mark_asphodel (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mark_asphodel) wrote2013-01-29 05:39 pm
mark_asphodel) wrote2013-01-29 05:39 pm
In defense of sporking
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.
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.
no subject
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).
no subject
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.