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SV has an even problem

logiccosmic

logiccosmic

the Prince of Word Crimes
Location
the Hague, formerly
Pronouns
He/Him
I like fanfiction overall. I don't agree with the consensus that some hold that it isn't real writing, or anything like that. But there is a big problem with the content thereof; an even problem.

I don't want to confuse you all; this could be in the fanfiction forum, but I think it needs to be here, as it could apply to other media, like quests, and think it's a valuable conversation to have.

Recently, I was reading a conversation about the importance of a characters costume. Now, this was related to a quest that I've barely frequented, and I'm not great at keeping up with thanks like that. But I did notice something.

The difference in, not to put too fine a point on it, but quality. I don't mean to impugn the technical writing of any writer. I know what you are thinking, @logiccosmic writes trash, and like trash, yo. Yup, agreed. And that's why I think that we should talk about this. Statisically, would you say that around, maybe, 75% of the content on the site feels almost... by the numbers? Our stories aren't even, smooth experiences. They feel kinda disjointed, and rushed almost?

Case in point, relying solely on one of my stories, the biggest one I did, you could expect there to be, well, interesting stuff in Fiend. However, it's mostly just escalation in featureless rooms. That may be an uncharitable viewing, but that's how it feels to me, looking back on it. I could expect that I wouldn't right something similar, perhaps slightly more detailed now, but I think I'd still have a hard time finding a good way to express myself. In Fiend, there isn't really any overarching goal, plot, or message. It's just fight mans.

So why is the quality difference so massive, between something like my fic, and something like @EarthScorpion 's? I think it's something that sounds painful, but perhaps we need to talk about it.

SV idolizes power. That's the simple truth. It's more complex than that; it's the easy resolution of problems, the veneer of competency, and much more. But, the issue is, what does the story become about? Is it just a series of punch the man downs? Or does it devolve into fluff with no purpose? (Not to say fluff is bad, or a story expressly going for fluff is bad either). Yes, this is an oversimplification of the topic, but that's why I want to have this discussion, so we can talk about it honestly. And I'm 100% guilty of it.

So, now that this is all out, what's the general consensus? Am I dumb, just imagining things, or is this something we can address?

And more so, how can we address this? To those of you who are the more, well, distinguished writers, how do you do what you do? I kinda want to have deep, rich stories not be novelties, and instead become more commonplace.
 
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logiccosmic said:
I like fanfiction overall. I don't agree with the consensus that some hold that it isn't real writing, or anything like that. But there is a big problem with the content thereof; an even problem.

I don't want to confuse you all; this could be in the fanfiction forum, but I think it needs to be here, as it could apply to other media, like quests, and think it's a valuable conversation to have.

Recently, I was reading a conversation about the importance of a characters costume. Now, this was related to a quest that I've barely frequented, and I'm not great at keeping up with thanks like that. But I did notice something.

The difference in, not to put too fine a point on it, but quality. I don't mean to impugn the technical writing of any writer. I know what you are thinking, @logiccosmic writes trash, and like trash, yo. Yup, agreed. And that's why I think that we should talk about this. Statisically, would you say that around, maybe, 75% of the content on the site feels almost... by the numbers? Our stories aren't even, smooth experiences. They feel kinda disjointed, and rushed almost?

Case in point, relying solely on one of my stories, the biggest one I did, you could expect there to be, well, interesting stuff in Fiend. However, it's mostly just escalation in featureless rooms. That may be an uncharitable viewing, but that's how it feels to me, looking back on it. I could expect that I wouldn't right something similar, perhaps slightly more detailed now, but I think I'd still have a hard time finding a good way to express myself. In Fiend, there isn't really any overarching goal, plot, or message. It's just fight mans.

So why is the quality difference so massive, between something like my fic, and something like @EarthScorpion 's? I think it's something that sounds painful, but perhaps we need to talk about it.

