Why I like badfic

[cimorene]

I've thought about making a post like this a lot, because I read a lot of badfic, and I talk to a lot of people who don't, and it's something that most people don't understand. The question comes up directly, or by implication, a lot.

Reading badfic - even though I often choose good writing over it when I have the chance - is something that I enjoy for its own sake even when it does pain me, and not just in the "there was no good fic to read" way. It's a different experience, a difference in kind and a difference in degree at once. If reading good fiction is a dream about swimming deep underwater, then reading badfic is a thoughtful trance while you wade through a stream. Perhaps a more apt analogy is that reading badfic is like looking at child art, although strictly speaking the badfic of the unsophisticated adult and the child-like art of the unsophisticated adult differ in some significant ways from the art and writing of actual children (although certainly you find the writing of actual children in among badfic. Even in fandom, as their authors' notes so horrifyingly notify me).

In some recent meta posts like the one on access character and heroinisation I talked about how the body of fanon found in badfic lies closer to the fannish collective unconscious. In a recent meta post by somebody else associated, I think, with the "does fanfic make us poor" debate (unfortunately, I can't remember which), fanfiction was likened to primitive writing or storytelling. I would argue that this isn't true of all fanfiction, but it is true of badfic. Looking at a fandom's badfic shows you, eventually, a gradually emerging picture of the fannish collective unconscious as it applies to that fandom; it shows you the first storytelling impulses of many fans unfiltered by the additional processes which go into writing more sophisticated fiction.

At a certain early stage, a child's representations of other people are almost wholly symbolic. As they perceive more things about people they add more details: lips, ears, eyelashes, fingers and toes. You get these blob people, circles with eyes and lips and noses but usually no ears or eyebrows, with spindly sticks emerging from the sides (where the ears would be, often) and from the bottom for the arms and legs, with circles for feet and hands and stick fingers. There are almost never five sticks on hands or feet. The child considers it important to represent that the person has fingers, and a nose, and a head; the number of fingers is obviously less important. In other words, child art tells you about how the child looks at things, but it also tells you about how people look at things, because people used to be children. People learn to think symbolically first. People fasten onto the fact of fingers before they reach the more sophisticated stage of noticing their number.

In the same way, badfic shows you how the badfic writers look at things, which details they fasten onto, but it also shows you a glimpse of the fannish collective unconscious, patterns which emerge in good stories as well.

Comments

[mecurtin.livejournal.com]

My only point of disagreement with you is that I think badfic is closer to the *human* collective unconscious, not just the fannish one. My Future of Fandom thinks it might be the collective unconscious of young women in particular. Either way, it's not just the fannish mind.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Well, that's certainly true, but I don't think it really counts as a disagreement. Being closer to the fannish collective unconscious requires being closer to the more general one implicitly, doesn't it? And I definitely think the fannish collective unconscious is the centre. It's all members of fanon who are producing badfic, after all, even as they also have a multitude of other identities and affiliations as human beings which affect them.

But the main reason I made the 'fannish' distinction, really, was for singling out individual fandoms in contrast to wider Fandom or slash fandom as a whole. Badfic represents the wider fannish collective unconscious as a subset of the wider human one (and its proximity to the Id), but each piece of it also represents the smaller fandom it is a part of, and different fandoms have different characteristics, or at least different emphasis.

[emmuzka.livejournal.com]

I think that badfics *are* an unconscious mind of the fandom, at least partly. The fandom's unconscious wish is "something old, something new". Badfics give us the old part, recycling ideas that have hit the nervers. We fans want to read about agony, humiliation, endless love, power strugles, physical manifestations of misery, babies, forced life situations and such. What else are the love struggles and rent boy fics than manifestations of the victim fantasy?

It's left for the good writers' responsibility to produce the "something new"; fresh ideas and truly good storylines for the others to recycle. That's why a fandom is doomed when the good ones go on. Recycling doesn't create new enough to keep the fandom from degrating.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Yes - in other words, we want to read the archetypal, the clichés and tropes of storytelling in general and of our slash/romance genre in particular, and badfic provides this in much greater abundance than good fiction does, usually, because, well, stories pretty much turn into badfic when they pass a certain level of cliché content, since as a consequence they tend to lose their resemblance to canon and characterisation and so on. (I mean, good fic certainly draws on tropes and clichés too, but to a lesser extent, which is why most people, even ones who hate badfic, have a hankering for, you know, bad-ish or mediocre fic sometimes, stuff which does have more of those clichés in it. Thus ridiculous stuff - mpreg, harlequins - that DOES have good writing becomes ridiculously popular, like rageprufrock's "He's Having Her Baby!" series in SGA.)

And likewise badfic does introduce new ideas sometimes, of course; but in far smaller degree than good fiction does...

[emmuzka.livejournal.com]

In a way, badfic is also the most sincere way of flattering. "He is having her baby" must have dozens of bad and mediocre writers recycling the idea, or at lest taking advantage of the new profile rise of Mpreg fics that the fic caused. There is nothing bad about this.

