More Tvtropes <3

[farla]

Getting a pileup that might all get deleted down again, so I want to preserve it forever because it's beautiful.

(All the lovely chatter from last time's gone because they switched to a new page.)

So the new page has barely been up before minchan makes a cool edit!
*** It should also be noted that there are several cases where Farla simply contradicts canon- such as when a Suicune, sent out to fight another pokemon after being caught, just jumps over the heads of everyone there and leaves, or in the chapter "Sometimes the answer's just no", where an Abra just leaves, despite having been caught by the trainer. She goes out of her way to point out how bad and awful OT fiction is for ignoring canon, and then just does the same thing- I hae to second the dis-recommendation thing, really.

I can only assume this has come up in more recent episodes at any point since I stopped watching.

(It will never matter because stories are not bad for ignoring canon, they are bad for being bad. I care a lot less about canon than people think.)

**** @/FalconPain: Those examples reflect one of Farla's biggest pet peeves: catching and training a Pokemon that doesn't want to be caught or trained and treating it as anything other than abuse. I find the stories worth a read but not necessarily worth taking to heart, as there are some chapters that don't sit right with me; her chapter about why a character shouldn't start the journey as an older teenager sounds dangerously close to "if you aren't training Pokemon by age ten, you shouldn't be training them at all", or even "Pokemon training is kid's stuff that adults should be embarrassed to still be doing".

FalconPain continues to interpret for me. So far they've done an okay job with that so that's fine though.

I find their complaint interesting because my chapters on older trainers involve other older trainers being the ones to say it's dumb exactly because I want to encourage people to remember it's srs bsns and older trainers should be around, and I'd be interested which one they're talking about here.

Anyway <3 Tvtropes, I wish there were more places people talked about fic with the (okay, mistaken, but) idea the author would never see it. I would post so much stuff there and watch with glee.

Also apparently they're finally trying to prune out the really shitty fic, so kudos guys! Just don't take mine down until people get all their commentary out. Also, please apply this wonderful idea to the rest of the fandom pages.

Comments

[ember-reignited.livejournal.com]

The fanfic rec pages on TVTropes really are puzzling. On the Homestuck one for example, they have a pretty good list of some of the best and/or most notable fics in the fandom as well as a few things I can understand why someone would want to rec them even if they wouldn't be what I would choose to showcase.... and then they have Dermonster's stuff, which while it occasionally contains some half-way interesting ideas is very near unreadable.

[farla.livejournal.com]

I think that's more a sign Homestuck has fewer badfics to choose. Check any other fandom, sometimes there's actually a worse badfic:goodfic ratio than clicking around FFN randomly.

Although Dermonster's stuff is inexplicably popular. I mean, the Felt one to me doesn't even manage the interesting ideas bit, it's just nonsense tangentially related to a character's ability after an extended game of telephone was played, but it has a ton of hits and kudos so I guess it's a valid rec?

[(Anonymous)]

I am tempted to direct them to this page and say, "You do realize Farla's reading this, right?"

[farla.livejournal.com]

No, then they'll stop! We must be very quiet.

[falconpain.livejournal.com]

After some quick rereading, I think I'll have to concede my criticism. The closest I could find to what I was complaining about was the fifth chapter, and that one was criticizing the justification for starting late rather than the effects.

I wonder if I'm thinking of a different fic or possibly someone's rant topic. I could have sworn I saw one that said that a starting teenager beating a starting ten-year-old makes the older one look pathetic, and losing to him makes him look even worse. But at this point, I can't say it's something you wrote. I will adjust my comment accordingly.

(I'm also glad I reread it, because while I disagree with the "pulling a gun" bit in a later chapter, the part about how a criminal organization should have much stronger fighters than a starting trainer anyway is perfectly believable. I missed that the first time.)

Nothing I type about a fic is meant to be hidden from the author.

[ember-reignited.livejournal.com]

I could have sworn I saw one that said that a starting teenager beating a starting ten-year-old makes the older one look pathetic, and losing to him makes him look even worse.

That's pretty much the opposite of Farla's criticism, which is that older starting trainers will lose to people younger them, and will lose even more to people their own age who started at the normal time for it. They are pathetic the way fandomers like Rakspatel who come into spaces they know nothing about and presume to speak down to younger, more knowledgeable fans on the grounds that their ~life experience~ means they automatically know better are pathetic.

[farla.livejournal.com]

Who's Rakspatel? I want in on this delicious hate.

[ember-reignited.livejournal.com]

http://www.journalfen.net/community/fandom_wank/1272092.html

Long story short, Rakspatel (which, by the way, is her legal name as well as her internet handle, and she makes fun of other fans for "hiding behind" their "silly" usernames) is the woman who single-handedly brought the funny back to Fandom Wank after a long dry spell. :)

[farla.livejournal.com]

There might have been something to that effect in the Hypotheticals chapter about it's rare that the story of a character losing most of their fights will be all that interesting. People aren't going to know exactly when the trainer started, so if most people start at the same age, and they do, it's certainly going to look pretty bad if you're eighteen and can't fight anyone near your own age. Most of my objection is on the meta level - it's not as impressive to read about someone winning against younger kids and slowly reaching their own age class like it is to read about someone beating kids their age and then getting past their own age class, and as long as there are older trainers who are experienced it makes it hard to transition into the part of the plot where you're using pokemon to fight evil or whatever, because those people should be dealing with it.

Hm, what don't you like about guns? I'm rather ambivalent about them in fanfic myself.

[negrek.livejournal.com]

I just can't get over how your name appears right under Damned Lolita on the recs page.

I hope they do manage to get at least a little of the drek out of there. I pretty much stopped paying attention to the page after I saw people reccing their own badfics on there (and then saw another author recommending that you put your fanfic on the TVTropes rec list as advertising).

[farla.livejournal.com]

Well, any publicity is good publicity?

...I generally avoid any story I saw there, though. But it looks like they're trying to crack down on authors doing that at least.