SV idolizes power. That's the simple truth. It's more complex than that; it's the easy resolution of problems, the veneer of competency, and much more. But, the issue is, what does the story become about? Is it just a series of punch the man downs? Or does it devolve into fluff with no purpose? (Not to say fluff is bad, or a story expressly going for fluff is bad either). Yes, this is an oversimplification of the topic, but that's why I want to have this discussion, so we can talk about it honestly. And I'm 100% guilty of it.

So, now that this is all out, what's the general consensus? Am I dumb, just imagining things, or is this something we can address?

And more so, how can we address this? To those of you who are the more, well, distinguished writers, how do you do what you do? I kinda want to have deep, rich stories not be novelties, and instead become more commonplace.
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Guy who made the first thread here. That's a good parody. I ain't even mad, well done.
 
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Running mostly off the top of my head so I'll beg forgiveness now for people who find that my thoughts aren't especially well-directed; please bear with it.
logiccosmic said:
SV idolizes power. That's the simple truth. It's more complex than that; it's the easy resolution of problems, the veneer of competency, and much more. But, the issue is, what does the story become about? Is it just a series of punch the man downs? Or does it devolve into fluff with no purpose? (Not to say fluff is bad, or a story expressly going for fluff is bad either). Yes, this is an oversimplification of the topic, but that's why I want to have this discussion, so we can talk about it honestly. And I'm 100% guilty of it.
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So I'm going to at least try and resist the urge of like, Zeroing In on what precisely motivates the creation of the Hypercompetent Protagonist or what particular set of priorities is responsible for creating plots that resolve too neatly, problems that aren't really problems at all--my guesses probably aren't The Most Right anyway. Instead I'll try to address the consequences of characters whose finer personality traits warp to fit the needs of the situation, of heroes who can always see through the tricks and traps laid in their way in the nick of time (or well beforehand), of badasses who are in more danger of revealing their Secret Power to people who might not accept their cooldisturbing superpowersabilities than they are of...being endangered. I could keep going and try to do a few more decently illustrative examples but the thing with examples (especially when they're of or about writing) is that context is king, and basically all of what I just said can work in appropriate context, can even be a basically central story conceit. But as an aggregate, as a symptom they lead to stories that are...well, see the title. They're even. Flat. Featureless. Plain.

Their plots become simple or derivative in the derogatory senses of both terms, their characters rarely develop, their romances are often inexplicable as anything other than an exercise in authorial indulgence because their unchanging characters often have so little in the way of strong traits or personality that it's a wonder that any of them could feel attraction to any of their fellow cardboard cutouts. They are generally not difficult or stressful (or even interesting) to read, and if their prose is sufficiently competent the reader might even enjoy them a bit. Miracle if they remember very much about them later though.

It's often difficult to determine a clear objective for them beyond continuing (which is an indulgence especially possible for fics and quests, since they're not packaged up beginning to end like books--strictly speaking they do not have to have an end, so there is equally little practical pressure for them to plan for or move toward a finish) and from word to word and update to update and arc to arc they can be listless and meandering; any direction is as good as any other, so why commit? Why move at all?

My thoughts in particular are that these are problems that arise first and foremost when the writer does not know what they want to say or what they want to do or where they want to go or how they want to get there. After all it's hard to know what to cut if you don't know why anything's there in the first place. It's hard to know what to add when you don't know what's missing, it's hard to know how to develop a conflict when you don't particularly know why anyone is stopping anyone else from getting what they want. It's hard to know what to tell your readers if you don't know what you want them to understand.

I think those are the best places what we as writers and as people what give feedback can focus on in our stories and in the stories we read and respond to, because writing is an art form, and there aren't a lot of set answers to problems--an element that may be a problem in one work can be a virtue in another, but neither writer nor reader can tell the difference without the context with which to frame and understand those elements, much less fix them.

Doing that a lot in a healthy and constructive and encouraging way is tricky.
 
It's because most people want to read stories about power-leveling. Demographics, man.

