gingerbread jamboree

Duuuuuuuuuuuude, gingerbread Taj Mahal.

AND THE TWIN TOWERS WITH A PLANE STICKING OUT. NO JOKE. WHAT? There's also this moving homeless Christmas.

And then an old-school log cabin, a Gothic cathedral and a shoe, like the kind that the Little Old Woman lived in, from the "not horribly wrong" book.

without badfic, there's a lot less to read.

Dear pretentious teenies,

It's probably a good idea, when using the stylistic tricks with which you hope to awe your audience, to either draw said audience in first and then sneak up on them with your ground-breaking unorthodoxy, or to hammer them over the head at the very start and hope they'll be too stunned and confused to back-button. If you strike an intermediate quantity of pretension, the odds are you will succeed in passing the limits of what the reader will accept before the story has had a chance to rack up any brownie points without impressing them enough for curiosity or interest to overcome the negative effect of the pretentious styling. This could result in your audience being limited, as soon as the first paragraph, to those people who, through indiscriminate or backward taste, like pretension.

This isn't to suggest that you should entirely camouflage what you may consider an essential part of your personality, or a laudable genius for florid adjectives, ungrammatical or semantically confused constructions, or needlessly incoherent points of view. You might just consider toning it down (or up) right at the beginning, without reducing the stylistic peculiarites of the piece as a whole. Many readers may be willing or even eager to be sucked in to a piece of badfic and read all the way to the end, no matter how poor they judge it, and find themselves sadly excluded from perusal of yours merely through a slight slip-up in your handling of pretentiousness. A little sensitivity in those crucial opening sentences and scenes could go a long way.

Yours hopefully,
cim