Fic's You Used To Love But Want To Burn Nowadays

Only when there's an excess of such things Fourth, you know that.

 

Ah, the 1632 series. Its greatest strength is that its perhaps the most realistic and detailed take on the full ramifications of an ISOT. Its greatest weakness is that its perhaps the most realistic and detailed take on the full ramifications of an ISOT. Let's see, by my count: 1631-1632 got one novel. 1633 got one novel. 1634 got four novels. 1635 got six novels. 1636 has at least seven. Then there are short stories, which are over 100+ in number currently.

 

That, and it seems like there's been less covered in each novel.

 

I'm unfamiliar with this series. Details?

 

Hmmm. I'll weigh in.

Embers.

Vathara, I've concluded, likes to have clear moral and narrative 'good guys': "This character is In The Right." In series where this is more or less the case to start with (Rurouni Kenshin as case in point), his very considerable other strengths can come through and produce really excellent stories.

But when he's ficcing series that don't have such dichotomies, or where the canon's favored character viewpoint isn't his, this habit tends to turn into drastic derails.

Which is really very sad, because I quite liked that one up until it became explicit.

 

This has the back cover summary: http://www.webscription.net/p-379-1632.aspx
This link has the whole 1632 book: http://www.webscription.net/10.1125/Baen/0671578499/0671578499.htm?blurb

 

Just to be clear here, this is perfectly legal. Baen gives out the earlier parts of a series free to get people to buy the rest of it.

 

Correct. 1633 is also available. Its a sensible strategy, given that 1632 and 1633 are both the best books, and the tip of the iceberg when it comes to all written so far. I did enjoy 1634: The Baltic War and 1634: The Galileo Affair, probably best read in that order. I read 1635: Cannon Law, but that's as far as I got before the combination of delays between releases and branching plotlines caused me to lose interest.

 

Anything that used to be hosted on the now defunct group of anifics sites.

 

Yeah but as we've established in multiple threads you have... rigorous (read as: seemingly insane) standards for what you'll read. Anyway we don't need to rehash this again.

Are we reading the same Embers? I feel like of all the things I've read that's one of the clearer "Gray and Gray moralities". Hell the amount of gray on gray is getting to be one of my major annoyances with the story. When even the designated villainous Insane Evil Dragon has totally valid reasons it gets to be a little annoying. If anything I'd argue that the problem with Embers is that Vathara is clearly trying to express a world of Black and White while writing a completely gray world. It causes headaches.

 

"no Karma Houdinis, no Downer Endings" isn't especially rigorous, and as best I can tell, that's Darth Artemis' position, which in honesty isn't particularly different from mine. If a story features either of those on a large scale, neither I nor Darth Artemis would be inclined to read it. Stories which feature it on a limited scale are iffy, IE, one major likable character gets a miserable undeserved ending but the others are fine.

 

That sums up the general standards in a nutshell, though there's other stuff that irritates me more on a case-by-case basis, and some stuff I can just ignore if the rest of the story is good enough. Case in point: All The Roads We Have To Walk, a Kingdom Hearts darkfic (or perhaps darker fic) that I hold as one of my all-time favorite fics despite containing stuff that would be an instant buzz-kill in other stories.

But Ram's right, that's more than enough talk about my reading preferences.

 

FES had a good start, the too cool for school protagonist aside, but it choked on bloat and ended up twice as long as it needed to be. Bloat kills the joy in a lot of serialized fics.

I'm sure everyone hates their first fic, but I seriously wish I could douse Taking Sights in gasoline and light a match. I used to love writing it, but, knowing what I do now, I could tell the same story in a 10~15,000 word oneshot without all the dross.

 

I wrote a FFVIII novelization a long time ago (first truly serious fanfic I ever wrote) I thought it was pretty good at the time. But everytime I've gone back to read it....I've been disappointed. My skills have grown so much between then and now that it's embarrassing to look at my old stuff.

 

Isn't that always the case? I look back at my old essays and wonder to myself...how was I ever that stupid?

 

I remember liking Sailor Nothing a few years back, but now it seems forced and overly grimderp.

 

*snerk* yup!

Speaking of stories that started out looking good and then took a running jump into the Pit of Voles, I'd like to suggest "Rise of the Tau." It's a 40k fic with a strange-but-interesting premise: an Ultramarine wakes up to find himself nearly alone in a universe almost completely overrun by probably the weakest of the major 40k factions. It starts off looking interesting, and then devolves into weirdass la-la-land. Ick.

