Parley: Dread and Loathing on Fimfiction · 12:31pm Mar 6th, 2016
Firstly, if you haven’t heard, Season 6 premieres on the 26th. Huzzah!
Now for the meat of this blog. Given my username, I’m sometimes asked what I’m not a fan of. Well, this week, I’m going to explore that. Since this is a Parley blog, I’m inviting all of you to do the same.
This topic came to mind when I stumbled upon a story earlier this week. Empty Horizons has an impressive rating, a compelling description, some cool art, and an intriguing premise: The Mane Six find themselves in a far future where ponykind is losing its magic.
I had zero interest in reading it.
That wasn't the author’s fault. I am terribly uncomfortable with the whole “dying magic” concept. It’s not that I think it’s a bad idea. Indeed, in a setting as magical as Equestria, it’s a natural avenue to explore. It just really creeps me out. (As per the blog title, I dread it rather than loathe it.) I almost always avoid the idea when I encounter it on this site. There are a few exceptions, most notably Regression, but when that updates, it gives me a feeling of blended anticipation and apprehension like little else.
Thinking about it, the concept is part of a larger theme I can’t abide. Persistent degeneration, whether physical, mental, supernatural, or otherwise, repels me. The idea that the future will inevitably be worse than the past goes against my personal philosophy. It feels like letting entropy win. (I know, I know. In the game of thermodynamics, entropy is the house. That doesn’t mean I have to like it.)
But enough about me. What ideas, whether on this site or in general, repel you? What, if anything, to you consider so heinous that you don’t think it should be used in any story? And perhaps most interesting of all, why do you feel this way? Do you even know?
A scary topic you have started here :)
Repel is a strong word, but I guess extremes aren't my cup of tea. Filtered and to a large degree Random are things I generally ignore, but theme wise, everything is an experience.
Then again, possibly I've had a sheltered reading experience so far :D
Hmn, I know that I have some fairly strongly held pet peeves about writing, but offhand I'm not sure an qualify as "Never should be written ever".
Actually here's one: mind control that turns into romance. Waaaaayyyyyy too rapey for me.
The idea that sexual amorality is a more "mature" attitude than sexual morality. This especially bothers me because I know the cultural-evolutionary reasons for sexual morality. Beyond that, the larger idea that amorality (on all topics) is more mature than morality in general. For the same reason.
Amoral individuals are distrusted, and amoral societies fall.
I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream-style cosmic nihilism horror. It just feels like a really cheap and dumb way to milk the readers' emotions to me, and has ruined several otherwise intriguing or even excellent stories. A major example would be the third Hard Reset story. The whole "Oh, by the way, the Elements of Harmony commit genocide and sentence ponies to eternities of suffering for no real reason. Have a nice day!" thing lost me completely, and I never looked at any of the spinoffs after that. That just aint Equestria
For the same reason, I am sorry to say, your Starlight Glimmer & Discord stories did nothing for me except make me worry for where this fandom is going
I actually began to fear that my negativity around that time had alienated you, which worried me as you're a friendly chap and prolific commenter and I quite like having you as a reader.
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I appreciate constructive negativity. I can't grow as a writer if I'm locked in a hugbox. And I can totally understand being turned off by universal hopelessness, especially in Equestria.
If I may go on a slightly-non-literature tangent here, this is a huge part of the reason I don't enjoy the kinds of video games that have unforgiving difficulty and permadeath; the idea that I could spend minutes or hours playing a game, only to end up with either no progress to show for it or even a regression to a less powerful state is just abhorrent.
I can barely even understand how people can stand having a game insulting them and literally wasting their time that way. Some people say the journey is more important, that just playing the game is fun enough, but the mere fact of knowing I could be wasting huge amounts of my time ruins the fun of even playing in the first place.
For example, Darkest Dungeon seems kinda cool, but everything I've heard about the game suggest that the best you can hope for is prolonging your inevitable death-spiral of endless misery, and watching all your little heroes slowly descend into madness and death. You can't win, you can't grow stronger, you have no hope. WHY THE HECK WOULD ANYONE WANT THAT?
There's a lot of things I don't care for... very little I do care for anymore (depression-induced apathy sucks), but there's really only two things I can think of that really irritate and even anger me.
One is stories that hammer home hopeless scenarios. Background Pony is a specific example; I never finished it, since it got so pointless after about the 10th failure that I found it completely pointless to even care anymore. And, from what I've heard, that was pretty much the overall theme of the ending; that there was no way to solve the problem and that Lyra was damned to be forgotten forever. I utterly hate the idea that life can be so completely and utterly pointless.
