[ SECRET POST #2353 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2353 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.


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02.
[Boy Meets World]


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03.
[Firefly]


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04.
[Hannibal]


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05.
[BBC Sherlock]


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06.
[Vocaloid]


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07.
[Dept. Heaven]


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08.
[Roger Federer]


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09.
[Dogma]


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10.
[Yu-Gi-Oh: Bonds Beyond Time]


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11.
[Leonard Nimoy]


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12.
[a song of ice and fire/game of thrones]


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13.
[Dragon Age Origins]


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14.
[Arrested Development]


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15.
[Fall Out Boy]


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16.
[Homestuck]


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17.
[Joss Whedon]


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18.
[Chicago Fire]


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19.
[Homestuck]


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20.
[Final Fantasy VII]


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21.
[Enya]


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22.
[Discworld]


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 067 secrets from Secret Submission Post #336.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ], [ 1 - IC secret? ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Speculation: mocking badfic makes your own writing worse

[(Anonymous)]

One of the justifications I've seen for mocking/sporking bad writing was that "by reading bad writing, we learn what not to do." But I suspect it's the opposite: spending too much time reading badfic for mockage purposes does very little to improve your own writing, and looking down on other people's writing tends to make you smug about your own. I can't think of any other way to explain why the most inveterate badfic mockers and sporkers I've encountered were all incredibly hostile to criticism of their own pedestrian writing.

Re: Speculation: mocking badfic makes your own writing worse

[chardmonster]

Or: some of the people who most loudly criticize other peoples' work are very insecure about their own. They may never have been very good in the first place.

Also, all fanfiction is pedestrian writing. It's fanfiction.

Re: Speculation: mocking badfic makes your own writing worse

[(Anonymous)]

Also, all fanfiction is pedestrian writing. It's fanfiction.

Criticism or disparagement of a work because of the medium rather than the content has got to be one of the most vapid opinions possible.

Re: Speculation: mocking badfic makes your own writing worse

[chardmonster]

Show us on the fanfiction where someone mocked you.

Seriously, though. Calling something "pedestrian" isn't really being very disparaging. There's very good fanfic out there. It's just by default playing with someone else's characterization, which puts it in another category of writing.

A lot of respected original authors started out with fanfic.

Re: Speculation: mocking badfic makes your own writing worse

[mechanosapience]

Just butting in, but would you say that John Milton, Dante Alighieri, and Virgil (not to mention plenty of other serious authors) are being pedestrian for playing with someone else's characterization/canon more broadly?

Re: Speculation: mocking badfic makes your own writing worse

[chardmonster]

The Bible, a fundamental part of western civilization, isn't Supernatural.

That's like comparing somebody using a couple references to Gilgamesh to somebody's Kigo slash and caling them the same.

Re: Speculation: mocking badfic makes your own writing worse

[(Anonymous)]

I was referring to these people's original fic, actually, but thanks for the completely unnecessary jab at fanfiction.

Re: Speculation: mocking badfic makes your own writing worse

[chardmonster]

Oh god.

This is over someone making fun of your fanfic, isn't it?

Re: Speculation: mocking badfic makes your own writing worse

[(Anonymous)]

Oh god.

Someone points out that you jumped to a stupid conclusion and your response is to jump to another one.

What are you paying the poor slob who will have to write your thesis for you?

Re: Speculation: mocking badfic makes your own writing worse

[chardmonster]

I'm terribly sorry that I assumed that they were talking about pedestrian fanfiction in the thread that is angry at people who poke fun at badfic, which is overwhelmingly fanfiction.

What are you paying the poor upperclassman who is helping you pass freshman English?

Re: Speculation: mocking badfic makes your own writing worse

[(Anonymous)]

You're three for three in the uncalled-for assumptions department here; congratulations.

Re: Speculation: mocking badfic makes your own writing worse

[(Anonymous)]

Not really. I think it comes down to confidence-- either you're laughing at badfic because badfic is genuinely cracky and funny, or you're using it to boost up your confidence in your own writing. I don't think that thinking "I can do better than that" is a bad thing as long as you acknowledge that you're still going to have to put effort into critiquing your own work, and the fact that someone else did it wrong doesn't mean you'll automatically do it right.

