were the big hits?
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Bookplayer's "Love On The Acers Of Sewwt Apples" as normal mode and 00mariofan4eva00's "CRISSIS IN TIMESPACE!!!" as God Mode.
Bookplayer's is public and I've asked the author of the latter to post it in a blog post so folks can see it. Otherwise it'll be bronycon only and there's no reason this can't become a thing. Eye of Argon pales to what we as a fandom can do to cause literary trouble :)