#is central to the entire concept of fanfic imo

[ravenkings]

my spicy hot take of the day is that fanfiction as a medium is inextricably tied up with the capitalist mode of media production

[freakywizard]

hiii r&m anon here again!!! i noticed you mentioned liking season 7, so i was wondering if you had any favorite or least favourite episodes, plotlines, all that jazz. season 7 debrief, if you will. would love to hear your thoughts!

ram anon gracing my inbox once again (always a pleasure)

huge rant below the cut (talking about rick and morty triggers the longwinded newspaper art critic in me sorry)

s7e2 and e4 were the best episodes in my opinion. absurd, darkly funny, overall just so perfect. i was especially excited about s7e2 since the rick/jerry dynamic has intrigued me since episode s3e5. i love that that episode basically just confirmed Rick and Jerry may be foils but are also perfect complements? they can only understand / appreciate each other when they are literally existing in each other's flesh? i try not to wax poetic about ram but this episode was tempting meeeee

and re: e4, i think this show's writing is at its best when the writers come up with a stupid concept and treat it seriously. i love that this episode saw the concept of 'what if corpse spaghetti' through to the end. classic dark comedy, absurd, wacky goodness. lovee it

one thing i do hate about this season (as well as seasons 5 and 6) is the number of callbacks to 'old' rick and morty. s7e3 and s7e8 were some of the worst episodes this season, mostly because they just reused old plotlines and developed them in the least interesting ways possible, imo. did the mid gag from s3e5 really need its own episode? it really did not. i think that this is one of the worst consequences of the show becoming less episodic and more serialized - the writers just endlessly milk the early seasons to recycle into plotlines, one-off gags, whatever. the self-referentiality and meta humor of newer seasons will always, always grind my gears severely.

also, s7e7 was almost unwatchable. it reminded me of s6e2 in all the worst ways - just dedicating an entire episode to a SINGLE movie reference, doubling down on the singular reference as the episode drags on. god that episode sucked. so boring, annoying, unfunny.

i have extremely mixed feelings on s7e5. On the one hand, I'm still annoyed that the backstory from s3e1 is even canon, and Rick is yet another entry in the long tradition of flawed male protagonists turned into a nihilistic depressed shitshow by the death of a wife. it's such a pat trope, imo.

HOWEVER, i really like how this episode developed Rick. I'll always be a fan of ruthlessness and revenge plotlines, so im biased. but i've come to appreciate Rick Prime as a villain, as a testament to how much Rick hates himself -- there's a version of himself out there that would torture himself across the universe by killing off his own loved ones, just to try to prove his own superiority? it's all very mindfucky but im super into it. Rick C137 killing Prime with his fists, all while Prime goads him? it was such a cool scene. i love when the show does selfcest

i also still have mixed feelings on the evil morty and his growing prominence in the series. it was nice when he was just a little treat, but it became clear in s4 the writers were aware of fan expectations for the character. i can't help but wonder if that's shaped the way they're writing him, especially giving him the centralized role in the story of possible-future-final-antagonist? that being said i've always liked evil morty, he's a fun character to watch on screen. although i'm extremely cautious of my enjoyment. he's already starting to feel like a fanfic rip-off of himself a little bit (that one line where he said 'well, they don't call me good morty' was so bizarre. evil morty was the fandom name for him, and the writers adopted it and made it a diegetic epithet for the character???????)

s7e10 was refreshing after a long season of Morty getting sidelined. I love how this one starts with a classic rick and morty set-up (what if *weird thing* in *random place*) but turns it into existential horror? really cool. i don't think it was the most subtle way to do morty character development, but it was interesting enough that i was invested. also, rick pinning morty's picture to the pinboard. so good

overall my reaction to this season is 'we're so back.' it was LEAGUES better than s5-6, which i think are like the ram dark ages. i don't think s7 was the best season yet (as some are suggesting) but I think that this season marks a positive turn for the quality of writing in the show.!!

here's my episode ranking in ( i mostly did this for fun)

E2

E5

E4

E10

E6

E1

E3

E9

E7

E8

Basically, e7 and e8 were irredeemably terrible. e9, e3, and e1 were mid/fine. e6, e10, e4, e5, and e2 were all varying degrees of peak rick and morty.

other mics. thoughts:

i felt like there was a lot of long, no dialogue, sad music montages that felt like references to the famous scene from s4e8? the one from s7e4 comes to mind immediately. but there were another few sprinkled in

s7e3 rick telling a scientologist "worship how you want" ??? he would not say that. who let that slide in the writing room?