Demographics. :V
 
I am an inveterate power levels guy. I write a lot of action heavy stories and I just find it more enjoyable to write when the participants are wrecking the neighborhood. Honestly speaking, I've structured whole chapters or acts or a story around one particularly spectacular action idea, and in general I don't often feel a need for restraint on this front. I don't maximize every story and setting, and if you lined all my ideas up you could order them into a fighting game tier list, but I'd win a lot of versus debates lol

I wrote a post which has some relevance here. It was responding to a somewhat different topic, but:

Ford Prefect said:
Ranks and power levels are things that readers like, and so they make for effective tools. The kind of audience that likes these battle heavy stories will get into the concept, and more importantly they will immediately comprehend it. If you're writing a story and a character whispers 'Do you see that guy over there? That's Darker McEdgelord. They say he reached S-class in less than two years' then people will just grok that instantly due to familiarity with stories that do similar things. That's economical. It's effective - like giving a character an epithet. When I made a friend with zero familiarity with Gundam watch the original series' compilation films, just hearing people call Char Aznable the Red Comet worked. He immediately knew that Char meant business, even without knowing where the epithet came from or how Char got it. He just knew.

It's all part of hype making, which is a big part of why these fighting stories capture the imagination. How characters talk about other characters and their strength, how they rank against each other, and so on. That shit is fun. It helps you get invested. When Whitebeard finally took to the field in One Piece it was a big deal even before he did anything, because at this point everyone from his allies to his enemies had been hyping him up. Even characters established to be miles beyond the protagonist were concerned by his movements. It was a big deal - it generated emotions of awe and hope at his appearance.
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To reiterate, power levels are fun. And generally, demonstrations of power are fun as well - from both the perspective of creator and audience. It's why something like Dragon Ball has remained enormously popular even though it has basically done away with complex plotting. The final story arc, the Universal Survival Saga, didn't really have a plot at all. It was just a series of fight sequences strung together. It certainly had a story, but it was not a particularly complicated one, and not so engaging that you'd think it would get, in some cities, thousands of people out on the street to watch the second to last episode.

But it did, and it did so entirely on the persistent and consistent ebb and flow of power and power levels. People were genuinely invested in how powerful each character was. How strong they were. How well they could fight. Whether they could find it in themselves to win this battle. I didn't watch all of Dragon Ball Super, but I did watch the final episode, and I had watched enough to get a sense of things across the arc, and I got weirdly invested in watching three broken and battered guys trying to take down a fourth broken and battered guy, who I knew to have such unbelievable reserves of strength that he was still almost unbeatable.

All it took was a few characters I kind of liked, some action that was enjoyable to watch and a sense of stakes. The fight also meant something (the distinction between strength gained on your own versus the strength gained through working with others), but that's for after the moment reviews. In the moment that's not what is going through your head.

ONE PUNCH MAN is actually well written, and quite funny, but a huge portion of its popularity, and Saitama's popularity, stems from high level superpowers and the fidelity which they are presented with. Well-animated destruction of the environment goes down well (though not always, see Concrete Revolutio). Dragon Ball Super wasn't amazingly well-animated, so it's not necessary, but I think it helps. Part of why I give Man of Steel some slack even though it's an otherwise quite ordinary film is that Superman looks and feels like he has unworldly power, and the way that is depicted is spectacular to look at.

Of course, Man of Steel took flak because the degree of power depicted was ill-used. The spectacle destroyed much of Metropolis and raised questions about the priorities of the character (and in turn, the filmmakers). That is, the story was not served by the shattering buildings and visible shockwaves.

The takeaway here is:
  • Power is fun.
  • Stakes are important.
  • Spectacle should not interfere with story.
It's the sense of stakes that I find is usually lacking. It's the distinction between a character being powerful and a character being unbeatable, particularly when that character is the protagonist. There's no sense of stakes in Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei in large part because Shiba Tatsuya cannot be defeated in essentially any area. He is the most powerful and most righteous character in that entire fictional universe. Tatsuya is emblematic of a trend both in professionally produced media and fan-media. You see that sometimes on SV, though most often you see the expectation of low stakes in quest voters.

It's weird that this is the case, incidentally. For me personally the thing I like best is strong villains. It's weird and annoying when the hero is an unsurpassable wall, but it's another thing entirely when it's the villain. And even if you don't want them to be physically powerful, there are numerous other ways to create an unsurpassable wall, through moral or ideological conflict. This creates rivalry, one of the most powerful tools in a writer's arsenal.
 