But in my experience laughing at badfic while simultaneously understanding why what they were doing didn't work helped me a lot, and I take criticism pretty well. If you get too entrenched in complaining about every little thing then yeah you'll probably have some confidence issues but after a point you'll have to learn to discern what is just nitpicky and what is a valid complaint. To be honest I don't publicly mock badfic anymore, just between friends. But it did help.

Re: Speculation: mocking badfic makes your own writing worse

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think that thinking "I can do better than that" is a bad thing as long as you acknowledge that you're still going to have to put effort into critiquing your own work...

See, I think this is exactly what these people didn't do. I suspect they got so used waxing indignant about bad writing, and to delivering criticism from on high, that they became smug and imagined that they could do no wrong. Plus, avoiding obvious mistakes is not the same as writing well.

Re: Speculation: mocking badfic makes your own writing worse

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think it has a negative effect but I definitely think it doesn't have any real positive effect either. At the end of the day there's a million ways to be a shitty writer, and studying those ways doesn't show you how to be a good writer, it just shows you a few of the more obvious mistakes to avoid. And, I mean, I think most people who are halfway serious about writing could figure out how to avoid the kind of mistakes you see in really terrible fanfiction on their own. It's not like the flaws these works have are subtle or anything.

I guess what I'm saying is there's some merit to the idea that looking at interesting failures can teach you lessons, but most shitty fanfiction isn't interesting in that way. It's just funny and stupid.

Re: Speculation: mocking badfic makes your own writing worse

[(Anonymous)]

Agreed on your last point especially--it can be instructive to see where a good idea failed because the author didn't think its consequences through, or how a story that started well went off the rails. But nobody is going to learn anything from sporking My Immortal.

Re: Speculation: mocking badfic makes your own writing worse

[(Anonymous)]

Seeing as I tend to mock things by parodying them endlessly, I've been getting a lot of practice writing in the distinct style of Tara Gilesbie. So yeah, I'm gonna have to say it's making me worse. MCR ROX!!1

Re: Speculation: mocking badfic makes your own writing worse

[(Anonymous)]

I think that in general, what you read influences how you write, both for good and for ill. Neither my mind nor my fingers ever used to want to make homophone-confusion errors before I started spending significant amounts of time on the internet.

Re: Speculation: mocking badfic makes your own writing worse

[(Anonymous)]

fuck, that's why I've been getting worse with those.

Re: Speculation: mocking badfic makes your own writing worse

[(Anonymous)]

different anon


...holy shit

D:

Re: Speculation: mocking badfic makes your own writing worse

[(Anonymous)]

I think you're right.

I remember reading somewhere they looked into it and it turned out that spelling exercises where you have to correct "mistakes" actually makes you remember better the misspelled word/wrong sentence structure, grammar, whatever, than the correct version. Whoops.

So if you want someone to learn proper writing, they need to read things that are properly written.

Re: Speculation: mocking badfic makes your own writing worse

[(Anonymous)]

In some ways I agree, but mostly I think it just helps people shove a stick up their ass. When people focus so much on defining what is bad and terrible and should never be done, I think it's more like they're just carving themselves into a rut.

Devoting a lot of time and energy into what really boils down to just being a pretentious cock doesn't tend to do a lot of good for anyone's writing, I've noticed.

Re: Speculation: mocking badfic makes your own writing worse

[(Anonymous)]

I think it depends:
1) Those who seek out badfic to mock may be insecure about their own writing and were never great writers to begin with; they prefer to bite before they're bitten, so to speak.
2) Spending copious amounts of time around badfic may lower their standards of writing; so long as they feel that it's better than what they've been reading, they think it's good.
3) Casually browsing such forums may give writers a better idea of what people's opinions are on certain writing techniques.

Personally, the only mocking forum I follow is weepingcock on LJ, because the mocking is limited to ridiculous porn. There are wide and varied opinions on the quality of general narrative and whatnot, but sex scenes? There isn't much gray area when it comes to figuring out what's titillating and what's just ridiculous. And it does help to know what people find ridiculous in sex scenes because you're usually writing them to turn people on, not off.

Re: Speculation: mocking badfic makes your own writing worse

[(Anonymous)]

Not sure if the badfic itself is the cause, or maybe it's a chicken/egg kinda thing. I definitely think a lot of it is insecure people who want to lash out pre-emptively because they're not confident in their own writing or know it's not that good. I remember back in the day reading places like FFR and sporking comms, and a lot of the posters there wrote the exact same kind of stuff they railed against.