The other is the tendency for 'anti-establishment heroes'. This one is going to get me so much hate, but I am honestly sick and tired of how 'anarchist' and 'hero' have become synonymous in this day and age. Laws exist for a reason, to protect people; yes, sometimes they can be abused, and there are times when you need defy them to do what's right. That doesn't mean that anyone trying enforce the laws is a fascist, that everyone who just ignores them to do whatever they want is a hero, or that people who don't constantly rebel against them are 'oppressed'. I would utterly LOVE to see characters like that be wrong, for once.
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Would you believe me if I told you that Sherlock Holmes, in the stories, is not any kind of sociopath? In fact, that he is a kind and compassionate man about whom the worst thing you can say is that he's too quick to forgive criminals for their crimes? Because he is. The idea of Sherlock Holmes as a callous misanthrope and high-functioning psychopath which dominates every adaptation today is completely a creation of modern writers and has no basis in the original stories.
Sometimes I think people have taken the modern love for flawed and ambiguous characters too far, to the point where the only heroes allowed outside of children's entertainment are charismatic jerks who are barely better than the villains they fight.
For me it's blatant misanthropy and stories being pure and unsubtle political pamphlets from any direction of the ideological space. While I can accept that a story is functional to communicate an idea I need it to be a bit more than a pure piece of propaganda to enjoy it. But then maybe I'm simply blind to the stories that pander to my own sensibilities, it's so difficult to judge them.
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That happens a lot, but in the stories where you find this they are usually the antagonists or the misguided fools, and then are often as irritating as the ones where they are the unquestioned heroes.
I didn't exactly know myself what I don't like in a story... Until one of my favorites went and had the main character, a strong, independent Royal Guard with a playful personality, clapped into enchanted shackles that would slowly break her mind and turn her into a submissive, obedient wife of the monster that kidnapped her.
Loss of self, loss of personality, and just as importantly, loss of memories. Those are probably my worst possible fears in life right next to loss of intelligence, and I simply can't bear to continue following a story if this is used and is not resolved somehow later(in the case of above-mentioned story, a Deus Ex Machina was used, but I most definitely didn't mind that).
On the flipside, I am more than fine with Mind Break that ends up toughening the character up in the end, making them more assertive as a result of their experience for example.
I hate stories that are too heavily driven by allegory. Too often I've read stories that seemed to have really inventive and imaginative concepts, only to later discover that those concepts are just parallels for religion, war, etc. Why can't I have a story about a society of moles without it being an allegory for Christianity?
Oh, and second-person stories.
Thinking about issues of change, and technology, a couple more.
Technologically Static Equestrias - In a technologically-static world, there is no progress. Nothing ever gets any better. The best one can hope for is a comfortable eternal stasis.
This has the side effect of making the drive of a character like Twilight Sparkle entirely pointless.
I discussed this further in "Future Equestrias II. Direction of Change"
Also, Show clearly depicts a technologically-dynamic society. Comic Book, which is not as well written, muddies the issue.
Magic vs. Technology - The assumption that magic and technology are fundamentally-different and even opposed fields of study.
First of all, the only reason why this is true in reality, to the extent that it is true, is that in reality magic doesn't work. But in Equestria, magic obviously does work. Which means that the "magic" in question isn't superstition, but rather the discovery and application of physical laws not known to our culture (and possibly not working as well on our Earth).
Show is absolutely clear about this. Characters who study and use magic treat it as a science and technology. Equestria incorporates magic into its agriculture, industry and daily life. It's not some sort of woo-woo mysticism.
It's true that the emotional state of the caster is relevant to the success and effects of the spell. However, this is because the caster's mind is an instrumentality of the magic. The same thing is true of an artisan crafting something by hand in our world. We're so used to automated production that we don't readily grasp this any more.
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Note that in the Shadow Wars Story Verse it is the villains -- the Night Shadows -- who have embraced hopelessness as the truth of the Universe, and the explicit motivator for their evil. They're predatory nihilists who believe that the best possible outcome is to be the last to die by eating everyone else.
Entropy only meaningfully wins on cosmological timescales. As long as there are stars in the sky we'll be fine. That gives us at least a trillion years to come up with a solution. We know this universe began somehow with a very low entropy state, so that may give us a possible model for a solution. The only thing known to guarantee the ultimate victory of nihilism is a lack of effort (admittedly there may be factors we don't know about) and I think we value our survival too much. Whats more, I don't think we're alone in that.
