Jun
8th
2015
So how relevant... · 2:42am Jun 8th, 2015
...is "WD: The HiE Experiment" still, given the evolution (or lack thereof) of FIM Fiction?
You might remember my parody of the genre:
Where I tried to do everything I'd seen bad authors (and some interesting ones) do when writing Human in Equestria stories. So my question right now is: do you still find stories like the ones parodied and feel the urge to link the authors to this story to try and make a point?
Or have things changed and the stuff that I made fun of is a thing of the past?
There'll always be a new generation of writers who refuse to learn from the past, so I don't think the story will ever become irrelevant. Heck, you could probably add a couple of new chapters.
3131111 or those who willingly and gleefully ignore it, like me.
Every writer is different. Never force. Just show.
HiE will always be a relevant thing to parody given that it's never really going to go away, hell, it might even still have some legs for new ideas. Self-insert will also never cease to show it's horrible face nor will the Mary sue variations on it.
The real trick will be when we hit a saturation point on parodies of these genres where we then have parodies of the cliches in the parodies. (although now that I think back on one example, that was done year one, so damn we move fast.)
If the HiE Experiment is obsolete, it's not because writers have evolved beyond it. It's because the genre itself has evolved new, even stranger appendages.
Literature is an evolving field.
Fan fiction is no exception, HiE being proof of this due to how absurdly broad of a concept HiE covers.
There's still going to be shitty writers but parody rarely ages well because, as said, literature is an evolving field. If that's true, HiE is going ludicrous speed.
I mean, you can take a look through all the most popular HiE stories through out the past 3 or 4 years and see how tastes have changed, new concept have been born, things like Villain in Equestria to the Conversion Bureau.
However, some things remain universal to bad writing just like how there are only 7 original stories.
But I don't think parody will teach them anything more than a good critique will. Because either they will ignore it because they just want the circle jerk or showing them a parody of their work does little to nothing to help them improve their writing because not everybody can fully realize the flaws in their writing.
3131161 On the other hand, there are a lot of people who still use the same, strange approaches listed in Wanderer D's initial HiE experiment. I think it's actually still relevant.
Oh god does that make us humans pathetic or does that just mean we like bad habits?
I think it has help some. They are still being written, they are still committing all those horrid cliché sins. But they are also dropping in technical quality... meaning they are, more and more, getting limited to the writers that are already shitty anyway! So the mediocre and above authors aren't doing them as much which is good! But it is still relevant to new authors. Even if the clichés aren't up to date the thought process and attitude behind the newer clichés is the same and thus it keeps its relevancy!
To be honest, I never thought that self-inserts were the main problem with HiE. The big problem with the HiE genre has always been and continues to be a lack of original ideas. That's not to say that people aren't still thinking of original ideas for the genre all the time, but Sturgeon's Law reigns supreme here - if ever there is an original idea, it's jumped on by the bandwagoners until it is original no more, and these copycat stories comprise the vast majority of all stories with the tag.
Broadly speaking, you can take any given HiE and put them in a category like this. It's a LoHAV. It's a TCB. It's a Five Score. It's a Chess Game of the Gods. It's a crossover where a random character from another franchise appears in Equestria and reacts to things. It's an Equestria Girls story where a human from that world comes through the mirror. It's a story about a human possessing the body of a FiM character. It's a self-insert. And so on and so forth. Many of these are rediculous concepts and worth parodying, but truthfully, I believe that the lack of originality on display is what most needs parodying, and I'm not sure that The HiE Experiment ever really focused on that aspect of it, at least not to my memory.
It has me in it so I think it's become irrelevant.
If nothing else, EqG has changed things. Time was, a complete newbie's first story was about a stranger coming to town and falling for the librarian. Now it's about the new kid to transfers to CHS and falls for the red-headed girl.
By all means write a second part.
Oh my god. The cover art is soup. I always thought it was the space core, for some reason.
Still hilarious and surprisingly engaging.
How long has this blog post been up? Because I just now realized that the picture is of a bowl of alphabet soup and not - as I had been believing- a picture of the eye of the Space Core from Portal 2 just in a weird way?