Yeah, I used to be really afraid about my targets finding my fics (and I used to use the Story Alert function on ff.net to keep track of them, and I remember one author found my fics because of that and left nice reviews, and I kind of had a crisis of conscience about it. Except then I MSTed her fic anyway, after asking LJ if it was okay. Meet my younger self, isn't she a sweetheart?) I think, as I said in the post, a lot of ficcers look back on their earliest BWOFC fics and go "oh god, was I really that bad at writing once?" and maybe then if they found someone had sporked their fics they might have a laugh about it. But you can't control when someone will find the sporkings and if they'd found them straight after writing their fics they'd be upset, which is understandable. But I agree that no-one I know who sporked fics actually went out of their way to link their targets to it, and it was a way of venting steam among like-minded people. I remember one of the sporking communities getting really annoyed about someone linking authors to their MSTs and Sue reports, because that wasn't what we were aiming for. If we'd wanted them to read it, we would have posted a review saying such.
I'm not touching the issue of taste because YKINMKATO and et cetera, plus I read a couple of Snapefen wank reports yesterday and some Snape fans are really scary. But I really wonder why someone would complain about sporking to ffrants, because that's half the posts basically. (In a shorter form, but still.)
Imo, I think the Department of Bad Slash did less harm than Mary-Sues, because a) there was seldom if any killing involved, so there isn't an immediate reaction to a pair of agents riddling an original female character with arrows, and b) it makes the distinction of being Bad slash, while Mary-Sues is much more ambivalent.
They... seriously? They think that ficcing itself is bad? Oh god, this is the last thing I want newbies to any sort of fandom to think.
And I've realised that writing against canon is not a bad thing if the author can write it well enough and if they explore how it would affect the rest of the story. Something like "I made it so Boromir didn't die because I think he's hot" vs "I made it so Boromir didn't die because I wanted to see how he'd affect the course of the War, Denethor and Faramir's actions and Aragorn becoming king". Basically I love AUs. And um there is a difference between writing AUs and "what if?" stories and writing stories that you claim are canon-compliant but have character X acting completely OOC for no reason.
For the record, I eventually gave up sporking because it was taking up time that I could use for writing my own stuff. Also I ended up not reading anything at ff.net anymore, now my main source of fics are LJ and recs pages and the like, so I'm not wading through seas of badly-written fic to find gems any more. And sometimes I still read things that make me rage and I have to rein myself in and say "cool it, click away if you don't want to keep reading". But it is a slow process and I expect that I might lapse from time to time.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2010-04-14 06:38 am (UTC)I'm not touching the issue of taste because YKINMKATO and et cetera, plus I read a couple of Snapefen wank reports yesterday and some Snape fans are really scary. But I really wonder why someone would complain about sporking to ffrants, because that's half the posts basically. (In a shorter form, but still.)
Imo, I think the Department of Bad Slash did less harm than Mary-Sues, because a) there was seldom if any killing involved, so there isn't an immediate reaction to a pair of agents riddling an original female character with arrows, and b) it makes the distinction of being Bad slash, while Mary-Sues is much more ambivalent.
They... seriously? They think that ficcing itself is bad? Oh god, this is the last thing I want newbies to any sort of fandom to think.
And I've realised that writing against canon is not a bad thing if the author can write it well enough and if they explore how it would affect the rest of the story. Something like "I made it so Boromir didn't die because I think he's hot" vs "I made it so Boromir didn't die because I wanted to see how he'd affect the course of the War, Denethor and Faramir's actions and Aragorn becoming king". Basically I love AUs. And um there is a difference between writing AUs and "what if?" stories and writing stories that you claim are canon-compliant but have character X acting completely OOC for no reason.
For the record, I eventually gave up sporking because it was taking up time that I could use for writing my own stuff. Also I ended up not reading anything at ff.net anymore, now my main source of fics are LJ and recs pages and the like, so I'm not wading through seas of badly-written fic to find gems any more. And sometimes I still read things that make me rage and I have to rein myself in and say "cool it, click away if you don't want to keep reading". But it is a slow process and I expect that I might lapse from time to time.