I'd say for me the biggest turnoff is extreme grimdarkness. I'm not just talking "Society has flaws, people die sometimes, nobody has plot armor". I'm talking "The entire point of this story is for everybody to die or suffer", stories that intentionally kill off a sizable percentage of the world or half the main cast just to show they can (I'm looking at you, Attack on Titan). Often it seems like there isn't really a point to the story, except to hurt everyone.
If the story is mostly focused on, like, the triumph of the human (or equine?) spirit despite all that, about people fighting back against what seems hopeless and making what headway they can, that's fine. But it's more-or-less impossible to tell such a story apart from one where the ending will just be Rocks Fall Everyone Dies, so why bother trying to read either?
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Yeah we're off topic, but the idea with those games is that "progress" isn't beating the next level, it's improving your skill at the game enough that you can reliably reach the next level. The first few times you reach a certain point in the game it'll seem like a huge accomplishment, but eventually you'll be able to do it on more than half your attempts.
Generally speaking, self-insert fanfiction makes me feel uncomfortable, like I'm learning way more about the author than I ever wanted to, and in an entirely inappropriate context. Autobiographies, personal blogs, they're fine by me, but reading the fiction someone wrote about themselves, their fantasies, that's... creepy to me. It makes me feel like a voyeur.
I could never do Princess Luna's job.
For me, fiction has one rule. Only one rule that it must, and I mean must, adhere to. I can read anything from mind control romance to nihilistic origami, as long as it obeys a simple rule:
SHOW. DON'T. TELL.
The whole heat death thing, though so far off from our lifetimes, honestly terrifies me.
And it isn't the fact that our species will come to an end, or even the notion that our programmed biology makes us worry about subsequent generations.
More so it is the atmosphere of futility that we get from this idea. Beyond legacy and beyond history is realm of experience. Was it all for naught? Some say to live for the experience, but what if one doesn't care? What if they just wanted something more long lasting (not necessarily legacy) to result from their actions and, as they accept they will fade from history, to have others continue life and the future?
Do they then have all their altruistic intentions forsaken from the get go?
I've never liked HiE stories. I came here to read about ponies, not humans. Doesn't help that most of the time the HiE stories follow the same basic formula of human coming to Equestria, making friends with Mane Six, helps them fight against evil, blah blah blah...
Then, like many above this comment, I don't like when there's a sense of hopelessness in a story. Even if the story is trying to force you to have hope, you just feel like there's no point in continuing the story. I have heard many times that the best dark stories have at least a ray of hope for readers to keep going--kind of like having a flashlight in a cave.
Also, I despise unnecessary romances. I've soured on a few stories because of a romance that came out of nowhere, or if the plot would be the same (or perhaps better) without it.
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I'm glad that fad seems to have died down a bit. There will always be games like that for the people who like them, but I was getting really sick of seeing a really interesting game preview suddenly start bragging about how many arbitrary ways they found to increase the difficulty. Challenging is fine, but I've seen one that claims that it won't even tell you the controls.
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Have to agree with you on everything. I get that rebels are cool, but it gets really tiring seeing people try to write heroic rebels when they (the author) genuinely can't tell the difference between a poorly implemented law and the laws that are basically required for civilization to exist. Also, Background Pony was tedious as hell even before it got properly depressing. After hearing how it ended I was just happy I had lost interest in it before the 50% mark. Also, I love what you've done with every single character in Necromantic Adventures of Lyra Heartstrings thank you so much for taking the fandoms stock characters and making me love them again.
On to my own pet hates, I guess. I can't stand whiny misanthropes. You know, the dorky kid that got bullied in high school because he's 'different' so his mouthpiece in the story will tell ponies all about how awful the entire species is while quoting the same tired list of things that humanity needs to stop doing (polluting, wars, racism, etc).
I can't stand mouthpiece characters in general, really. It's fine to have characters share your interests or opinions, but it gets really tiring when a character spends the entire chapter just ranting about how much they hate porn or whatever. This was what made me give up on RealityCheck's stories. Off the top of my head, The Audience contains about four chapters that exist solely so RC's avatar in the story can "enlighten" the reader (porn, gold standard, price ceilings after disasters, and immortality). Nyx's Family has an entire chapter dedicated to a conversation where Celestia speaks with her economic adviser, but none of it has anything to do with the actual story and is only there so RC can establish Celestia as following the same schools of economics that he does. Fanfic is Crapsack is basically just him mocking fanfictions or fanfiction tropes he doesn't like, which was sometimes funny and sometimes just a spiteful rant delivered by one character while everyone else stands around going "what kind of sick person comes up with stuff like that?" so the main character can launch into a string of insults and bad psychoanalysis at HP Lovecraft or people who write dark fanfics (both grimdark and actually-might-be-good-dark).
