THE HORROR, THE HORROR!

[beatrice_otter]

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.

Comments

[muccamukk]

I think the Character/You fic kicked off again in MCU fandom. Or, at least that's where I started seeing a lot of it again, specifically Loki/You, though some Bucky/You more recently.

Like you (specifically you), I had always thought it was one of those huge 'don't's for writing, unless you (general you) were trying to be artistic, and generally knew what you (ditto) were doing.

[beatrice_otter]

It's just so easy to mess up in; and it also (at least for me) requires a far higher suspension of disbelief than other POV types. Because there are a LOT of things that I could buy someone ELSE doing/saying/thinking, that I would NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS do, say, or think myself. Which means I'm a lot more likely to try to argue with the story.

[muccamukk]

Yeah, that's really the heart of it for me.

Story: You're longing with desire for Kylo Ren's gleaming dark hair.
Me: No I ain't.

[beatrice_otter]

I'm longing with desire to get him locked up in a nice safe place with good Force-shielding so Snoke can't influence him and a competent therapist, so he can get his shit unfucked and stand trial for his crimes. When he has paid his debt to society, then I will be longing with desire for him to be a good son for Leia, who deserves better.

[muccamukk]

Indeed, and the state of his hair isn't really a factor.

[lilacsigil]

Oh, Character/You is totally back. I'm in Daredevil fandom and it's everywhere, I think spilling over from MCU. I also remember it from the 90s and was glad it departed.

[beatrice_otter]

I'm hearing that it's coming in all over the place. Sigh. I wouldn't care if it was in places like Wattpad or The Pit of Voles, where I wouldn't have to trip over it.

[watersword]

Yeah, it's a thing again; I've seen it in a lot of Actor RPF. (I have filtered it out by judicious use of the AO3 savior extension; I've seen a few decent [Fannish BSO]/OFC fics, but I have never seen a quality [Fannish BSO]/You fic.)

[beatrice_otter]

I have AO3 Savior as well, that's a good point, I should use it.

I could name quite a number of Character/OFC fics that are really good, and even a couple of Character/OMC fics that are great, but no /You fics worth reading.

[schneefink]

I only started reading fic more recently and in several cases I like second person fic, but character/reader seemed like a warning sign of badfic before I even read one.

I search AO3 by kudos usually, because sorting by hits or comments favors multi-chaptered fic. I just checked for Hockey RPF and oddly that seems to be more the case for comments than hits, not sure why. I have a friend who prefers sorting by bookmarks than kudos. I'd be interested in seeing what the differences are, across several fandoms, but I'm too lazy to check.

[senmut]

I use kudos too, or sometimes bookmarks. Kudos tend to get me good porn, bookmarks tends to be plot or character driven.

The reader-insert really throws me for a loop, and I tend to avoid it. I might eventually try to read it, but I don't know.

(I said no coffee-house AUs once, and now my favorite Prequel fic is a Coffee-House AU.)

[schneefink]

Huh, interesting difference between kudos & bookmarks, I'll keep that in mind.

[senmut]

It's not a hard and fast rule, but it applies more often than not, from th fandoms I use it on.

[laurajv]

My personal choice is to compare the percentage of kudos to the number of hits. This has some limitations (older stories that people re-read a lot, for example, end up skewing down), but for stories posted longer than a day ago but less than a month ago, it works pretty well.

Anything above a 5% I'll open, but generally what I'm looking for is 8-10% or higher. This is pretty easy to tell by sight on most stories (just lop off the last digit on the hits, and see if the kudos are anywhere near the resulting number).

[schneefink]

I thought about doing that for Yuletide. Then I read i.e. opened the fic I got about twenty times and concluded it doesn't always work ;) But occasionally it's a good benchmark, agreed.

[beatrice_otter]

That requires too much math.

[laurajv]

hee!

