An Introduction

I didn’t think this was necessary per se, but I felt like doing it anyways. I thought it would be nice to give people a glimpse at the madness before they got caught in it.

A few things I’ll clear up from the beginning. I’m not a great writer. I’m not a titan of any writing site or group on FFN or anywhere else. As I’ve probably said before this post, I’m not an elite. Nor am I an elitist. I’m cool with writing what suits me, which is fine for everyone. The problem arises when you – intentionally or not – end up writing for a large(r) audience and subject your work to criticism from the masses. I’m here not only to criticize, but to dissect as much as I possibly can properly.

The stories in the Sonic the Hedgehog archive on FFN are what have drawn my attention in my writing career. There are many other stories on many other sites but this is my community, for better or for worse. I contribute to it like anyone else does, and its concerns become my concerns. What I’m trying to get at is this:

Sonic the Hedgehog fanfiction is terrible.

This isn’t talking about the individual pieces that make it up, this isn’t talking about individual authors and their copy-paste stories or whatnot. This is a fact, a description of this particular section of fanfiction and something that has been going on for way too long. The adventures are boring. The character pieces suck. The characters themselves suck. Rehashes and rehashes and rehashes of rehashed rehashes. That’s my point. This community, besides being made up of incredibly sick people that for whatever reason become the introduction to Sonic the Hedgehog if not videogames and fanfiction in general, is dysfunctional. I’m not going to go over the reasons why this entire fanbase is horrible, because then I’d have to change the purpose of my blog. If I wanted to just spout off over the fandom, I’d make a Tumblr page with periodic snipes at key people. This isn’t really about that. This is focused on the writing aspect primarily – everything else comes later on if you want.

Having basic writing skills helps keep you from the bottom of the barrel. But after that, you’ll need to put some form of effort into your writing in order to produce a good product. This isn’t really a blog for raising your popularity. I’m not popular on FanFiction by any means, I think. But well-liked stories get a lot of good reviews, provided readers find them and word-of-mouth spreads. There are great stories that I like and great stories that I don’t really like.

The blog’s main focus will be on characters and plotlines. Both are abused constantly for negative results, and I’ll be explaining why I believe that’s the case so often. Posts will go into what makes up each character and what the ideal uses of them are, as opposed to the unfortunate status quo. I’m not going to wow anyone with loads of numbers and raw data, that’s someone else’s job. I just feel like identifying problems and why they’re problems, along with possible ways to fix them if I can. Otherwise, this blog is going to be a mixed bag.