Fanfic summaries that don't inspire you to read the story

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Re: Fanfic summaries that don't inspire you to read the stor

Postby Pata Hikari » Sun Oct 01, 2017 11:54 am

"Trained Attack Lobsters" is one of the greatest sequences of three words in any story ever written.
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Re: Fanfic summaries that don't inspire you to read the stor

Postby Ellen Kuhfeld » Sun Oct 01, 2017 2:13 pm

I used "Bonsai Liberation Front" to scare Principal Kuno away. He feared for his little palm tree. And really -- Sailor Jupiter should use a Coconut Storm on him.
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Re: Fanfic summaries that don't inspire you to read the stor

Postby PCHeintz72 » Sun Oct 01, 2017 5:43 pm

horde of ravenous gophers?
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Re: Fanfic summaries that don't inspire you to read the stor

Postby Ellen Kuhfeld » Mon Oct 02, 2017 8:35 am

At least in our D&D campaign, both rats and/or wombats worked better than gophers. Summaries involving either gophers or wombats would not convince me to read the story. Rats? Maybe, if they're used well.
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Re: Fanfic summaries that don't inspire you to read the stor

Postby Té Rowan » Mon Oct 02, 2017 10:42 am

Sorry for a lame-broken post…
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Re: Fanfic summaries that don't inspire you to read the stor

Postby Té Rowan » Mon Oct 02, 2017 10:46 am

Pata Hikari wrote:I'm posting again to this thread because I found it.

The worst fanfic summary ever.


The goddess of reincarnation, cheat abilities, & the multiverse falls in love with an SI!OC shortly before he dies, causing him to be reincarnated in the Ranma 1/2 world as Ranma's younger twin brother. 6 months later he gains the Gamer Ability. Will the SI!OC tell anyone about his ability? His reincarnation? His knowledge of the future? What waves will he cause? Pairings Undecided

Oh, **** – and I was just done repressing that load of awfulness!
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Re: Fanfic summaries that don't inspire you to read the stor

Postby Pata Hikari » Mon Oct 02, 2017 7:46 pm

You shall never forget this pain.
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Re: Fanfic summaries that don't inspire you to read the stor

Postby Spica75 » Mon Oct 02, 2017 11:53 pm

I'm merely observing that the vast majority of the time this leads to a badly written character, because the author is using lazy shortcuts instead of trying to get into the head of the character their modifying and portraying them in character.


:roll:

And this is where you're being stupidly prejudiced. Using tags like that have absolutely NOTHING to do with how good OR bad characters are written. Or do you actually believe that people come up with the tag first and THEN write the story?

People start writing, then when posting they try to come up with the tag that they think fits their take on the character best.


So, uh, what's hypocritical about this?

Tags should contain information about the major characters involved in the story, properties of the story such as AU, Divergence, etc. And any trigger warnings for sensitive content like violence or sexual assault.


You complain about the use of tags and then state that they should be used exactly the way you complain about them.
Except when they are the tags YOU specifically don't like, because obviously, everyone should know and abide by that.
Yes, that is hypocritical.

None of those tags I mentioned had to do with awful bad and dumb character modifiers like Rational!Nanoha.

Tags should contain information about the major characters involved in the story, properties of the story such as AU, Divergence

Which is exactly where your kind of "awful bad and dumb character modifiers" belong.

Well in the first place this thread is all about posting summaries that don't inspire you to read the story, therefore it is entirely about "preferences"


Yes. But you asserted specifically that "character modifiers" ALWAYS meant poorly written characters or something(not to mention your absolutely ridiculous assertion above that such tags are thought up first, which they rarely are, and just as an aside i might add that the majority of writers both professional and not actually DO use simple archetypes as their starting point for their characters, so even if fanfic writers DID start with those tags, why would that even matter?).

Which is pure prejudice and/or lack of experience on your part. And it is in fact fairly common to use those tags exactly because the majority of people consider them useful.
There's even people who read NOTHING but stories using just a few specific tags(yes, this is also quite ridiculous, but it's real, and the one time i tried sorting like that, it DID work to find more good fics than by just looking at random, so the tags CAN definitely be used liked that).
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Re: Fanfic summaries that don't inspire you to read the stor

Postby Spica75 » Mon Oct 02, 2017 11:56 pm

Pata Hikari wrote:I'm posting again to this thread because I found it.

The worst fanfic summary ever.


Ok, that one i think i can pretty much agree with. I'm sure there are worse somewhere, but it's going to be extremely hard finding them due to rarity.

Worst kind of Gary Stu combined with, i don't even know how many bad ideas. *shudder*
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Re: Fanfic summaries that don't inspire you to read the stor

Postby Pata Hikari » Tue Oct 03, 2017 2:02 am

Spica75 wrote:And this is where you're being stupidly prejudiced. Using tags like that have absolutely NOTHING to do with how good OR bad characters are written. Or do you actually believe that people come up with the tag first and THEN write the story?

People start writing, then when posting they try to come up with the tag that they think fits their take on the character best.


Harry Potter is not a goth.

So if your story has Goth!Harry in the summary that tells me you do not have the character Harry Potter in your story so why would I want to read a Harry Potter fanfic that does not, in fact, have Harry Potter in it?

Spica75 wrote:You complain about the use of tags and then state that they should be used exactly the way you complain about them.
Except when they are the tags YOU specifically don't like, because obviously, everyone should know and abide by that.
Yes, that is hypocritical.


No. I'm talking about a story which deliberately makes central character wildly out of character, them. These tags tell me the author is doing this, which is bad, which means I won't read them.

