beatrice_otter (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beatrice_otter) wrote2016-03-27 06:21 am
beatrice_otter) wrote2016-03-27 06:21 am
THE HORROR, THE HORROR!
Okay, so I was on AO3, searching for new Star Wars fic. Specifically, Force Awakens Star Wars fic. And so I clicked on the Force Awakens tag, and sorted by number of hits, because that's a pretty good way of getting the best stuff. Or, at least, the stuff everyone is reading, but whatever. Most of the real duds get weeded out by this, you know?
And I was shocked by what I found. In the first three pages, there were at least TWO SEPARATE REALLY LONG SECOND-PERSON FICS. And not, like ordinary you-as-one-of-the-characters fics. No. Both of them were romances between "Kylo Ren/You."
I have not read either one of them. I am sure, to get up that high into the hit counts in the Force Awakens tag on AO3 (which is a pretty large tag), they must be good fics.
But. Like. You guys, I started out reading fanfic in the 90s on the ancient fanfix.net (.com?) Star Wars archive that was lost to the mists of the intarwebs over a decade and a half ago. And on a few other fanfiction websites of similar age. And there were a decent number of those Character/You second-person fic. And they were all terrible. Pretty much across the board. Look, I was a bored teen who spent a lot of time reading fanfic, and there was A LOT LESS of it then. I read everything, even the really bad fic. There were a few signs that a fic was going to be really bad, and you knew that going in, but it was that or the fic I'd already read a dozen times, I read it anyway. And Character/You was like a bright flashing neon sign LORD KING BAD FIC HERE. (Grammar, spelling, plot, characterization, you name it. Being asexual I can't comment on the hotness of the porn aspect, but everything else was bad.) And then people just ... stopped writing second-person fic. And slowly and steadily the fanfic writing world expanded, and the fandoms I'd read expanded, and my time grew more constrained by adulting, and I stopped reading badfic because a) there was a lot more selection available, and b) I had less time to read fanfic in, which together meant I started reading only good quality stuff I liked.
Seeing those two "Kylo Ren and you get it on!!!" fics was a blast from the past in a bad way. Like I said, given how high they are in the rankings, I'm sure they are decent quality. But even if I liked Kylo Ren, you could not pay me enough to make me read them.
And I was shocked by what I found. In the first three pages, there were at least TWO SEPARATE REALLY LONG SECOND-PERSON FICS. And not, like ordinary you-as-one-of-the-characters fics. No. Both of them were romances between "Kylo Ren/You."
I have not read either one of them. I am sure, to get up that high into the hit counts in the Force Awakens tag on AO3 (which is a pretty large tag), they must be good fics.
But. Like. You guys, I started out reading fanfic in the 90s on the ancient fanfix.net (.com?) Star Wars archive that was lost to the mists of the intarwebs over a decade and a half ago. And on a few other fanfiction websites of similar age. And there were a decent number of those Character/You second-person fic. And they were all terrible. Pretty much across the board. Look, I was a bored teen who spent a lot of time reading fanfic, and there was A LOT LESS of it then. I read everything, even the really bad fic. There were a few signs that a fic was going to be really bad, and you knew that going in, but it was that or the fic I'd already read a dozen times, I read it anyway. And Character/You was like a bright flashing neon sign LORD KING BAD FIC HERE. (Grammar, spelling, plot, characterization, you name it. Being asexual I can't comment on the hotness of the porn aspect, but everything else was bad.) And then people just ... stopped writing second-person fic. And slowly and steadily the fanfic writing world expanded, and the fandoms I'd read expanded, and my time grew more constrained by adulting, and I stopped reading badfic because a) there was a lot more selection available, and b) I had less time to read fanfic in, which together meant I started reading only good quality stuff I liked.
Seeing those two "Kylo Ren and you get it on!!!" fics was a blast from the past in a bad way. Like I said, given how high they are in the rankings, I'm sure they are decent quality. But even if I liked Kylo Ren, you could not pay me enough to make me read them.
no subject
Yep. Yep. yehaw.
I've also seen it again on Tumblr in certain Narnia blogs -- Edmund/you being especially popular but that's just because I follow Narnia for all that I've been shoved out the door.
These are not my favorite flavor of delicious cake to be sure (though I obviously read enough of them in the 90s to remember them now!) I guess it's just making a resurgence, though I'm not sure why. There really is nothing new in fandom, is there?
no subject
See, I never was much into PT fic until later. Because the first few years were mostly Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan slash (Remember the Master/Apprentice Archive?), and I didn't like much of that. There was too much of it that wasn't in character with what we knew of the Jedi Order, and a lot of the student teacher stuff squicked me. (Yet about the same time, I got sucked into a period of Snape/Hermione reading, which I'm still not sure whether squicking about one but not the other was a case of internal sexism or a higher amount of "dealing with the ethics" in the S/H stuff. Or if part of it might have been that I had higher ethical standards for Jedi than for Hogwarts teachers.)
And no, there's nothing new in fandom. What goes around comes aound.