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.
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(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.)