The Tao of Badfic
Aug. 30th, 2006 01:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
justalurkrIn response to the Mission Report Challenge over on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
sga_flashfic, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ismenetruth wrote a mission report on devildoll's Still The One, an entry into svmadelyn's Badfic Summary Ficathon.
I can post until the end of time about what a stunning, masterful, breathtaking-in-its-scope, breadth and depth of absolute pinnacle of nadir-ness "Still the One" is as badfic, but really? It must be read to be believed. You will be riveted in your quest to see if there's a god-awful, soul-soulsucking, eyegouging cliche she missed in this needle-sharp sendup ofthe endless amounts of crap on ff.net fanfiction with better intentions than execution.
If you are in the right mood and consumed the right amount of beverages, it's entirely likely you will pee your pants laughing while reading this...story, and the follow-up mission report. Even if you don't, you will most likely need a shower or three to wash away the horror.
OK, question: that horror mentioned behind the cut is a common experience to reading badfic. Proponents of goodfic are verbal as all hell in their reasoning about the whys of the horror: spelling counts, songs belong on the radio, unicorns are best left to professional nine year olds, some people should have the word processing software removed from their harddrives for the betterment of all humankind...yada yada yada.
Is it at all possible the real root of the BadFic!Horror sensation (which is unlike any other horror, admit it!) is that every fan drawing breath has, at some time, by thought, word or deed, at least in the privacy of his or her mind, committed these atrocities or worse?
Now is your chance to come clean. What have you done, when did you do it, and where is the body buried?
I'll start. In my defense, I was a professional nine year old when it first came to me.
Her name, I swear to God and three other white men (credit Redd Foxx for that one) was originally Mary Jean, after the mascot of a used car lot in my favorite radio ad. (She was Mean Mary Jean, superstar of their team, and wore sequined cowboy boots. What's not to like?) I didn't know about Mary Sue, or it might have been worse. Of course, Mary Jean didn't fitEarthsea the wonder of swords and sorcery world I was working on, so she became Dinna (short for di-in-na, which meant "gift of the sea" in the language of the exotic priestess, Sylvie Bow-of-the-Sun, who found her) Seagift.
She was raised to be a priestess of the Holy Isle, a much warmer clime than Atuan, but broke the highest law when, at the age of eight, she killed a rabid wolf with a sharp stick in defense of the sheep she was guarding. This single act condemned the most promising student of the holy writings (she was reading at three! could debate canon law by five! and sheep loved her!) to exile to the Isle of Magic, the only other place that would take girls as students.
Within a year of her arrival on the Isle of Magic, Dinna Seagift had become Daiel (and screw me if I can remember what that meant, but it was Highly Significant, of course) the most skilled twelve year old (math was never my strong suit) sword-swinging spellcaster in the history of the Island, and on her way to the Halls of Sorcery disguised as a boy to learn all of their secrets.
(see if you can tell at what points I branched out into romance novels, horror and cyberpunk.)
She grew up, banged the smartest boy in the Halls, heartlessly dumped him for the handsomest boy in the Halls, never telling boy one of their secret child fostered to the Holy Isle to be raised as a Priestess in Daiel's stead, set right a number of wrongs concerning who was sitting on which throne in the world, found out the world was actually a demon playing with everyone in it and about to put up its marbles and go home, thereby consigning all life to oblivion, figured out a way to unite all the magic users in the world to slay the demon without destroying said world, was told at the critical moment the demon was actually her father (and the sea it violated at the dawn of time was her mother,) so she was expected to do the daughterly thing and help the demon out of its chains as a world, decided she was more human than demonic and did the correct Oedipal thing, winding up back on the Holy Isle as a priestess of the Seas I kid you not.
Mercifully: this only got written up to the bit about musical thrones before dying a horrible, watery death when the toilet tank cracked in my S. Florida apartment while I was out of town and the flood found the manuscript on the floor in the hall with the rest of my crap from my college dorm room that I was going to sort through and see if there were any story ideas worth salvaging, which brings me to...
Unfortunately: I'm getting nibbles from the NaNoWriMo bug.
Be afraid. Be VERY afraid.
But I digress.
Your turn! Excavate your closets for badfic skeletons! They can't possibly be worse than that (points up.)
sga_flashfic, ismenetruth wrote a mission report on devildoll's Still The One, an entry into svmadelyn's Badfic Summary Ficathon.I can post until the end of time about what a stunning, masterful, breathtaking-in-its-scope, breadth and depth of absolute pinnacle of nadir-ness "Still the One" is as badfic, but really? It must be read to be believed. You will be riveted in your quest to see if there's a god-awful, soul-soulsucking, eyegouging cliche she missed in this needle-sharp sendup of
If you are in the right mood and consumed the right amount of beverages, it's entirely likely you will pee your pants laughing while reading this...story, and the follow-up mission report. Even if you don't, you will most likely need a shower or three to wash away the horror.
