badfic galore

[insaneneko]

I picked out a couple of Hikago doujinshi from the top of the top box (I have four boxes of Hikago doujinshi stacked on top of each other). Turned out that the random (and lazy) choice does not yield the best results. First one was not bad. It was pure romantic melodrama that recast the Sai-Hikaru relationship very differently, resulting in a wonderfully screwed-up Hikaru. Throw in a gay Akira and you get fun times. Especially a gay Akira who is pining after a very, very straight (and oblivious) Ashiwara. Very WTF, but it somehow worked. XD; The flashback to the angsty (and tragic) past, written in very fancy font, was the perfect touch (if hard to read thanks to the fancy font). Classic fanfic, I tell ya. Not very good, but satisfying.

The second one I picked up was also "classic," but in the bad sense. It was a fantasy AU where Hikaru is a supernatural being called the "Crown." My first problem with it (besides the absurd premise with some really wacky geopolitics that I don't really want to get into right now) is that because "Crown" was always written in katakana I kept thinking it read "Clown." Sorry, a supernatural being called the "Clown" inspires nothing but derision in me. Especially when the name comes from a supposedly ancient organization that seems to only have Japanese members. These completely inappropriate uses of English just drive me bonkers. Why not stick with a nice Japanese or pseudo-Chinese name instead of using (dorky) English? Or at least use kanji instead of katakana to write the name out since all foreign loan words used to be written in kanji....In any case, the story itself was weak because it tried to mash too many divergent cliches together, but then ended with what basically amounted to a deux ex machina.

It starts off with the immortal "Crown" (*snorts*) waiting for his beloved to be reborn. This is one of those immortal-mortal romances with the immortal pining for the mortal for most of the time, happily reuniting with the reborn mortal, then is sadly parted from the mortal when the mortal dies. This set-up is not bad in and of itself (though overused). What just killed me was that in the end we find out that the "Crown" is the friggin CREATOR OF THE UNIVERSE. Why the hell does the creator not just yank his beloved out of the cycle of reincarnation instead of pining after him? Does he like being tragic or something? Bored after an eternity of existence and wants some spice in his life? Why have a little cat-and-mouse game with an organization that totally misunderstands what the "Crown" is instead of sending them away and/or making them forget--if not actually setting them straight at the very beginning instead of indulging them in their pursuit? It's such a failure of imagination when you end up making a character waaay too powerful to have ever been troubled by anything that happened in your story.

Maybe I should just look for the ones with the pretty pictures. *sighs*

Comments

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I hate seeing inappropriate usage of English. My favorite one was a Japanese fanfic author using random idioms that you must memorize for tests as topics for fanfic. Or just plain ungrammatical or really stupid English used as titles. The thing was, also, in all of these fandoms the setting completely non-Western to boot, so there was no reason to even use English, or Engrish, for that matter.