ingvild

I feel, very strongly, that something can easily be a good fic without necessarily being a good fanfic.

A good fic, or story as they call it outside fandom, manages to convey something. It can have characterisation, plot, buildup, resolution, world-building, all sorts of stuff that makes it a nice read.

A good fanfic has that AND it stays true to to the world and the characters it uses.

So just because a lot of thought and effort has gone into a fic, and it's exciting and whatnot, it can fail completely as a fanfic.

And that's why character bashing fics always are badfics.










Icon not randomly chosen at all.

After reading FandomSecrets (probably not a good idea, I get so worked up), I have come up with one theory and one statement.

Theory: A lot of people aren't really fans of a book/series/comic/whatever, they're fans of their perception of it.

Statement: People who harp on something they hate are a lot more annoying than those who go on and on about something they love.

( Examples and spoiler from Avatar within )

( Also, here are some rules for how to win a ship war )

...that no matter which fandom I enter, it somehow ends up being about whose cock goes where?*

Also, you know why I'm actively avoiding Gundam Wing yaoi? (Beyond the fact that Heero/Relena is the only pairing I have any emotional investment in, of course.) It's because while I'm sure there are some yaoi fics that DON'T treat the girls as non-existent/unimportant/in the way/boring and stupid/harpy-bitches from hell, the ratio seems to be 1:1234567890**, and I'm not willing to wade through all those other fics for the one that's fair to the Women of Wing.

I'm not saying that het fics are necessarily better, but at least the women are there.

...It probably doesn't help that I think that fics that portray all the five pilots as Preventers, but completely ignore the two (three?***) women who are Preventers, are like telling me that they don't matter enough to be included.


*I might have brought this on myself by watching Kyou Kara Maou - but I'm honestly more interested in their non-romantic relationships. Especially the family relationships.
**The number has no basis in anything except my frustration.
***I don't know if I should count the one who's on Mars. Although she was wearing a Preventer-issued spacesuit.

"Comic book-like". It has become a word for something that's shallow and one-dimensional (at least in Norwegian). I always want to protest when I hear it, because it's so darned limiting. Comics are a medium, just like novels, plays, TV shows or movies. It has its own strenghts and its own faults. It is hardly only one genre. You have the comic book analogy to a Harlequin novel as well as its War and Peace.

I think I will comment on the rather unique nature of the comic book later. It seems to me like it's a mixture of novels/novellas/short stories and TV shows/movies, with a smatter of plays, written or on stage - this depends on the comic book. This could actually be a very interesting post, but I'll wait for a while.

You see, now I have to talk about quality. The thing is, although there are a lot of quality comic books, and some with great depth and nuances, there's also quite a lot of simple, shallow works. And unfortunately some of those books that tend to choose easy ways out are superhero comic books. I like superhero books, but I won't kid myself: With only a few exceptions, they aren't really what one would call high literature.

We have come to expect something from the superhero books. The heroes win. They don't kill (except Punisher, and he's an anti-hero anyway). Nobody stays dead except Uncle Ben/Jason Todd/Bucky um. Nobody stays dead. It's come so far that the inscription on Jean Grey's tombstone says "She will rise again". And moralising is perfectly acceptable. Nobody questions Professor X or other telepaths' right to enter somebody else's head. Mindwipe is perfectly okay. I don't know about you guys, but personally, if someone started talking in my head I'd freak out completely, because dammit, my thoughts are my own and I'll share them if I WANT to.

Most importantly, the status quo is not disturbed.

A lot of the time, I think that many of those who complain about Infinite Crisis/House of M/Civil War, the universe-shaking Events in DC and Marvel, only complain because they represent change. I might question methods and execution, but in the end, I think change is good. Stagnation is something that should be avoided. I don't want to be reading the same stories ten years from now as the ones I read five years ago. And while I wish that they hadn't taken away the mutation of most Marvel mutants, because I liked the new line introduced by Grant Morrison with loads of mutants, not all with useful mutations, and a living mutant subculture, I still think that good stories might come from it.

However, there are times when I wonder why I keep reading superhero comic books. I have no idea why I kept reading Uncanny X-Men throughout Chuck Austen's run, for example. Actually, I've become rather disillusioned with the entire X-Men franchise (except X-Factor), although I might have to buy Mike Carey's run when it's gathered in a trade. I like what I've seen there.

But when I read things like this I feel ashamed for continuing to support the industry.