[beatrice_otter]

There's arguments to be made for sorting different ways. Sorting by hits favors multi-chapter works over single-chapter works, certainly; but it also favors old favorites that people re-read often. Because you can only kudo once per fic, but a favorite fic you might read many times. In which case, hit count is a more accurate reading of how much you enjoy a fic than a kudo. (And, in any case, I tend to prefer longer stories, so the fact that it favors long stories isn't exactly a downside ;) )

[copracat]

I think that fandom gatekeeping pushed them into drawers and now, like non-con and rpf did in the past 15 years, they're coming out.

[beatrice_otter]

Oh, totally on the gatekeeping thing. And, you know, everybody writes bad-fic when they're starting to write, and so shaming/gatekeeping about it prevents people from writing; but I do wish that I didn't have to wade through it. That's what sorting by hits or kudos or comments or bookmarks is supposed to fix!

[saturnofthemoon]

That's....terrifying. I read a lot of fanfic in the nineties but I only remember one character/you fic. Lot of Mary Sue fics too. I admire you for having the bravery to look up a metafandom on the archive. I've never attempted that feat.

[monanotlisa]

Same here -- started reading fic in the late 90s but have no recollection of Character/You fic being a trend. I hail from X-Files fandom, though, where I think people had such strong ship preferences (or of course the NOROMOs had a strong no!shipping preference) that they didn't do much self-insert fic? Even so-called Mary Sue stories weren't much of a phenomenon (misogynist trope conception aside).

[saturnofthemoon]

You know, I never got into X-files because my siblings made fun of me for watching it. I read Star Trek, Babylon 5, and Earth: Final Conflict. Lots of OFCs but the only character/reader fic I read was in Lexx, a very small fandom.

[beatrice_otter]

I quite regularly troll for new fic in just that way, through a variety of fandoms.

[beatrice_otter]

Well, different fandoms have different trends. It was definitely a thing in Star Wars fic then (OT, of course, as the PT didn't exist yet in the 90s).

[rthstewart]

Oh gosh, fanfix! Guri's old site! She posted Stuff early on. As for those Hot character/You fics, I remember a lot of those during The Phantom Menace -- Qui Gon Jinn of the flowing, glorious hair riding a beautiful horse and you are the horse. Also, Qui Gon Jinn, Young Obi-Wan, and you in hot threesome -- I think I remember one involving eugenics at the Jedi Temple.

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?

[beatrice_otter]

Someone else who remembers it! I never interacted with any of the people involved, no emails or comments or anything, but I was SO SAD when it disappeared.

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.

[melannen]

Second-person fic got a lot less stigmatized because of Homestuck, although Homestuck second-person is generally very different from Character/Reader fic. But I think a lot of it is still similar in taking its inspiration from gaming - it's being done as if it's an rpg dating sim and "you" is the player character. Although I also I think what we're seeing here is the generation of people who came up writing stuff like 1D and Twilight and Glee fic on Wattpad - there was never a shortage of it there - moving into less fragmented fandoms and posting stuff on AO3.

(although also I wouldn't count on it being good just because it's high in the kudos ranks on AO3; there is a cohort of anti-kylo-ren troll-kudosers who for awhile were deliberately upvoting deliberate badfic.)

(I mean, there's also one that ships him with Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way pretty high in that list.)

[beatrice_otter]

Aha! An explanation, at last! Thank you, Mel!

[melannen]

I'm not saying it's necessarily the right explanation, but it makes sense to me. :P I can tell you as a tag wrangler that the character/reader and character/you tags started seeping onto AO3 a few years ago via those sorts of fandoms and also jrpgs (we had a long discussion as to whether character/reader is the same ship as character/you.) And as a recovering Homestuck fan - you get used to second person pretty quickly if there's a lot of good fic written in it; the "you" stops feeling any more personal than the "I" in first-person, it's just a way of creating a sense of intimacy with the POV character, and it becomes natural to write.

(I'm not saying that you should read the Kylo Ren epics, but there's nothing fundamentally badfic about second person once you've submerged in it enough that it feels natural - when I was really into Homestuck I had to make a deliberate effort to not just do everything second-person.)

[endeni]

I don't know if you're still on the look out and how much our tastes might overlap but here are my favorite Star Wars fics, recent stuff is mostly TFA. ;)

[beatrice_otter]

Thank you!