+Remove Head from Sphincter

Just more evidence that popularity doesn't make something good.

The other day I was looking at the site fanfiction.net. I'm a longtime user. I've been on it since back in 2001 when they were first getting big, and before everybody and their brother thought they were a professional writer. I was browsing the Dragonball Z section, because I think we can all agree that anything that combines potty humor with ass kicking is pretty freakin' sweet, and ran across possibly the biggest atrocity in the history of fan fiction. The entire story was centered and triple spaced, the dialogue was flat and infantile, and characterization was non-existent. I felt like I was reading a daytime soap opera written by a blind baby on crack. I won't link it because I don't want to subject my readers to it. I thought to myself, self, surely nobody could subject their eyes to this unfortunate massacre of the English language! Nobody will actually read this until the end and review it! You know I don't say this often, but I was wrong. That hideous attempt at coherency had over 200 reviews, and many of them were positive. I'm sure you would have shared my incredulity had you read the train wreck that was that piece. I couldn't even get past the first three paragraphs. It was basically unintelligible to somebody of normal verbal skills. The author, and I use the term loosely, was obviously either twelve years old, or spoke English as a second language. And yet this monstrosity had more reviews than some of the best stories I've read.

On a different occasion, I was browsing the titles and saw a story that said in the description "AU/OOC" which, for those of you who haven't had the misfortune of having this concept explained to you, means Alternate Universe and Out of Character. The gist of this is that it's set in someplace other than the setting of the show/book/whatever and the character's personality has been twisted beyond recognition. If you're not wondering the same thing I am, you should be. Why is a story that is set in a different place with characters who are, for all intents and purposes, not the same as they are in the story on which the fan fiction is based, written as fan fiction? If the setting and characters are different, what the hell is the same? Why is it considered fan fiction at all? Isn't that really an original? Why use a character with the same name if they're not the same? It baffles me. Yet pieces of tripe like this are reviewed up the ass with the all important "this iz greet!!! eye love it!!!! UR SO KEWL!!!!111" critiques. Meanwhile, I and other authors toil away actually writing something with depth, meaning, and that insignificant detail known as grammar, and get next to nothing in the way of reviews or readers. In fact, the more reviews a story has, no matter how shitty it is, the more reviews it's likely to get, like it's one big contest to see who can most loudly agree with what the person before them said.

Let's take a look at the media. Millions of copies of "Gossip Girl" and "Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" are sold, but nobody will pick up a history book, or even something only slightly above their pathetic intellect such as an Anne Bishop novel, or Harper Lee's classic To Kill a Mockingbird. People will watch the highly intellectual "Scary Movie" films, but show them a deep, thoughtful movie such as The Legend of Bagger Vance and they'd rather eat their own shorts than sit through it. Titanic won how many awards? And don't even get me started on Star Wars. That disaster isn't even worth the eight dollars you pay to see it in the theater, let alone the millions of dollars spent to make it, but people keep buying it because it's "acclaimed" or because the bright, flashing lights entrance them so they can't look away. I could sell any idiot a pile of shit in a paper bag as long as I told them it was critically acclaimed. We've moved into the age of not thinking. Let's just let the media tell us what's good. We've started looking more at the opinion than the actual thing. The more reviews, the more acclaimed, the more people will say it's acclaimed or amazing because they don't want to be seen as wrong or ignorant.

Here's what I think, which is naturally the right opinion: People need to stop listening to what everybody and their brother says about something and just think for themselves for once. If you read a story, even if only a few people have reviewed and liked it, then say something! Don't allow the lack of reviews to influence the way you view a piece. Don't let how people critique a film or TV show or book to influence your thoughts on it. Grow a brain and ask yourself what you thought of it! Quit letting the people around you pull your strings until you don't even know who's in control. Maybe if people would actually read for themselves, they wouldn't give a piece of shit a good review just because everybody else said it was good. Maybe if people took their heads out of their asses and thought for themselves, something that wasn't half assed and crapped out like the Wachowski brothers' latest disaster (or last three if you want to get technical about it) would get some attention. However, as usual, I live in an ideal world or my own creation and everybody else sucks, so I'm dreaming. Man, people blow hard.

Get me out of here!