Thread:Talk:Pokémon/Fanfic Recs/Farla, Unoriginality, and other works.

This comes from having witnessed her outbursts over at das_sporking and other sites, but I'd like to say that Farla's stories might not qualify for 'Fanfic Recs' material.

For starters, she is boring. I tried reading her stories before, and the tone comes across as so particularly dry and impersonal that it didn't really capture me. It felt like it was going through motions throughout her chapters, with the story being slow in a way that was less 'Tolkien' and more 'History Channel'. Which is bad when you are trying to write a story and capture the interest of readers.

Then, we have the divisive, proselytizing nature of her writing. I'm not saying fiction, even fanfic, shouldn't have meaning to it; great stories lead you to think, after all, and the best ones are those that have messages we come to agree with. But her writing sometimes feels like there's an agenda, and she's particularly nasty about certain points without offering much of an alternative. For instance, in Unoriginality, there's the whole 'oh you should stop making Pokémon befriend your characters because they have their own lives to live and your characters aren't going to look good for taking them' bit. If she were trying to teach how to write better Pokémon fics, she'd have included options on how to write a 'befriending' scenario that would actually work, instead of simply going with the 'no, you shouldn't do this'. It's not a matter of being a cliché, it's a matter that people want to do it, so making it an option should be done.

Third... I think an implicit point of 'Fanfic Recs' is 'this is how you should do', similar to a more standard 'Fiction Recs'. It's true that Tolkien's writing created countless imitators, but without him there might not be A Song of Ice and Fire. Disney comics could be seen as an Eurocentric vision of the world with other nations and societies being inferior either as good savages or silly commies, but they were the inspiration for Osamu Tezuka's own art style and altered the face of art as we know it.

Putting a fanfic here is an implicit agreement that more fics should be like this, and honestly? I don't want to see more fics or more authors taking their beats from Farla. I'd rather see her stories, such as Pokémon Revolution, being placed on the old Darth Wiki equivalent, if only because she's not really that great. Her attitude doesn't help [and it's not like you should say attitude doesn't matter; GRRM's attitude towards fanfiction turned me away from ASoIaF, and everyone knows that Orson Scott Card stopped being popular once his homophobia became better-known by his audience].

Whew! That was a lot of words. I hope you can see my point here.