Ford Prefect said:
I am an inveterate power levels guy. I write a lot of action heavy stories and I just find it more enjoyable to write when the participants are wrecking the neighborhood. Honestly speaking, I've structured whole chapters or acts or a story around one particularly spectacular action idea, and in general I don't often feel a need for restraint on this front. I don't maximize every story and setting, and if you lined all my ideas up you could order them into a fighting game tier list, but I'd win a lot of versus debates lol

I wrote a post which has some relevance here. It was responding to a somewhat different topic, but:



To reiterate, power levels are fun. And generally, demonstrations of power are fun as well - from both the perspective of creator and audience. It's why something like Dragon Ball has remained enormously popular even though it has basically done away with complex plotting. The final story arc, the Universal Survival Saga, didn't really have a plot at all. It was just a series of fight sequences strung together. It certainly had a story, but it was not a particularly complicated one, and not so engaging that you'd think it would get, in some cities, thousands of people out on the street to watch the second to last episode.

But it did, and it did so entirely on the persistent and consistent ebb and flow of power and power levels. People were genuinely invested in how powerful each character was. How strong they were. How well they could fight. Whether they could find it in themselves to win this battle. I didn't watch all of Dragon Ball Super, but I did watch the final episode, and I had watched enough to get a sense of things across the arc, and I got weirdly invested in watching three broken and battered guys trying to take down a fourth broken and battered guy, who I knew to have such unbelievable reserves of strength that he was still almost unbeatable.

All it took was a few characters I kind of liked, some action that was enjoyable to watch and a sense of stakes. The fight also meant something (the distinction between strength gained on your own versus the strength gained through working with others), but that's for after the moment reviews. In the moment that's not what is going through your head.

ONE PUNCH MAN is actually well written, and quite funny, but a huge portion of its popularity, and Saitama's popularity, stems from high level superpowers and the fidelity which they are presented with. Well-animated destruction of the environment goes down well (though not always, see Concrete Revolutio). Dragon Ball Super wasn't amazingly well-animated, so it's not necessary, but I think it helps. Part of why I give Man of Steel some slack even though it's an otherwise quite ordinary film is that Superman looks and feels like he has unworldly power, and the way that is depicted is spectacular to look at.

Of course, Man of Steel took flak because the degree of power depicted was ill-used. The spectacle destroyed much of Metropolis and raised questions about the priorities of the character (and in turn, the filmmakers). That is, the story was not served by the shattering buildings and visible shockwaves.

The takeaway here is:
  • Power is fun.
  • Stakes are important.
  • Spectacle should not interfere with story.
It's the sense of stakes that I find is usually lacking. It's the distinction between a character being powerful and a character being unbeatable, particularly when that character is the protagonist. There's no sense of stakes in Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei in large part because Shiba Tatsuya cannot be defeated in essentially any area. He is the most powerful and most righteous character in that entire fictional universe. Tatsuya is emblematic of a trend both in professionally produced media and fan-media. You see that sometimes on SV, though most often you see the expectation of low stakes in quest voters.

It's weird that this is the case, incidentally. For me personally the thing I like best is strong villains. It's weird and annoying when the hero is an unsurpassable wall, but it's another thing entirely when it's the villain. And even if you don't want them to be physically powerful, there are numerous other ways to create an unsurpassable wall, through moral or ideological conflict. This creates rivalry, one of the most powerful tools in a writer's arsenal.
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While I understand the entertainment value of seeing immense amount of destruction, most of your examples are visual-based as opposed to text-based. I'm not speaking for the entire community, but I don't have the ability or resources to produce visuals of such quality as to not make people bleed profusely from their eyes.

Speaking from that perspective, do you find the same enjoyment from text-based works of fiction? It's one thing to see destruction caused by demonstration of power, but reading about them is quite another. For me, it's not the same, and I don't find reading about destruction or fighting as opposed to actually seeing them.

