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oh, i meant to tell you guys...
16 Feb 2008 05:10 pmThe other day someone at fandom_lounge asked for Pride & Prejudice recs. Call me crazy, but I tend to assume that when a book is one of the top, what, five? in the English language and has been in the public domain for decades, with a well-known pro fanfic industry around it, if there were any really good derivative works about it they'd generally be a) professionally published1 and b) well-known2.
So I only clicked for the LOLz. And boy did they come. My first target was what someone referred to as her absolute favourite, presumably the best, although she implied she had a sizeable list of recs she could later make available.
Said favourite started off like a canon remix, needlessly re-narrating all the same events of canon with oodles of borrowed dialogue and even narration since she used the same POV. At first I had no idea why she'd bothered with so much rehashing, until she first departed from canon with Elizabeth's instant suspicion of Wickham. The badfic soon revealed itself as P&P with all the misunderstandings, which is to say all the plot, removed.
Soon after Elizabeth actually said! To Darcy! During the dance!: "He's a rather smooth character your Mr. Wickham" [punctuation decidedly SIC the badthor]. Let me repeat that.
Elizabeth, to Darcy, during the steps of the dance: He's a rather smooth character your Mr. Wickham.
I. I. Uh.
AHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
1. Unless they were slash. But if it breaks the D/E and B/J OTPs it's automatically bad in my book! *judging*
2. I mean, if you look around, you will hear about, for example, derivative works of Gone with the Wind, Jane Eyre (Wide Sargasso Sea \o/), Sherlock Holmes (the latter - actually good or not? It's debatable, but some of them are at least literary even though most of them are just as bad as 90% of Holmes/Watson fanfic). You'll hear about P&P fic too: what you'll hear is that it's not only poorly-written, but poorly-researched and gets all the details of canon/period wrong.
So I only clicked for the LOLz. And boy did they come. My first target was what someone referred to as her absolute favourite, presumably the best, although she implied she had a sizeable list of recs she could later make available.
Said favourite started off like a canon remix, needlessly re-narrating all the same events of canon with oodles of borrowed dialogue and even narration since she used the same POV. At first I had no idea why she'd bothered with so much rehashing, until she first departed from canon with Elizabeth's instant suspicion of Wickham. The badfic soon revealed itself as P&P with all the misunderstandings, which is to say all the plot, removed.
Soon after Elizabeth actually said! To Darcy! During the dance!: "He's a rather smooth character your Mr. Wickham" [punctuation decidedly SIC the badthor]. Let me repeat that.
Elizabeth, to Darcy, during the steps of the dance: He's a rather smooth character your Mr. Wickham.
I. I. Uh.
AHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
1. Unless they were slash. But if it breaks the D/E and B/J OTPs it's automatically bad in my book! *judging*
2. I mean, if you look around, you will hear about, for example, derivative works of Gone with the Wind, Jane Eyre (Wide Sargasso Sea \o/), Sherlock Holmes (the latter - actually good or not? It's debatable, but some of them are at least literary even though most of them are just as bad as 90% of Holmes/Watson fanfic). You'll hear about P&P fic too: what you'll hear is that it's not only poorly-written, but poorly-researched and gets all the details of canon/period wrong.
