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I can totally understand why people like badfic, and mediocrefic, and stuff that's competently executed but uninteresting to me. Aside from hatereading and just enjoying it anyway because it's funny, there's a whole world of ideas and some people simply care about different aspects of canon and want different things from what they're reading. Sometimes they don't care at all about simple standards that other people consider fundamental to a good reading experience - like, you know, punctuation, or coherence - and care exclusively about other things that other people, like for instance me, only want as far from our reading material as possible, like a certain style of characterization or a particular kink. Those people are out there making and consuming fanfiction for each other and having a good time, and the presence of the stuff they enjoy making it harder to find the stuff I enjoy is just an unfortunate side-effect of it coexisting in the same fandom; nobody's failing at anything, except our community at creating filterable tags that reliably separate the two subgenres.
But looking at bad fanart is completely different. Obviously producing less expert and less sophisticated art is a normal and natural outcome of an artist practicing and honing and perfecting their skills. And the fact that not everybody notices, for example, when the joints don't go the right direction and other anatomical impossibilities is adequately proved by the Hawkeye Initiative. There's a further swathe of variation in results that works analogously to the situation with written fanworks, because people find different styles appealing, or different effects.
But there's definitely a lot of fanart that is just not good, like because it visibly is trying and failing to capture the likeness of a particular actor, for example, or because it mostly manages to achieve a style but then loses it in spots and winds up with, you know, a giant hammer instead of a foot - the kind of stuff you see in janky anime that was produced on a low budget and a too-short deadline. It's often impossible for me to imagine the artist failing to notice the problem when it's a question of a spotty result like this.
And beyond that, the much bigger question is: what is driving other people to share bad fanart? Can it really be THAT common that what fans are interested in and value in fanart doesn't include a realistic work actually resembling the character it's trying to capture? (To say nothing of all the other elements of a work of art.) What DO those people want out of fanart? Sometimes it seems that some people don't want anything out of fanart at all - that their attitude is like that of a primary school art teacher, and the entire value of the fanart to them is in the fact that somebody was moved to make it. Which philosophically is fine and admirable, like from the point of view of an archivist, or a debate about fanworks and community... but is a weird standard to apply for sharing art on their personal blogs. Unless they just have a blog dedicated to every piece of fanart in X fandom they can find, in which case carry on, because at least that's what it says on the tin.
But looking at bad fanart is completely different. Obviously producing less expert and less sophisticated art is a normal and natural outcome of an artist practicing and honing and perfecting their skills. And the fact that not everybody notices, for example, when the joints don't go the right direction and other anatomical impossibilities is adequately proved by the Hawkeye Initiative. There's a further swathe of variation in results that works analogously to the situation with written fanworks, because people find different styles appealing, or different effects.
But there's definitely a lot of fanart that is just not good, like because it visibly is trying and failing to capture the likeness of a particular actor, for example, or because it mostly manages to achieve a style but then loses it in spots and winds up with, you know, a giant hammer instead of a foot - the kind of stuff you see in janky anime that was produced on a low budget and a too-short deadline. It's often impossible for me to imagine the artist failing to notice the problem when it's a question of a spotty result like this.
And beyond that, the much bigger question is: what is driving other people to share bad fanart? Can it really be THAT common that what fans are interested in and value in fanart doesn't include a realistic work actually resembling the character it's trying to capture? (To say nothing of all the other elements of a work of art.) What DO those people want out of fanart? Sometimes it seems that some people don't want anything out of fanart at all - that their attitude is like that of a primary school art teacher, and the entire value of the fanart to them is in the fact that somebody was moved to make it. Which philosophically is fine and admirable, like from the point of view of an archivist, or a debate about fanworks and community... but is a weird standard to apply for sharing art on their personal blogs. Unless they just have a blog dedicated to every piece of fanart in X fandom they can find, in which case carry on, because at least that's what it says on the tin.