In all honesty, I prefer not to write battles in my work, if I can.
 
Apotheosis said:
I'm sure you can find that tons of that under the #tf2 tag on tumblr :V
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i guess i know why they call it his sticky launcher ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Also kind of piggy-backing what was already said here, when you understand how to build tension you can pretty much keep any conflict compelling, but you still need moments of pause and that's pacing; pacing is an entirely different thing.

I also feel like you should also have very, very strong theming. Even fanfiction can be based around strong theming; fanfiction is still art. It's still storytelling. And the best part is that you can hide that theming in whatever you want [fuck who's watching].

Like let's say that I want to center a quest around Wakanda coming out from the shadows. Wakanda is a powerful nation, and it would be trivially easy for them to take over the world, but the quest is about political intrigue and not doing that.

The themes are about power struggle, the willingness to enact bloody justice, and the willpower it takes to not do that, as well as the difference between soft power and hard power, and when they ought to be used. We now have a really powerful protagonist (Wakanda) but there's still a lot of conflict, both internal (I really, really want to destroy these fuckers) and external (they'rE REALLY HARD TO INTERACT WITH).

The themes can then be interwoven into the story, with an overall end goal. What ending fits most for the tone and setting you're going for? What arc makes sense for the characters involved? Is it strictly political, or is it very character driven?

etc etc etc.

Now I would write this sort of thing but I actually don't have the time to anymore >_>
 
I think there's an inherent problem with fanfic specifically in that it's being written in context the original work existing as a completed work, which warps how people see the story and characters.

For example, if you're watching Star Wars for the first time your perception of Luke as a character is being developed over time, you watch him try to deal with the peril he's in, you watch him make mistakes, and you eventually watch him grow to overcome the conflict of the series.

Then you decide that you really want to write a fanfic about what Luke was doing before Hoth, but then it turns out your idea of him as a character is being informed by his entire character journey. So unless you're being very careful to write a post-ANH, pre-ESB Luke, you're inevitably going to write a Luke who more closely resembles Luke at the end of his development and is doing all the cool Jedi shit that they assume a post-ROTJ Luke would be doing.

This happens a lot in Worm fandom. Where Hard Man Hard Decisions Uber-badass Taylor that the character decayed to ends up projected onto early story Scared Teenager With a Mean Streak Taylor. Leading to all sorts of dumb wanky bullshit. Because when your starting point is the character being the biggest badass ever or a super-Jedi, that means that there's no room for the lower power, lower stakes exploits the series started with. And that means the fanfic is not going to have the narrative weight or impact that the original did. It won't have the progression that was present in the original because the end point of the progression bleeds into how they write the characters without being earned.

Actually, this is kind of what happened with Anakin Skywalker in the prequels I think. Since he was being written in the context of him inevitably turning to the dark side, he got written as the weirdest, school shootingest sick puppy ever because the fact that he becomes Darth Vader in the end hung too heavy over the story.
 
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You got your effortpost in your shitpost.
10/10 would be trolled by you again.

Reveen said:
I think there's an inherent problem with fanfic specifically in that it's being written in context the original work existing as a completed work, which warps how people see the story and characters.
.
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Unless you're writing something which isn't finished yet, in which case you'll need to make shit up to keep it going longer than the base story. See also: any ASOIAF fic that deals with Jon's parentage or lasts long enough for the Others to be a factor.
 
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Vyslanté said:
Seriously tho, half the forum might be nerds that were bullied in school, it's not surprising that they look for power fantaisies where they are the one in charge for once :V
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But even then, the amount of power given to the main characters in your typical power fantasy can be too much. This reminds me of a quote by a great poet:

"No man should have all that power"
- Kanye West, Power​
 
Tada Taro said:
It's because most people want to read stories about power-leveling. Demographics, man.

Demographics. :V
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There is actually some very interesting reading about escapism fantasy and peoples desire for (preconceived) self-control of their own actions and how this can impacts nearly all aspects of their life.

Power fantasies are also much more preferable for society than the Angry Young Man demographic actually going out and doing something about it.

:V
 
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