OK, question: that horror mentioned behind the cut is a common experience to reading badfic. Proponents of goodfic are verbal as all hell in their reasoning about the whys of the horror: spelling counts, songs belong on the radio, unicorns are best left to professional nine year olds, some people should have the word processing software removed from their harddrives for the betterment of all humankind...yada yada yada.
Is it at all possible the real root of the BadFic!Horror sensation (which is unlike any other horror, admit it!) is that every fan drawing breath has, at some time, by thought, word or deed, at least in the privacy of his or her mind, committed these atrocities or worse?
Now is your chance to come clean. What have you done, when did you do it, and where is the body buried?
I'll start. In my defense, I was a professional nine year old when it first came to me.
Her name, I swear to God and three other white men (credit Redd Foxx for that one) was originally Mary Jean, after the mascot of a used car lot in my favorite radio ad. (She was Mean Mary Jean, superstar of their team, and wore sequined cowboy boots. What's not to like?) I didn't know about Mary Sue, or it might have been worse. Of course, Mary Jean didn't fit
She was raised to be a priestess of the Holy Isle
Within a year of her arrival on the Isle of Magic, Dinna Seagift had become Daiel (and screw me if I can remember what that meant, but it was Highly Significant, of course) the most skilled twelve year old (math was never my strong suit) sword-swinging spellcaster in the history of the Island, and on her way to the Halls of Sorcery disguised as a boy to learn all of their secrets.
(see if you can tell at what points I branched out into romance novels, horror and cyberpunk.)
She grew up, banged the smartest boy in the Halls, heartlessly dumped him for the handsomest boy in the Halls, never telling boy one of their secret child fostered to the Holy Isle to be raised as a Priestess in Daiel's stead, set right a number of wrongs concerning who was sitting on which throne in the world, found out the world was actually a demon playing with everyone in it and about to put up its marbles and go home, thereby consigning all life to oblivion, figured out a way to unite all the magic users in the world to slay the demon without destroying said world, was told at the critical moment the demon was actually her father (and the sea it violated at the dawn of time was her mother,) so she was expected to do the daughterly thing and help the demon out of its chains as a world, decided she was more human than demonic and did the correct Oedipal thing, winding up back on the Holy Isle as a priestess of the Seas I kid you not.
Mercifully: this only got written up to the bit about musical thrones before dying a horrible, watery death when the toilet tank cracked in my S. Florida apartment while I was out of town and the flood found the manuscript on the floor in the hall with the rest of my crap from my college dorm room that I was going to sort through and see if there were any story ideas worth salvaging, which brings me to...
Unfortunately: I'm getting nibbles from the NaNoWriMo bug.
Be afraid. Be VERY afraid.
But I digress.
Your turn! Excavate your closets for badfic skeletons! They can't possibly be worse than that (points up.)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-08-30 10:31 pm (UTC)You've never seen the shit I wrote when I was still a shipper. :-p
no subject
Date: 2006-08-31 12:00 am (UTC)You were a shipper?
no subject
Date: 2006-08-31 12:05 am (UTC)I've only been a slasher for about two years now. I used to be the worst kind of J/S shipper - the die, Pete, die kind. It wasn't pretty. Neither was the fic. If you ever like, accidently eat something poisonous and don't have syrup of ipacac handy, I'll dig through my old files and find it. That should do the trick. ;-)
no subject
Date: 2006-08-31 12:48 am (UTC)[ducks, flees]
no subject
Date: 2006-08-31 03:06 am (UTC)They could be, but you'll never know ;-P
Actually, I think this is why
Bill Gatesthe devil invented computer viruses. Every couple of years I get one that forces me to purge my harddrive (which sounds like geek!kink) and mercifully deletes the worst fics ever.And am I getting this right--nannymo is starting from scratch and writing an entire novel in one month? There are times I can't write an entire sentence in a month :-0
no subject
Date: 2006-08-31 01:14 pm (UTC)Somewhere on the actual website (http://www.nanowrimo.org/), they come clean and admit NaNoWriMo is pretty much an excuse to ditch housework in favor of writing. ;)
On the other hand, the site has a short list of NaNo novels that sold.
Chris Baty's book (non-fiction, but coincidentally approximately 50,000 words long) No Plot? No Problem!, details methods of finding the time to write 1667 words per day, converting loved ones into effective agents of guilt and terror and some of the philosophy behind this rather bizarre tradition born out of the pre-millennial dot com boom. It's a fascinating story.
The NaNoWriMo bug started nibbling me at WriterCon, incidentally, when a panelist said the biggest break to her writer's block was participating in NaNoWriMo. The resulting room-wide enthusiastic head-nodding reminded me a lot of eveningings in my Southern Baptist grandma's revival tent (Cameron Mitchell & Hank Landry aren't the only ones with those memories.) People who have participated believe in the powers of NaNoWriMo to get the lead out.