Thursday, September 11, 2003

   In reply to Maladjusted's comment on my post on "spamfics"
I so feel your pain. . .

The situation in the Trigun section is kind of different, better some days, worse others. There are plenty of wonderful writers (Shandrial, Thunk, Chrystalline, Amaya3, Jaina-although most of her stuff is lemons, "Misconception" is really good so far-, for L/K yaoi Madmax2, Annie-chan, and Space-Weazel-although her being only 13 and writing something utterly raw like "Slave" highly disturbs me), and I [i]love[/i] to see it when they update or publish a new fic.

All of these authors were newbies at one time or another, and I like to see inventive newbie authors whether serious or humorous (for humor, "The Trouble With Knives" by a newbie author, Serendipity1,is a riot). Note [i]inventive[/i] newbie authors though.

Sadly, sometimes the less inventive and more spammy newbies almost convince me that writing good (or even mediocre but somehow interesting) fanfic is a lost art.

By that I mean fics with spelling SO atrocious that they're funny although they're not intended as humor. I've seen L337, misspelled character names(i.e. "Marrel" for "Meryl," "Wolf Wood" for "Wolfwood"), "Spellchecked" documents where correctly spelled words are used incorrectly, (i.e. "worms" for "works"), and capitalization errors galore at the least.

Also, while I'm ranting, the pairings in so much newbie work in the are SO unoriginal it makes me want to scream. By that I mean they're almost to a one either VashxMeryl, Vash/Wolfwood, or some random bishounenxa Mary Sue. Gaaak. I mean (and I don't mean this as any kind of an insult because I love VashxMeryl, although I can't stand the Wolfwood pairing), can't anyone write some WolfwoodxMilly, Legato/Knives, MillyxVash, Legato/Midvalley, or anything else that hasn't been done better 100 times before?

As one last point of my rant, kind of connected to that one, I wish Mary Sue authors were forced to tag their works as such. The "original character" note in summaries is helpful (if you refuse to read all fanfics with that note), but like an e-mail spam filter, it sometimes lets some spam through (i.e. people who don't label their fics or pairings as OCs) and sometimes catches some good stuff (like once in a thousand times, someone can write an OC that isn't a Mary Sue, keep the OC as a secondary or minor character, and actually make the fic a good story).

Anyway though, I wasted an hour the day before yesterday on a 33 chapter Mary Sue that was labeled in a way to make it look like it wasn't necessarily one. Grr.

Point is, I still hold out hope for fanfiction.net's Trigun section (it IS the best on the Internet, at least it's not as bad as MediaMiner or a few other sites I can think about) but I really wish some people would think before they write and post.


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