Wax's Theory of Bad Fanart

[cimorene]

wax: Man, I HATE fanart. There are so many ways it can go wrong!

wax: More ways than with bad fanfic! Or worse, because it's all at once, anyway, whereas with bad fanfic, you get it in small chunks that you can digest. But with fanart, it's like "WAUGH! I SUCK!" It's like someone who tells really bad jokes all the time.

cim: Wait. How is bad fanart like somebody who tells bad jokes all the time?

wax: Because it's embarrassing?


cim: I don't know if this really counts as meta.
wax: It's totally meta! I was being wise!

Comments

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

I love bad fanart more than badfic. While I find badfic amusing if other people are just c&ping bits for me or something, it's really annoying to come across on my own when I actually want to read a fic. But bad fanart is always good.

[phineasjones.livejournal.com]

omg, i totally agree with wax. bad fanart makes my skin crawl. as does badfic, but i feel i have more power to quit the badfic before it gets really bad. the bad fanart leaves you no time to escape.

[almostnever.livejournal.com]

I like fanart for the same reason. If it's bad, you can dismiss it at a glance. You can waste all kinds of time reading fan fiction before you know if it's really bad or not. With fanart you know right away.

[annlarimer.livejournal.com]

Bad fanfic requires your active participation.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

I actually find bad fanart kind of traumatising a lot of times - enough to not bother clicking on it, even though it can also be entertaining. I don't have that level of aversion to badfic, even though it's true that the TRULY WORST badfic has a traumatising power even worse than fanart's worst powers. Sometimes badfic leaves me still obsessing over it days later and bursting out with "But why is he a stripper?" or "If he was such an asshole, what was he doing in the Peace Corps to begin with?" or "But if he wasn't really travelling in time, why did they find all the physical evidence of that place he visited?"

[cimness.livejournal.com]

I rarely dismiss bad fanart at a glance - my attention is grabbed and my eye travels all around, discovering all the ways the person is deformed or whatever. You could say the trainwreck effect was much stronger.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

EXACTLY. "Waugh! I suck!" vs. a much more gradual "I suck in THIS way and THIS way and hahaha, now the protagonist is trying to commit date-rape, and I can't even punctuate dialogue..." and, you know, when you reach the part where Rodney is found trying to drown himself on the pier because John thinks he's fat or the part where Pete gives Patrick syphilis, you can just hit the back button.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

More active than fanart, but reading is only a real sport when the spelling and punctuation and line spacing are so screwy that you keep having to read everything three times and draw mental diagrams to figure out what happened.