A Matter of Perspective

“I know you said your focus is on writing and not the fanfiction community, but I think an examination of how audience affects storytelling would make an interesting post. You mentioned everything being rehashes of rehashes, so could it be that fanfic writers are sticking to what they know is popular and will get praised instead of attempting something riskier and more difficult? New writers have got to be looking at what’s already well-regarded and being influenced by that precedent.

I mean, low-effort praise-grabbing isn’t unique to the Sonic fandom, but it’s probably an especially bad environment for producing good writing.”

We’ll start this post from that comment.

Communities are, more or less, hubs from which content is produced or distributed in the case of fandoms. Some places specialize in content, others are more diverse, and etcetera. The fanfiction community is about fanfiction, obviously. Stories, writers, ideas, all of that fun stuff.

In the fanfiction world, more often than not as pointed out in the quote above, audience affects content. This is a bad model to follow, but it’s the one commonly used by most authors. So in other words, what’s hot at the moment or what’s been well-received determines what most of the new content is going to be about, whether it’s a good or bad thing. This isn’t any different in the Sonic the Hedgehog fanfiction community – what’s trending will get you more reviews and more praise than what’s actually good.

There are safe bets all around. “Adaptations”, for one. Romance stories. Long and pointless adventures. You know the drill. A good portion of people writing fanfiction, like it or not, are lonely, socially inept anime fans or obnoxiously weepy teenage girls. Most times the two categories cross into each other. Writers also usually feel that they could “do better than Sega” most of the time, that they provide “depth” to characters and are willing to go further than the “sparse” source material. I’m using quotes here so that I don’t have to type “bullshit” a lot beside each instance of bullshit.

I’ll be blunt here and make some people upset in the process. Whatever. The Sonic fandom when it comes to fanfiction and…well, everything else beyond that if you think about it, is basically hopeless. I mean, you can call yourself a Sonic fan without being a pathetic loser, but if you’re part of the fandom, you’re going to be associated with these people at some point. There are good people within the fandom, somewhere. But that doesn’t magically change the fact that this fanbase is pretty much pathetic, really. I guess I sound a bit bitter, but it leads into a point that I’m going to make.

A pathetic fanbase leads to a pathetic audience for content and really a horrible group of peers. You’ve found your network of competent people? Great. That leaves the other 95% to deal with. Reviews usually aren’t helpful or informative, just gushing about how great the latest chapter is. That’s not bad in and of itself, but then there’s no indication of what made the chapter good, what made the story stand out or any commentary whatsoever. Just mindless praise. Then when someone tries to basically detail a problem or an inconsistency, you have the standard fanfiction author spaz-fest. There aren’t that many people to do this (provide constructive criticism) in the case of Sonic fanfiction, as evidenced by the fact that I know or knew most of those who provided some form of constructive criticism. One such person is reviled throughout the community, and intentionally or not, I’ll probably end up following in his footsteps once I get the will to review more stories. In essence, the community is resistant to change, as most fanfiction communities are. That leads to a few things happening.

I talked about safe bets when it comes to writing fanfiction in this category, and that goes back to, again, the influence of the audience. We have the prevalence of gender-bending, grimdark stories with excessive length, a disturbing amount of what we call “yaoi”, copy-pasted romance stories, rape, terrible adaptations, more rape, high school drama, and other flavours of crap. These stories are frequently updated, mainly due to a lack of [cohererent] plot or actual story-building elements as well as a need to please the audience. If they don’t, the cost will be precious reviews and popularity…I guess? I admit I don’t know exactly how the average writer’s mind works but from what I can gather, it’s usually reviews that drive the story forward. Either that, or some sense of boredom. Planning also becomes an issue – there usually is none. Chapters tend to be disconnected and lack unity within themselves. Sustained story arcs are padded with “filler” which shouldn’t really exist unless you’re working for an animation studio on the side. Drama comes out of nowhere in order to keep the story from grinding to a halt. And so on. I’ll even say that the “epics” written in the section don’t bring much more integrity upon themselves either. Long chapters don’t mean anything if nothing is going on in them, and stories can be huge without amounting to much at all. There are decent stories with enough popularity to make it seem like I’m talking nonsense, but it’s like a bucket of water being measured against a lake. On the whole, the nonsense stories draw in readers and that encourages others to do the same. In a universe where you only have so much to work with in terms of characterization and story before it gets loopy (unless you’re a competent enough writer…but I digress), quality control should be a key issue. But of course, the way to go about things is clearly to give everyone pats on the back and encourage them to go on with their inane plots and botched characters because it’s a learning experience. God bless any decent author that makes it onto the front page of the archives for a few hours at least…

It gets worse when you consider what is being supported within the Sonic fandom, in regards to writing, at least. You see, many many people – even supposedly good authors – have really missed the point of what this franchise is about normally. I’ve probably said this before: Sonic the Hedgehog is a videogame series about a blue hedgehog that runs really fast. Is that the end of it? No, it doesn’t have to be. You’re allowed to use your imagination to write about different things pertaining to the series. You know, make it a little darker if you want. But at its core, what the series is about is crazy adventures and thwarting diabolical plots, about making friends and triumphing over evil, maybe even losing fights once in a while. Exploring different subject matter is all fine and dandy. But from what has been presented to us, there are limits as to how far you can go before you start to drift away from the series’ intent. A good thing to look at in terms of limits? The current run of the Archie comic series. Ian Flynn has done a damn good job in terms of pushing the limits of the series’ nature while not losing sight of what it is. Another good thing? Check out a story on FFN by the name of Survivor’s Resolve. Pick any chapter, any single chapter. This is how you write something good without going over the top. But it’s not simple and it takes a good deal of time – time that people apparently do not have because it’s just for fun and they’re being creative. Editing a story is optional because everyone understands what you mean anyways. Forcing your sob-stories onto brightly coloured videogame characters is just fine because it’s so emotional and really speaks to people. Using characters to soapbox about political/social/sexual/etc. issues is great because it’s fanfiction so we can do what we want. Taking the characters out of their elements and throwing them into mundane places ripped out of other media is super cool because we can recognize things from our favorite shows and that guy did that thing like that other guy from place in show from episode and oh my god it’s so cool and shiny and I’ma review because the author won’t continue the story without reviews and I like reading this because Starlight Moonflower Raven Rose the Hedgehog Prower is so cool and xir’s violent bloody BDSM rape relationship with my OC is so magical and I like it so you have to write more.

You know what? I wish that was just a silly joke. It isn’t. This is pretty much what the writing community has become. It’s no wonder that we keep getting poorly written sex scenes from furry authors because…people condone this kind of shit. They let it happen. It’s not okay. You have to have standards, people. This isn’t just for your amusement, here – people are reading this stuff. People are learning from this and picking up on it, causing this perpetual cycle of garbage that gets harder and harder to break with each volley of stories released. And maybe the good writers left can make a difference somehow…maybe.

All we can do from here is try. That’s the sad truth.

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I mentioned a story earlier, Survivor’s Resolve by DC111. The story’s on FF.net; well-received with very good reason. As of now it’s still in progress but make the effort to check it out if you want to read something good for once.

The opening quote and idea for this post was contributed by the good Dr. O. You can find him on Project AFTER, a well-established community of those who hate all the crap that is produced by anime and fanfiction fans on the internet (the professional hacks get theirs as well). Make sure to check it out if you like intelligent discussion, laughs at the expense of others, and a chill atmosphere.

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‘Till the next one.