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

[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