The thing is, I wasn't thinking about Mary Sues but rather the examples like most of the doujinshi & fic in Gundam Fic, which is based around the concept of TWT (timeline-what-timeline), and how... y'know, it tends to suck so much less with the simple expedient of you actually giving something a specific context in time/space/the series canon. And the bandslash thing where it's not even that they're writing Mary Sues, but they're not writing... anyone in particular, just 'Hot Guy X' 'cause they don't bother at all. And with Snape/Lily, where people proclaim that while they acknowledge that in canon Snape was probably too dorky/shy/pathetic to make a move, to hell with that... I mean. You can change what happened, but if you just purposefully ignore his personality issues, it's going to suck. I feel.
It's funny though, that even back when I didn't know HP canon & didn't want to, I kind of realized a lot of fic sucked-- or at least wasn't well-written; in Gundam Wing I don't know canon and still don't feel like watching it to this day, but when I read whore!Duo and sentimental!Heero, I still now that people are on the bad crack, heh. It's not like they 'don't get it' or aren't that good, it's that they actively don't care if it makes any sense & they don't really try, which is where my problem lies, really. I mean, if they tried to place whore!Duo in any sort of real-seeming context... but that never tends to happen. He's just an emo cutting street-walking teenager who... happens to be a badass terrorist robot-mecha pilot in canon o_0
I think when I came into fandom, I quickly started to accumulate canon knowledge enough to just know what's going on (I remember being confused at Durendal's evil!Ron, thinking he wasn't like that... was he?)-- I read meta, essays, online references, etc, just so I'd have a clue. I didn't like the source and didn't want to read the books (...and I still haven't finished book 1 entirely or most of book 2, haha... *cough*), but I noticed when other people's fics referenced specific things and I always cared whether those references were real or not, etc.
It's like, I may not like the specific canon, but to me a basic understanding and acceptance of some of its tenets is inescapeable to play with it. Say, I knew Draco & Harry didn't like each other in canon from the start. I would never accept a fic where that was blatantly ignored, even back when all my knowledge rested on seeing movie 1 :> It's more that a look for a sense of acknowledgment & context rather than a bunch of factual details I probably don't remember even having read books 3-7 without looking it up at the Lexicon, hahah.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2007-09-09 08:59 pm (UTC)It's funny though, that even back when I didn't know HP canon & didn't want to, I kind of realized a lot of fic sucked-- or at least wasn't well-written; in Gundam Wing I don't know canon and still don't feel like watching it to this day, but when I read whore!Duo and sentimental!Heero, I still now that people are on the bad crack, heh. It's not like they 'don't get it' or aren't that good, it's that they actively don't care if it makes any sense & they don't really try, which is where my problem lies, really. I mean, if they tried to place whore!Duo in any sort of real-seeming context... but that never tends to happen. He's just an emo cutting street-walking teenager who... happens to be a badass terrorist robot-mecha pilot in canon o_0
I think when I came into fandom, I quickly started to accumulate canon knowledge enough to just know what's going on (I remember being confused at Durendal's evil!Ron, thinking he wasn't like that... was he?)-- I read meta, essays, online references, etc, just so I'd have a clue. I didn't like the source and didn't want to read the books (...and I still haven't finished book 1 entirely or most of book 2, haha... *cough*), but I noticed when other people's fics referenced specific things and I always cared whether those references were real or not, etc.
It's like, I may not like the specific canon, but to me a basic understanding and acceptance of some of its tenets is inescapeable to play with it. Say, I knew Draco & Harry didn't like each other in canon from the start. I would never accept a fic where that was blatantly ignored, even back when all my knowledge rested on seeing movie 1 :> It's more that a look for a sense of acknowledgment & context rather than a bunch of factual details I probably don't remember even having read books 3-7 without looking it up at the Lexicon, hahah.