I also get tired of stories that change or establish rules that didn't exist in the show, and then talk about how the canon characters are idiots for not having done [thing] in [episode]. For example, I read a story that said that basically any adult unicorn can teleport several dozen meters and then treated Rarity like an idiot for not teleporting away from the Diamond Dogs. It's incredibly lazy writing, and it tends to result in one or more characters either being elevated to godhood when it turns out that [thing they do] is the best way to do it and everyone else was a fool for not seeing it, or they keep talking about how [character] is a moron for not casting [spell they lifted from a video game] to deal with [canon situation from season one].
Not to pick on RealityCheck, but that's why his "rebuttal" stories (Shorn, Yes It Matters, Starting Over, and some chapters of his other stories) were so bad. He has this habit of shifting or adding background information in a way that supports what he wants the story to be. Like when he made the Abbot from Last Evening Together a sexist egomaniac because he didn't like the idea of a bunch of monks making someone shave their head.
Also I wish people would stop tossing the fandom characters in the background just because. The story doesn't really get better if you stop everything for a few minutes so Derpy/Ditzy can obsess (literally obsess, like an addict) over a few muffins, or so Lyra can shout about humans. It most especially does not improve when you resolve an interesting plot point by having a pony that actually looks nothing like David Tennant show up in a blue box and time travel the problem away. Unique spins on the Doctor are fine, but it's kind of frustrating being expected to just take it as a given that the Doctor was there the whole time when he never shows up or does anything until he becomes a Deus Ex Machina and ruins a dramatic moment with the ruthless efficiency of "and then she woke up."
Speaking of, never end anything by having your main character wake up when they're in a bind. I swear, it's like being thirty seconds away from orgasm and then having your partner stop what they're doing and run off.
Well, that was cathartic. One of these days I need to find a story I like and let myself just gush about it. Offset some of this negativity a little.
This. A thousand times this.
A little background info for me: I'm not particularly strong or charismatic, and my endurance in the face of mental or physical pain is unimpressive. My intellect, however, is something I can take pride in. The thought of losing that and my memories to brain damage, dementia, or to something more fantastic fills me with dread whenever I think about it. Also, my family owns, operates, and lives in the same house as a Residential Care Facility for the Elderly (an old folks home where people come to live out their remaining days) that primarily serves people with dementia, so dementia is something I have an unpleasant level of experience with. It's actually a relief to me when one of them dies, as then I know that regardless of which afterlife they end up in (or not, if you prefer), at least their mind isn't rotting within their skulls anymore. Beyond that, I find mind control to be abhorrent and terrifying on a number of levels.
This sort of thing happening in a story, especially when explicitly described, completely turns me off of it. At least when it seems hopeless to resist it. When the being inhabiting Twilight Sparkle's body in The Immortal Game made Rainbow Dash into a mind slave in a particularly cruel fashion that would gradually degrade her to being a mindless thug if she resisted, I immediately dropped the story and spent a chunk of time feeling sick.
A whole freaking lot of people evidently didn't mind this development enough to stop reading, though, as the fic is actually one of the more popular ones. I've enjoyed grimdark fics like FO:E or Days of Wasp and Spider, but I can't stomach my worst fears becoming a character's reality.
Frak. I had a couple of other fic types that I avoid, but now I need to lie down.
Wow, this comment chain actually gives me hope so far. I thought it'd be full of people being annoyed over nice happy themes (and I'm sure one or two will show up eventually :P) but I actually agree with an overwhelming majority of the people above me. Neat.
I certainly don't want to turn this into a thread of negativity (way too easy with subjects like this), so I'll be as diplomatic as possible.
Most of my pet peeves as of late actually come from the act of critique of creative works, but that's another discussion. Currently, however, there are two big storytelling phenomena that my friends and I have been talking about lately that we've been getting weary of--and sadly, they're finding their way into more and more creative works:
Fast/Extreme Tonal Shifts: We get it. You really liked The Empire Strikes Back--and why not, it's fucking awesome--and maybe you want to inject some stakes into the happy-go-lucky show you've been writing for a while now. Or you wanna sell a villain hard. SO LET'S GET SOME POLITICAL INTRIGUE GOING. LACK OF TRUST BETWEEN FRIENDS. SOME EVIL XANATOS PLANS. KILL OFF SOME BELOVED CHARACTERS. WHOO PHYSICAL AND/OR PSYCHOLOGICAL TORTURE. STATUS QUO? WHAT'S THAT?
