Why do people hate fanfiction?

[Caligulove]

I know that the reason that I don't like the idea of it is that it isn't that creative, man.

Sure, you've gone and made a story like everything else about writing. But you already have set things to work with. It's too easy and just comes off as weird when the person tries to reflect their own kind of personality on an established character.

At the same time, yea. Most fanfiction I've read is kind of crappy. I just want to get the FFiction writers to do... original stuff!
There's obviously SOME creativity there and wanting to write... now go and make up your own settings, characters and plots. EVERYTHING new.

 

[Flos]

Anathema is not an adjective, you fool! :|

Fanfiction tends to be of inferior quality, so many people dislike it when they see it.

 

[WolfThomas]

Most of it is godawful.

Parabellum was pretty good though, it was a story about the resistance guy in the train car with a vortigaunt at the start of Half life 2. It got wore at the end, when he forgot which characters he'd killed off and made some poor conjecture about existing characters. But the rest was fantastic, especially the scene when he meets Freeman, no dialogue awesome descriptions.

 

[Wayte]

Fanfiction is generally looked down upon because in most cases it is very poorly written and generally involves characters in some masturbatory fantasy.

Also, what's a Mary Sue?

A Mary Sue, or Marty Stu when applied to a male character, is a character that is portrayed as utterly flawless and has a tendency to hog the spotlight. A character designed to be thoroughly loved by all who ends up being despised by the audience for that very reason.

Good examples would be Padme Amidala or Wesley Crusher.

Ah ok thanks. I suppose that would be extremely annoying.

 

[Pegghead]

Because it reeks of sheer, unbridled, deppressing geekyness. I hate hard-core fans in general and the day you write fan fiction, that's the day you know you've become either a fanboy or a fangirl. And yeah, some of it is alright, but it's like looking through a bin filled with rotting fish heads to find the sandwich you dropped in there, you could go to the effort of rifling through the fish and getting the sandwich, but all those fish-heads will have probably ruined the sandwich, despite the fact that it was deli stylecheese cheese and meatball schmogey swimming in delicious sauces and spices...*Mmmmmmmm, fan-fiction sandwich*.

 

[Thaius]

That's why.

 

[Char-Nobyl]

Same reason lots of people hate anime. You have to sift through piles of crap to find the gems, which a lot of people don't have the patience for.

 

[Ziadaine_v1legacy]

Depends how well its written. If its some Teen-Girl crush on something like Twilight I Insta-Label it as fail.

 

[Erja_Perttu]

Agreeing with most other people here, I dislike bad fanfiction and you've got to find a lot of patience to find good fanfiction. Its a diamond in the rough kinda challenge.

I think it's worth it though. I found one the other day that was so well written that the ending nearly brought me to tears, and I got in contact with the author about the writing of it.

Turned out, that author had been writing for nearly thirty years and was self published. Go figure.

I try to work against the forces of bad fanfiction. As hopeless an assault as it maybe, if someone is really close to a good story and needs it tweaked, I'll try to doa bit of nudging.

Some people are just beyond help though. See twilight and all twilight fanfiction bar parody.

 

[alexoblivion]

http://www.toplessrobot.com/2009/07/fan_fiction_friday_the_pokemon_story.php
That. that is why. It's like Hitler and Germans. Sure, most Germans are ok people, but they will never recover from something so low being associated with themselves.

 

[Proteus214]

Because it just ain't canon.

This is why a lot of people hate it. I know back when people first started writing fan fiction about Star Trek there was a HUGE debacle when someone wrote a story where McCoy died. Poetic, but making huge alterations to someone else's story line can have serious backlash.

Probably the only good fan fiction I have seen was the Aliens: Earth Hive trilogy, but that story was actually intended to be Alien 3, but Fox would never give them the budget for it so it was cast into the bottomless pit as glorified fan fiction.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

Because most of it is usually crap.

This really.

While it's entirely possible for fan-fiction to be GOOD, such a thing seems to be relatively rare. The problem that most failed fan fiction writers run into is that they have either little respect for the lore, or, alternately, too much respect for the lore of the world. Characters drive a narrative, in spite of what some people tend to believe, and these characters often form a strong basis for our view of the fictional world. Much of the worst fan-fiction will take a character that the author liked and either force them into a situation or course of action that the character would seemingly never consider without a dramatic and compelling change in character. One example is forcing a character into a romance that is never pursued in the plot. Disregard for the world these characters exist in is just one side of the spectrum.

The other side of the spectrum is inhabited by people who hold the lore to be an ironclad document that they cannot change. The result here is generally characters that become static and a plot that generally ends up seeming contrived.

There are other traps that fan-fiction writers commonly fall into but most common is being far too liberal or conservative with the lore.

 

[_zuul]

I've always had a soft spot for fanfiction. As long as you steer away from slash fics, self-insertion ones, and the vampire alternates, you're good.
Also, what's a Mary Sue?

ignore the other replys

mary sue = self insertion

assuming you weren't referring to some scary japanese sex act

 

[ObsessiveSketch]

I once read a ridiculously awesome fanfic of LotR, something about Legolas having to deal with Gimli's eventual mortality. Really heart-wrenching, 'specially if you've actually sat down and read the written series. Usually I check out the first couple sentences of a fanfic if I think it's worth reading, and that'll usually give me a good taste of the style.

 

[issacization]

Bagenders is the only good stuff ive ever seen.

 

[_zuul]

why be original when you can steal someone else's characters hand have them act out your sexual fantasies?



also, there are no good fanfics, because if a fanfic were "good", why didn't the "writer" just use their own original ideas instead of blatantly stealing characters and setting from something else?

 

[WhiteFangofWhoa]

Because most of it is usually crap.

Exactly. Even after I've written about a dozen of them in various fields including poetry, looking back, I'd say all but two of them were crap, and those two are of course debatable.

I often find it hard to believe there are as many hardcore Yaoi/Yuri/Ew... authors as there seem to be- it has to be the same person under different names. Amazingly enough, about a month ago a fanfic author I considered one of my favorites went and wrote a hardcore femslash. I had always thought you were either one kind of writer or the other. Perhaps the mood just struck him one day and he began to type.

 

[uncle-ellis]

Its not all slash. there's rule 34 as well.