In defense of sporking

[mark_asphodel]

In the past I've defended sporking 'fics as well, part of the territory.  Big fandom, losta crap fic, lotsa trolls, it's sporking time.  And in a vast fandom like Harry Potter, it really doesn't matter.  You can piss off 5,000 Snape waifus and be confident you didn't want to know a single one of them, and they'll just form a clique of their own and keep churning out crap, and someone like me will just sit back with a bag of pretzels and watch the ebb and flow of carnage.  It's almost as good as Usenet.

Browsing some old HP-related haunts of mine, it occurs to me that the exact nature of the crapfic there, especially the latter-day crapfic, is what really makes the difference.  

Death Eater Apologists
Pseudo-Aristocratic classist tripe that extends to indictments of the author's personal life
People who legitimately seem to think Voldemort and his gang were misunderstood
Dumbledore is the true evil in Potterland, and it's not an exercise in subversion
Weird shit that puts high school bullies in a deeper tier of hell than, well, blood bigots who torture and murder the inferior sort of people

Really gross stuff.  Really gross stuff by prominent writers, spanning multiple comms and archives (and flamewars) and meta sites and on and on and on.  And some of them are decent enough writers that I can see why people would find it "refreshing" and "seductive"-- I sure did back in the pre-Deathly Hallows days before they all revealed themselves to be BATSHIT. 

Sporking this shit-- dissecting it, holding up to the light the ugly guts that make up an ugly, ugly worldview that uses fanfiction as a means of evangelizing The Truth about Harry Potter and his world-- basically amounts to a public service.  There is no parallel to it that I've seen in a fandom like Fire Emblem.  It'd be like if the major strain of Tellius fanfic amounted to heaps of things "proving" that laguz really are subhuman and Ashnard was right about everything.  I've seen a little bit of Ashnard apologetics on tumblr, but nothing like what the Harry Potter crowd does for the Malfoys, Snape, and such. 

Comments

[amielleon]

When it comes to serious social topics, I think the worst there is in this fandom is the "people who are gay were traumatized, that is why they are gay, gay is not actually a thing" mindset that comes through in some assorted Heather/men fic. Or maybe the traumatized-into-a-wheelchair-because-of-poperape element in the Rhys-in-a-wheelchair fic. But they're mostly isolated instances. The former group certainly doesn't have the Death Eater Apologists' fervor about the topic. And the latter consists of isolated incidents, people who may feel gross things but perhaps aren't even aware that they hold the view, much less join a movement about it. A level-headed review giving their intentions the benefit of the doubt is probably the better way to go about that sort of thing.

And as you say, factor in the fact that you'll see these people again and again, and it's quite a different environment.

[lyndis]

Good point. I mean, FE fandom has cliques but it's not like HP where like 200 people share your headcanon and/or take a fic as "headcanon" (or even canon) and then defend it to the ends of the earth. It seems to be a lot more isolated when you see weird shit.

Right up there with traumatized "that's why they're gay" 'fics, there's "Florina was assaulted that's why she stammers" fics and/or meta (or used to be meta, idk if anyone still agrees with it).

[mark_asphodel]

Right up there with traumatized "that's why they're gay" 'fics, there's "Florina was assaulted that's why she stammers" fics

Yeah, and I think you'd find a smattering of that anywhere, along with a number of 'fics that misunderstand mental illness or get diseases wrong or what have you. And some of that crap is just people recycling what cruddy TV/movies/pop psych already tells them.

I mean, from my standpoint the major thing infesting the fandom is self-inserts. I'll take self-inserts over the kind of batshit bigotry that lurks in corners of HP fandom any day. For one, people tend to grow out of the self-insert love.

[samuraiter]

Even though FE is one of the bigger video game fandoms, I think there's simply not enough of us to absorb that much batshittery. HP has the disadvantage of being Jupiter. Compared to that, we're barely a moon.

[mark_asphodel]

HP is a strange place in that intelligent and articulate people-- some of whom I enjoyed reading-- totally went off the rails and basically went... evil. Not just retreating into a little cocoon of "Character X never died! AU!" or "Book Six never happened! AU!" kind of world, but committing themselves wholesale to some alternate reading of the text in which right is wrong and up is down.

Writing fix-it fanfic is one thing; demanding other people read the source material in a way that adheres to your views is pretty nuts.

[kyusil]

Is sporking the same thing as MSTing? Or is it just generally making fun of a fic?

[mark_asphodel]

It's making fun of a fic. People always have been (I have fond memories of Citizens Against Bad Slash and Wicked X Witches Reviews), but IMO this lot (http://ficbitches.livejournal.com/) were kind of the pioneers at the specific kind of sporking that caught on in the journal-based era. Fittingly, I think that was the first site I followed that migrated to livejournal.

Like with any other fandom trend, it spread and diluted to the point where it's just people publicly snarking about 'fic and the snarkers are often as inarticulate and wrong about canon as the snarkees. But in a fandom like Harry Potter, wherein you have dedicated subgroups of people turning out stuff that basically paints a smiley face on the wizarding KKK, having counter-groups essentially web-picketing them feels appropriate.

[raphiael]

One thing I can say looking back at this is no matter how much people universally shit on "SJWs", I do not miss the days when "rape" was thrown around all the time for every little thing under the sun.

From one of the "reviews" - This is just a fic about two strangers who happen to have the same names. This is true of a ton of fandoms and pairings, even canon ones, where the characters are reduced to shadows of their original selves. People so desperate to see their fan pairing ignore the OOCness and more and more of these kind of fics show up. Nothing new under the sun, indeed :P

[zyriex]

Weird shit that puts high school bullies in a deeper tier of hell than, well, blood bigots who torture and murder the inferior sort of people


For some reason I have a feeling this sentiment generally comes from people who were bullied and want a sort of validation in that they want there to be a "better" group that they're part of. And if Death Eaters sort of fit well....