This isn't a bad thing in itself and it can prove that your concept has some legs! Still, I implore all creators out there: think hard as to whether or not this really adds to your narrative and is worth jolting the audience you have that originally tuned in for that original light-hearted fare you were offering. And if you decide to go forward with it, that's fine--but for the love of Celestia, build up to it. Give people some warning and time to brace themselves.
FiM itself is actually pretty bad at this (mainly in the "giving warning" department--the few times it's managed to give some decent warning of any of its impending status quo changes have always been by retroactive narrative opportunism, or by accident). I've also heard the Winningverse dropped the tonality ball pretty hard here, but I don't read Winningverse so that's all hearsay. Meanwhile RWBY recently had a massive tonal whiplash but put warning signs all over the place and had a straightforward serial narrative that only a bat could miss coming. So while my heart was in pieces over the last crop of Season 3 episodes, I'm still cheering for the series. Funny how that works.
Desperation to be "subversive": You can really tell these days which writers--professional or fannish--religiously read TVTropes or reactions to media on social media, and thus are blatantly scared to repeat well-worn plot devices, regardless of how much people might enjoy those plot devices, regardless of how talented the writers are to put new, refreshing spins on those plot devices, simply because said devices have been used before.
So instead of telling the story they want to tell to the best of their ability, using the strengths of those well-worn tropes, or even playing around with them, they instead bend over backwards to tell a story that absolutely no one will predict, leading to "twists" and status quo changes out of absolutely nowhere to "keep people guessing" or to "avoid cliches" instead of "keeping people entertained." It doesn't "make people think," you guys. It just leaves them confused and sometimes scared that getting invested in anything you do isn't worth it.
(I call this the "Agents of SHIELD Conundrum" but it's existed before and after that show.
)
This happens to shipping writers a lot too as the romance has to remain a constant and people see that as holding them back. You wanna write two (or more I guess?) legally-sound characters in love, just do it. Yeesh. Screw the highbrows who call it old hat. It's not for them.
I can't stand misconceptions and misunderstandings; all they do is breed hate, paranoia, and faulty thinking. Seriously, it's like people (and ponies) skip straight over rational thought when these things happen. I know we're all emotional beings, but there's a limit and a fine line between Being Emotional and Being an Idiot. I've seen what happens in the latter case in several series' and it's almost never a happy ending scenario, not to mention the damage can be long-term
It's probably my sense of justice, everyone I know tells me it's strong; I just don't like seeing good people (or ponies) getting hurt over something that can ultimately be avoided if you just take a moment to talk or listen.
There was one story I started to read that I finally had to stop because it had a similar feeling of hopelessness to the distopias/Apocalypses you described, only it was about Applejack suffering from depression (it was titled something like "For Sale: Sweet Apple Acres"). I didn't want to be too critical because the author based it on her(?) personal experience. But I couldn't get through it because external setbacks kept piling up to the point where it felt relentlessly and unrealistically hopeless.
When I read the idea of this blog I had to think for a moment and head over to my Read it Later List, then my Bookshelves and the more I continued to scan over them, each time I saw a little bit of everything. Cheesy romance, dark horror, slap stick comedy, daring adventure, sad occurrences, tragic happenings and most things in between. I mean when it comes down to it I guess you could say I am a fan of just about everything
But that couldn't be right, I don't love everything I've read here. I know I've clicked that downvote at least once or twice, but I had to figure out why. It brought me back to the first story I ever outright didn't like. It was a big step for me, I was pretty new to fan fiction and I'd just finished reading a new chapter of something I'd been tracking for a few months. So with another 2-3 week wait ahead of me I decided to try and fill the gap. That's when I found one of the first stories to give me a real taste of what I was getting into here.
It was a time-jumping fic and very interesting at that. Good action, featured one of my favorite ponies, written very well and was well over 50k words. The beginning of the fic wrote the mare as having high intelligence, able to reason with the best of them. Avoiding bad choices but still facing adversity and consequence to her actions. I got a good amount in and then that mare did something stupid. And I mean straight up moronic. It wasn't OOC, it wasn't due to stress, it wasn't cause the villain forced her hand. It was just outright dumb and everyone suffered for it. The next 2 chapters had her dealing with that issue which only caused those around her to suffer even more but yet not blame her. Even though it was clear she'd derped hard. Their explanation for not chewing her out wasn't even because the mare in question felt bad enough, a cliché I've come to expect from time to time and learned to accept. But because even they felt that her messing them all over was just filed under poop happens.