You seem confused. I'm not complaining about the tag, I'm complaining about the writing the tag is being used to signify.

Spica75 wrote:Which is exactly where your kind of "awful bad and dumb character modifiers" belong.


No, it is not.

"information about the major characters involved in the story" means exactly that. Who stars in the story? Who's the central character? Is this focused on the canon main character or a side character. This is the exact opposite of a "character modifier" this is me seeing a story with the "Ukyo" tag and expecting Ukyo to be a central character in the story.

"Properties of the story such as AU, Divergence" is, again, not character any sort of character modifiers, but rather the story's relationship to the canon source's timeline of events and the story's setting.

Spica75 wrote:Yes. But you asserted specifically that "character modifiers" ALWAYS meant poorly written characters or something


I said, and I quote "Thanks for telling me you replaced the main characters with Mary Sues of your own creation with their names!"

They lead to bad fanfiction because if you're using these modifier tags it means that you've essentially stripped out the characterization of the canon character and replaced it with some new characterization that fits whatever the modifier broadly means. This is bad.

Spica75 wrote:Which is pure prejudice and/or lack of experience on your part.


Ahahahahahahah nope! This is from tons of experience seeing these awful, awful stories with these sorts of modifiers. I'm not going to bother to read anymore stories that have DIsco!Cloud and other such things in them because I've read tons of them and it's always, always a sign of shallow shortcut characterization and a poor fanfic.
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Re: Fanfic summaries that don't inspire you to read the stor

Postby Drawde » Tue Oct 03, 2017 3:36 am

Sturgeon's law: 90+% of everything is garbage.

It's just that most of the authors using character tags came relatively recently. Back before sites like FFN came out you either had to have your own site or have someone host your stories. And most of the links were put in by people that liked that site. If no one liked your site (say for bad stories) no one linked to it. And if it was a hosting site they usually made sure the stories were edited in addition to having to like the story to post it.

In the early days of FFN stories were either reposted there or were mainly by already established authors. But over time others discovered how easy it was to post their stories there (and other sites like it) without bothering with the editing. Including of the quality. As time went on you were more likely to find out that current stories needed editing or rewriting.

So most of the character tag usage came out when it was harder to find good stories, thus most of the summaries with them weren't good.

Though I do agree in part. Most times I see those tags the author changes everything else as well, and shallowly as you said. But a good author that uses those tags could make JUST that the change in the story, with the story being how canon changes with that one change.

You've just had the bad luck of running into the bad stories like that WITH the tags. Plenty of the good older stories could have those same tags added to their summaries. Good luck finding the good stories with them though :(
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Re: Fanfic summaries that don't inspire you to read the stor

Postby Dumbledork » Fri Oct 06, 2017 6:31 am

Then there are stories where the summary is not too bad, but once you read the warnings you know right away that you don't want to have anything to do with it; like this one:

Harry Potter: Heir To The Frozen Throne
By: Warlock-Guardian 
Harry discovers that not is all that it seems when it comes to his Muggle-born mother. An ancient bloodline that has been hidden from the world for so long and a truth that was hidden is revealed. Harry is the great-grandson of Arthas Menethil; The Lich King, his Grandmother being Jaina Proudmoore; Grand Magus of the Kirin Tor. Some things will be changed - others will be broken.
Rated: Fiction M - English - Adventure/Fantasy - Harry P., Hermione G., Arthas Menethil, Jaina Proudmoore - Words: 4,428 - Reviews: 5 - Favs: 31 - Follows: 42 - Published: Oct 4 - id: 12676025


Summary: Harry Potter, the so-called Boy-Who-Lived and Hermione Granger are in
for a wake-up call when before everything that goes down during their 5th year;
something happens that changes both of their outlooks on everyone around them -
questions Harry had put away during his first year come to light and the truth
of both inheritances are about to bite Dumb-as-a-door on the backside... AU!
Events...

This is a Harry Potter/World Of Warcraft Crossover.

Warning:

There will be adult situations, blood-shed, violence, swearing etc and instances
of abuse to a minor (Dursleys...) in flashbacks. As you would suspect to happen
for those who are avid players of the video game series: World Of Warcraft and
its expansions.

Strong/Dark/Tactical!Harry and Hermione!, Dumbles is dumbles, as in manipulative
old coot, evil etc.

Pairings:

Harry/Hermione

Arthas/Jaina 3 (OTP)

For Your Consideration:

This -will- be a Dursleys (Vernon, mostly), Dumbledore, Molly & most of the
Weasley's bashing. Especially, Molly and Ginny. I -loathe- them both, but not as
bad as I hate Dumbledore and Vernon.
And that's the bottom line 'cause Dumbledork said so.

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Re: Fanfic summaries that don't inspire you to read the stor

Postby Spica75 » Fri Oct 06, 2017 10:04 am

Yeah, that's DEFINITELY a big and obvious NO!

Just proclaiming that it's a bashfic automatically shoves it to the bottom of the list, only maybe exception is for parodies, and barely that...
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Re: Fanfic summaries that don't inspire you to read the stor

Postby Cheb » Fri Oct 06, 2017 3:46 pm

I couldn't help mentioning trained attack lobsters in my fic :oops:
Last edited by Cheb on Fri Oct 06, 2017 3:51 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Fanfic summaries that don't inspire you to read the stor

Postby Pata Hikari » Fri Oct 06, 2017 3:48 pm

Cheb wrote:I couldn't help mentioning trained attack lobsters in my fic :oops:

Do not feel shame.

Embrace it.
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