the fight scenes and gore were all really well animated!! since s3 the animation has only gotten better and i love the gore

i actually love the new VAs. they're different from roiland, obviously, but i honestly think they're both doing a better job. the performances are more naturalistic, and less grating? i thought the change would weird me out, but it's subtle, and i like it

Rick canonically bad at eating pussy in his youth

[chronotopes]

Hello I would like to hear more of your thoughts behind what makes characters feel like OCs because this, like what makes something feel like a fanfic (a feeling I often seek out on purpose!) is a subject of fascination, and you have good thoughts about writing!

a) omg thank you so much

b) yikes all right i’ll try

c) this turned into a giant wall of text i’m so sorry. the tl;dr of it is that fanfiction and original fiction are both Good but they’re also Different for reasons of why the audience is reading the work in the first place. 

more under the cut. way more than anybody asked for. 

the thing is i always feel like i come off as an elitist when i say these kinds of things, and i genuinely don’t mean to. like… my concept is that fanfic is great and i also seek out things that Feel Like Fanfic, i just also feel like . okay. 

part one: when it’s good (aka the bit you actually asked me about)

the writing styles and the approaches to material of fanfic and original fiction are different. like i feel like.. not in a bad way at all, fanfic is a more emotional medium. if it’s good i’d call it “emotionally honest” - you see a lot more h/c in fic for instance, if it’s bad it’s more “emotionally exploitative” but it’s emotional either way. that’s the main tenet, and it’s something i like seeing in origfic to a certain degree! and fanfic also places a great deal of emphasis on characters we know and love - how they meet how they like each other how they banter what it would be like if they were monster truck drivers etc 

fanfiction, imo, often serves to fill the gaps the audience sees in fiction with regards to this kind of stuff. hurt, comfort, human interaction, recovery from trauma that canon might have glossed over. which is all great! 

all this in itself is great to have in original fiction, and also has existed in original fiction. i read an advance reader’s copy of this book called ‘a gentleman’s guide to vice and virtue’ a few months back, and it Felt Like A Fanfic™… in the sense that it had a great deal of upfront emotional honesty, wacky hijinx, gay romance, and representation in a period setting. do i think the book had some flaws in terms of character voice that fanfic also shares? quite possibly. was it a good book, in my opinion? hell yes! 

so.. part 2: when it’s bad

i think that when i say something “felt like a fanfic” in a bad way, i mean that it’s very… image-oriented, i guess? like there’s a 2014 tumblr vibe that is “long list of aus that are really cute/funny when you read them on paper” and then it depends entirely on execution. some fics that come from prompt lists like that are great. but i think there’s something in the essence of reading a post that’s like “au where enjolras and grantaire are bird people and grantaire always polishes enjolras’ feathers” and then writing a fic based on that 

that works for fanfic, bc fanfic goes off of characters that already exist within a coherent plot, but does not so much work for original fiction. like this sounds weird to say, because of course most original fiction is based on an idea, but i find that when a concept is executed in original fiction just because it sounds funny, or endearing, or differs from the Established Order of fiction in some meaningful way.. there’s not a lot of substance contained within it. 

and i guess there’s a certain approach to characters/style that works in fanfic but doesn’t work in origfic? this is easiest to use with a personal example, but - from late 2014 to late 2016, everything ! everything i wrote had the same structure, revolved around the same dynamic of two pretty teenagers with names and hair colors swapped, and featured some kind of exciting fantasy gimmick and a poorly-executed tumblr-y social commentary. “but katia, maybe you were just a bad writer back then,” i remind myself, and like: fair, but i think a great deal of the habits i picked up back then came from surrounding myself to too far of an extent with fanfiction “culture”, so to speak. 

in conclusion

 i guess my central thesis when i make these kinds of salty posts is that fanfiction conventions are great within fanfiction, but it’s always a good idea to think critically about what contexts/audiences/purposes fanfic has that separates it from original fiction. the two writing styles - at least in the ya world - have been sliding closer together over the past couple of years. (i found a book about fake dating while volunteering at the library! hetero fake dating.) some of that’s good, some of that’s harmless, but some of it, i think , kind of counteracts the level of texture and thought that goes into original fiction. 

an alternative way to look at it, though, is that good fiction always exists, and is usually influenced by the conventions of the time, and bad fiction is also impacted by trends. bad ya fiction existed in 2007 and it exists now… i just think bad ya fiction in 2017 has a bit more in common with bad fanfiction now than it did then. 

so like. fanfiction good, but also fanfiction and original fiction are demonstrably different with regards to purpose context audience and therefore their writing styles, so it’s a good idea for writers of fiction to think about that. and i’m only so adamant about this because it’s something i had to figure out.