One more chapter of self wallowing then she goes back in time as she normally did, only to do it again, this time willingly. And that's the first time I didn't finish a story. I came to realize that when a story gets hard for me is when the characters start to lose me. And it's really difficult to do that. I can understand that bad things have to happen, and characters can't always make the right choices. Then there would never be conflict. But these choices that they stand behind have to at least make sense. Or at least have some good reasoning or else I just put it under account of them holding the idiot ball and that doesn't always provide character development. Sometimes it's just plain stupid.
I can handle most concepts and ideas, as long as the characters fit and stay consistent. If they're holding that idiot ball there better be a good reason why. Cause if they're just being dumb because someones gotta be for a few paragraphs. I'm just gonna groan and endure. And I can't do that forever.
For me, it's corruption of a good character. When a story starts with a nice character, who seems like a genuinely nice person, and then slowly turns them into an evil person. I don't just mean that I think this is usually poorly written or anything, I just loathe the entire concept, even when I can objectively assess a piece of fiction with the conceit as very high quality.
When I was a kid I read all my favorite fantasy books over and over, but one of the best series I ever read I could never go back to, because the heroes' best friend is slowly tempted and corrupted into becoming the primary villain by the end of the series.
On the flip side, my favorite conceit is seeing bad characters redeemed, a major reason I'm such a fan of MLP.
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I generally agree with you. However, I've played a few of those games, and here's why:
- Dwarf Fortress: perhaps the worst offender that can be found; the game's core principle is "losing is fun!". However, it just has so much depth to it, that this is very much a case of "it's the journey that matters, not the goal". Also, since there's no real goal, and the sheer amount of things you can do open up ways to complete some of the most challenging parts of the game easily, it's not that hard if you know what you're doing.
- Nethack/Slashem: honestly, I enjoy playing around with game mechanics and seeing how far I xan get. The few times I really tried to play for a goal, I did back up my saves now and then.
- Xcom: I'm pretty late, I know, but I've just started playing Ironman on high difficulty. If you don't know, that's basically permadeath because you only have one save that autosaves. And let me tell you that it's vastly more rewarding this way: your soldiers actually matter, because if you mess up and one of them gets flanked and one-shot with a crit, you can't just waltz away and reload. So instead of steamrolling the aliens and reloading whenever anything goes wrong, I have an actual challenge, all my actions have consequences, and the sense of accomplishment when everything goes well is tremendous.
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Not for me. It's just not the way I work.
Losing even a single soldier hits my brain with the reality that everything I did with that soldier has been for nothing. It makes me consider it all a huge waste of time. It retroactively ruins all the fun I had with that soldier up to that point, and makes every past victory worthless.
My brain needs two things from a game; Power and progress. If a soldier dies, it means I was not strong/smart/clever enough to prevent his death, and it means all the progress I accumulated on him (his levels and such) were wasted.
Losing a soldier in X-com is the exact antithesis of what I play games for.
And I do agree that overcoming a difficult challenge makes it more rewarding (If it's literally impossible to lose, I usually bump the difficulty up to have at least some resistance), but that sense of triumph is vastly overshadowed by the dread, stress and frustration of not immediately winning on my first try. I don't care about a high reward if I have to slog through hours of abject misery to obtain it. I'm quite content with the lesser, more accessible victories.
If i ever do play X-com 2, it'll be on the easiest difficulty, straying as far away from ironman as humanly possible, and slapping the reload button as soon as someone dies. Because my brain cares little for distant, hypothetical victories; it needs instant, constant gratification, otherwise what's even the point? I could be having easier, less stressful fun with a book or a walk outside or something.
Isn't that the whole point of fun? To be actually having fun instead of sweating bullets and grinding teeth just trying (and very possibly failing) to have fun?
Huh. While there are plenty of things that really get my dander up, I've got enough of a taste for the grim, the dark, and combinations thereof that I can't think of any grimdark trope that I always hate.
Context matters, though. I just left a comment on Eakin's page about how some dark backstory in A Taste of the Good Life affected me much more than the objectively more horrifying bad stuff in the time loop trilogy.
