#ao3's tagging system makes it infinitely easier to track down the exact same scene done better and without shit talking your own tools

[mantisgodiveblog]

First off: “ We want to know if Siffrin would actually eat it if presented with One (1) raw potato during snack time.” I feel like he would. He is so ‘commit to the bit until I (perhaps literally) drop dead’. Secondly: Yeah, I can understand getting sick of seeing the same repetitive tropes! Somehow fanfic feels bite sized enough anything goes for me, but in actual books? Sometimes they feel like a nothing sandwich made of the same tropes as the last sandwich I just had.

We think that Bonnie should commit to the bit and start feeding Siffrin One whole raw potato, on grounds that it would be funny. Going to make the man commit to the bit so hard he gets food poisoning.

It's the other way around with us, honestly. Because fanfiction uses pre-established characters, all of the little ways in which poorly-handled tropes warp characterization become immediately evident. You're taking a character with their own particular personality and fitting it to a mold, and the contrast between the once-was and the is-here makes it so that every little crack is blindingly obvious. You see the shape of the roles that the characters are forced into, time and time again, and you see precisely where characters splinter to fit that, because you have that before and after comparison to show precisely where the traits are being selected.

The bite-sized-ness of fanfiction makes it a bit worse, honestly. It condenses it down to hit just the key points, and if you don't have the longform fic time to show the progress, it's all the more evident what you're introducing to get things over with in a quick period of time. We aren't immune to this, of course - we've probably got our fair share of distortions, especially in AU work - but the way that it narrows down differences to just the shift in author perception shines a brilliant spotlight on these little cracks, at least from our perspective.

It's not as though published books don't have their own flaws, but there's nothing to expose a bias like working with something people already have a vantage point on, and there's absolutely nothing that shows a critical gap in judgment as much as an author horrifically fumbling a scenario you've seen done infinitely better with the exact same characters multiple times before. Everyone working with the same tools means that it's much easier to judge execution, and it also, unfortunately, lets you know precisely who doesn't know to use the tools they've got without twisting them into something fundamentally different.