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

[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 ;) )