Thinking about this makes me want to seek out redemptive examples of seemingly impossible tropes, actually. I can think of stories I've enjoyed that featured rape, mind control, eternal torture that death would be preferable to, and (most surprising to me) even a story that appears to be inspired by its own cover art, but the only story tagged "Anthro" in my tracking or RiL shelves is a deliberate and obvious trollfic.
EDIT: I meant to make it clear that I actually quite liked A Taste of the Good Life, on balance. Scootaloo is way rad.
In this part of my comment I cheaply ride on what everyone before me has said and say, "A lot of the things people have already said, though usually, if I've actually picked it up, I'm going to read it anyway."
Now I'll be the odd one out. I don't like crossovers, and not just the blatant, "If I put X and Y together, it's as awesome as X + Y!!!". I usually avoid them, even if it's 'wrong to judge a [fic] by its cover'.
Part of this may be that, as internet-ignorant as I am, I usually don't know the source material.
Also, I don't have issue with taking inspiration from... pretty much anywhere, but when the author decides that they want to use the name of other sources, I start to lose interest. Notably, the source makes a difference, but the author and their intent is probably what's going to push me in one direction or another.
And the other half of this I don't really know. For a guy who's pseudonym is as obvious as it is, I feel somewhat hypocritical saying that even references to other sources (notably, only within an actual story) irk me. The blatant ones that break character are the worst, but I've come across a few more subtle ones that just annoy me. Really, anything that shows the author putting the story on the back burner to talk about
another sourceanything that isn't storytelling is what gets me.Good crossovers don't put me off, so long as all sources are well-meshed and relevant (like Bugsydor's Monster Hunter: Equestria (plug plug plug)), but I'm still less likely to take a close look.
Edit: To say nothing of displaced stories.
Let's see... I think that one of my chief turn-offs when it comes to ponyfic is misanthropy, and the overselling of Equestria that frequently accompanies it. Yeah, Equestria is a pretty nice place, and ponies are overall friendly and nice and good. But it's not some kind of a perfect utopia, and ponies can also be panicky, herd-minded, and xenophobic. That both of these things tend to go hand-in-hoof with HiE stories about a disaffected American teenage / college student guy finding his way to Equestria and finding happiness, validation and love there doesn't help.
A milder thing that annoys me is having Equestria be just modern America with a pony veneer. I like Equestria as a secondary world fantasy, a magical kingdom inspired by modern America, but not a carbon copy. (It's one of the things that frustrates me about Button Mash; he's a fun idea, and I admit to enjoying well-done SweetieMash, but... video games! Do not want those!) It's probably not a surprise that I'm extremely lenient of stories that go the other way and turn Equestria into a more alien and fantastic place.
Also, I'm completely intolerant of certain fetish stuff showing up in fics. I am not opposed to clopfics, whether we're talking about more literary stuff with the explicit things as a spice (like Cold in Gardez's deservedly well-regarded Salvation, or Romance Reports), or just raunchy po(r)ny stuff where the sex is in the main role. As long as they're reasonably well written, go for it! (The only reason I haven't written any clop stories myself is that I can't. Trying to write pony sex short-circuits my imagination for some reason.) All that said... any hint of foalcon is a huge NOPE. So is putting Twilight, or Shining Armor, into an incestuous relationship. All of my NOPE, and an automatic downvote if I stumble upon it.
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Oh yeah, the urge to be "clever" and throw in a superb twist is so [BUY SOME APPLES] annoying. The thing is, outside of mystery novels, it works only very, very rarely. Two successful examples that come to mind are The Usual Suspects, and Vader revealing that he's Luke's father in Empire Strikes Back. M. Night Shyamalan has practically made a career of trying, and failing, to pull a series of ever more outrageous story twists. Do not aspire to be M. Night Shyamalan, people!
For me, it's gotta be the killer robot trope - that is, the idea that artificial intelligence will inevitably attempt to kill its creator(s). I'm pretty forgiving if there's an in-universe reason for it, such as Skynet's prime directive of self-preservation in Terminator. I also like what Mass Effect does with the trope... until the very end when the Catalyst says "The created will always rebel against their creators." That, more than anything else, is my least favorite part of the ME3 ending, because it seems to contradict and trivialize everything you go through with Legion and EDI in the second and third games
Stories that use the "Alternate Universe" tag to sneak in changes that are irrelevant to the story. I mean blatant stuff like Twilight being six inches tall or Pinkie Pie being the Chaos God Slaneesh, when the plot and characterisation don't rely on them at all.