 

I'm going to resist my urge to vehemently disagree with the criticism of Imperfect Metamorphosis.

Instead, I will nominate Nobody Dies, which...well, the plot went off to la-la-land and started going in circles, which wasn't too bad until the jokes got stale. I'm afraid to even go back into the thread to check what's happened.

Shinji & 40K has much the same problem, except for being a hell of a lot more confusing and not really all that funny.

 

Hmmmm... now why was it that when I saw the title of this thread I knew that my work was going to be mentioned pretty quick?

Pattern recognition, got to be pattern recognition.

Ahem. While I disagree with some of the more vehement criticisms of my work, I will admit that looking back on The Open Door makes me cringe at times. I remember having a blast at the time of writing, especially at the start. Then things started to get weird. I was setting up plot points that were supposed to have long term pay off, but they ultimately got sidelined by other stuff. I kept going "Ooh, this is an interesting new way to branch off from here" and I had a few long term goals in mind, but after a point I looked back and I realized that somewhere along the line the plot had gone ballistic and I no longer had control of it. Which is a pity, because I never got to the part where New Chaos run into the CthulhuTech universe with every faction of canon 40k, every faction of Star Wars, Star Trek, Star Gate and Nanoha hot on their heels and baying for blood. Ah, c'est la vie.

But, having lived from the inside, I can tell you what the common thread for every one of these stories where you start out loving them but at best feel apathy for them towards the end. Quite frankly, as they get bigger it becomes obvious that the authours no longer have any damned idea what they are doing anymore. You start out with a collection of long term goals and some neat ideas. You're going to go from A to D by passing through points B and C and you're doing it in a hot rod. But somewhere between B and C, you notice that point E is just a little out of the way but if you go there you can pick up a sweet paint job along the way. Once you get to E you notice some interesting stuff over at G, and you can then swing around through F to get to D. A few months later you're sitting at point 5 wondering where the letters went, and you're driving around some sort of hybrid between a tank and fighter jet that has terrible mileage and doesn't run very well. You realize that to get to where you originally wanted to go, you're going to have to make a long slog with frequent refuelling stops, and at that point walking away from your monstrosity or setting fire to the ammo supply (which you don't remember adding in the first place).

This is why for me, even through the 'my writing from yesteryear is terrible' glasses I can say that Thousand Shinji was better than The Open Door. Even towards the end when I was starting to get sick of the story I managed to use the rails provided by the original story to let me barrel into the finish line instead of wandering off into the wilderness. The Open Door had no such guides and instead of having any goals at all started off as a weird joke that evolved into something grand and terrible, full of narrative decisions I regretted later. I am fairly certain that even if they maintain that they know what they are doing, the authours of similar megaworks have similarly lost control of their creations.

 

Unquestionably true AN. I don't think it's possible to write something large and stay on the rails. As an author it's hard enough to stay on the rails for something small and specific. Keeping it going when you're writing a serial or series that can go on as long as you want is impossible; you think of too many cool things and don't have enough stopping you from adding them. At best you end up with mountains of filler and at worst you end up with a mess that ends up in a different genre from where you started. (Hi Might and Magic and your crazy omnicidal space robots)

 

This is probably because Madoka does everything Sailor Nothing did but about a thousand times better.

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Epsilon

 

Honestly I really don't hate Last Firebender that much. Oh there are a lot of things in the early chapters that make me cringe*, and it's far to long. But overall, I'm not to unhappy with what I wrote.

Then again, it isn't technically my first fic. My first fic never even made it to getting posted and none of you are ever seeing it. Though I still maintain the premise wasn't bad......

Wait, no... I remember my first fanfic. Yeah, on second thought the first stuff I wrote defiantly qualifies for 'want to take a match to it." It's not merely terrible fanfic, it's terrible fanfic of terrible fanfic.

*

Spoiler

CAPS FOR YELLING IS A GREAT WRITING TECHNIQUE FOR DRAMATIC SCENES

Hey, I loved Might and Magic's space robots.

 

Guardian54's SupCom/ME stories. I'm sad to say that I enjoyed the first one (because I looked at it as a form of crack) then enjoyed the StarCraft fic in the same universe... then it all went down hill and has since landed in a pool of septic waste.

 

I dropped it the moment I realized that he was using the freaking point system and by now its pretty much SupCom wanking.

 

My first fic... It was a french fic about Naruto. Now, I hate Naruto, I hate this fic, I hate past me for writing it. *shudder*