This goes double if the changes actually do have a complex and nuanced backstory that are part of a shared universe elsewhere on the site, but the story is presented as a standalone with no warning or even use of the "this is a sequel to" field. It goes triple if the author refuses to acknowledge that the changes are even there, claiming that their story follows the natural and obvious consequences of show and/or comic canon.
I also dread extremely long stories. It's a sign of poor editing. If you need half a million words to tell your story, you're probably using them wrong. 100,000 words is a reasonable length for a novel. In general, just don't waste your readers' time and attention. EDIT: Since the other comments have mentioned it, I am thinking here of Background Pony among others. I actually really enjoyed the nihilistic theme. Tragedy is hard to write without being cheesy, and it's rare to see cosmic horror that genuinely unsettles me. SS&E did a fine job. But the story could easily have been ten times shorter and lost little of its impact.
These are all personal and subjective gripes, not absolute dealbreakers. I don't think there's any rule so absolute that a good enough writer can't break it with impunity.
3794768 I honestly agree with you completely, and in fact before trying Ironman Classic I was certain I would hate it. Did you actually give it a try yourself?
I guess I have a bit of a perfectionist/ocd trait; so on one hand, I really understand where you'e coming from: getting a perfect game with no soldier deaths, getting all the Meld, etc. is really nice, and warrants a reload if I fail at some point.
But then there's the other kind of perfectionist desire; this time, I'm trying to overcome the biggest challenge possible. In this sense, a perfect game would not be one with no deaths, but one completed on Impossible Ironman with all Second Wave options enabled. Once you've done that, you've essentially won at Xcom, as there's nothing else to do. (Well, there's Long War, but let's not spoil the victory.)
This does, however, take a certain point of view to properly enjoy, and I expect I'll ragequit more than once whenever I lose a high-ranking soldier.
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Nope, never. Because I know myself, and the pressure of playing on ironman would make the entire playthrough something I'd call "not fun at all"
Even when I do play games where you can just reload and try again, failing a mission often sours me on the game enough to stop playing it for days and possibly forever.
I couldn't stand to do that. It would stress me out, and that stress would make me absolutely despise every second spent playing. The possible victory at the end would not be worth it.
I play games to have fun. If the game gives me stress, frustration or annoyance instead, I immediately lose interest because I'm not here for these things. If I'm not having fun, I'm wasting my time; and if I'm wasting my time I'll do something else.
It's not even that I'd ragequit; I have an extremely high anger threshold. It's just that as soon as a game even starts to approach the general vicinity of "mildly annoying", I tend to stop having fun. As soon as I notice I'm not having fun, I realize I'm wasting my time, lose all interest in an instant, sigh deeply, quit the game, and get up to go do something else. This is very often fatal to whatever game I'm playing; a game that makes me do that rarely sees my face ever again, because I remember where I left off and what I have to look forward to, and as if by magic my interest remains entirely drained forever.
And quite simply, some games I love too much to let them make me abandon them like that. Hence why I never tried to ironman X-com.
Anyway, I feel we're just cluttering FanOfMostEverything's blog post comments with a mostly unrelated debate. Maybe we should stop or take this to PMs.
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I don't think anyone can argue with that. It's just a matter of taste what we find fun and what we find annoying.
Just like in writing: Some people want a grimdark story that doesn't pull its punches. Some people want growth and happy endings. Neither side is wrong, they're just different genres that work for different reasons.
I am not a fan of most stories that compromise canon without a satisfactory payoff. If you're going to throw in themes we don't see on the show, I have to know you're using them well and exploring a meaningful issue, or I'll stop reading very quickly. Here are a few examples of what I'm talking about.
1. 3795475 Agreed: misanthropy. I do not like stories in which the author uses ponykind as a cudgel against humankind, puts the two races at war, or has one of them hurt and kill the other. I've never read one that I enjoyed. This pretty much rules out the entire Conversion Bureau universe...which suits me fine.
2. On a related note: murder or other grimdark elements. These things don't have a place in MLP and they are psychologically painful for me to read in fanfiction--unless they are so compellingly woven into the story that I can't stop reading, despite all my misgivings. A few rare examples are how 'How to Be Cruel' by Erisn and 'A Night at Shadow Station' by MrNelg.
3. Author's revenge. You know, the kind of fics that are obviously written just so the author can punish a particular character for rustling his jimmies. Starlight Glimmer, Diamond Tiara, and Gilda are all popular targets.
4. And finally, I probably won't read any story that includes abortion, rape, slavery, prostitution, diaper fetishes, genocide, cannibalism, Molestia...and I'm sure I could think of more but you get the idea.