I think that it's more frustrating when people get *truly inspired* so that they will make a copy of the original. Like the fic "Supermarket in California"? It has a copy cat fic that gladly announces that it's a copy cat fic. I don't remember what shop Sheppard set up (a surf shop?) and the fic wasn't even that bad, but why, why why it had to be written in the first place? There was nothign new in it, not even the exaggareted emotional aspects that's usually present in badfics.

OH, and what also gets in my nerves are the Harlequin writers who didn't get the aspect of pastiche/sarcasm/absurdity of the original harlequin challenge, but took it with a face value, e.g. thinking that hey, a new genre of sappy romance in now in, let's write that.

I could write a fic where Rodney would get Mpregnant and then end up in a prison colony with Ronon and then they get rescued and after that, oh the agony since John is so Jealous of the bond formed between Ronon and Rodney, and let's name the baby after famous historical scientists, that's totally my original idea... But I won't write that, because I don't have the talent to write it so good that the badfic material would change to either absurdity or realism.

[egelantier.livejournal.com]

you raise a very interesting point, thank you. i've just thought about it while browsing Mushishi fandom: it's new, close-knit and talented, so there're about 30+ fics and all of them are very high-quality, so basically if you've found something, you're guaranteed a good read. it should be Heaven for fic-reader... and suddenly I discovered that fandom feels strangely empty and incomplete without badfics, clichefics, horribly done AUs and other horrors usually associated with Pit of Voles. the one explanation I could think of for this feeling - you don't have to read badfic, but it somehow has to be here, either like soil from which goodfic grow, or just for defining 'bad' on estimation scale.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

either like soil from which goodfic grow, or just for defining 'bad' on estimation scale

I think you've put your finger on two separate but both important elements! Fanfiction can't really exist in a vaccuum. That is to say, you do need that "soil" from which the goodfic grows, at least as a context, even if the badfic doesn't have to come before the goodfic; otherwise, even if it's still fanfiction, it's not part of fandom. But if it's just one or two people who have written about something that doesn't make a fandom because it doesn't really develop that shared universe, that metatextual conversation between writers and interpretations and imaginary worlds, which turns into fanon. Fanon is an essential part of a fandom; it's the collective unconscious, to go back to a pretentious term that I love.

[egelantier.livejournal.com]

after thinking about it some more i'm very, very tentatively assuming that in a fandom devoid of badfic there will be a lot of very intellectual, evocative fiction - character study, good angst, new interesting ideas, canon introspection, all these really wonderful things - but there won't be whole layer of, for lack of better term, 'kink'-fanfics, written just for the pleasure of simple themes - like hurt/comfort fanfiction, episode tags, simple fluff, this or that sexual kinks and so on and so on. it just seems to me that such stories - especially good written ones - are very important part of any fandom, sort of it's middle grounds, and they just can't adequately exist without strong fanon based on, yes, fannish collective unconscious.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Well, good fanfiction plays with kink and cliché too (and can be short and fluffy and essentially without substance - good writers write excellent drabbles!), but the ironic or metaphorical or self-conscious use made of it there, while it's very pleasing to read, isn't satisfying in the same way that reading an unironic earnest use of the cliché would be, even if it's much better written, and is still satisfying in its own way. So I do think you're right - although I was going to disagree at first, the ironic uses don't really count.

One thing that I notice, interestingly, in very small fandoms, is good writers playing more with the clichés, either in drabble form or ironically, and writing more fluff, than they perhaps would otherwise. It's as if fandoms have a certain... quota to meet? XD And if there's no badfic writers to do it, more sophisticated writers feel compelled to try and fill it themselves.

[egelantier.livejournal.com]

i guess if there's nobody to write enough clichefics or hurt/comfort fics or fluff fics 'good' authors start to write it just on a 'write what you want to read' principle, because it's such a highly satisfying kind of fics. so do we have good cliche-fic either growing out of ten bad ones or just appearing because there aren't ten of any quality? (kind of win-win situation, if you ask me).
i guess i keep thinking about this in some kind of forest biosenosis terms - from bottom of badfics through good written but nothing-but-cliche-fics (you know, the ones where there's honestly nothing more then this or that trope) to goodfics with new ideas, imagery etc on top. it's rather balanced, and when you take on part out, other start deforming.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

I think originally ironic clichéfic grew out of the bad kind - self-consciously or sarcastically. But that was a long time ago and the clichés are perfectly well-established now, so it's not hard to write drawing on them in an ironic way even if there's no badfic in that specific fandom to reference, because there's all the other badfic out there with that cliché - and if your readers are slash readers, they will still be able to get it.

I call stories which are written passably (or well) on the surface with bad ideas underneath "mediocre fic" (to indicate the position between bad and good), but I acknowledge it doesn't exactly capture what's going on with them. But yeah, it's definitely a spectrum - and a balance. Your comment about an alteration at any level affecting the others made me think about fandoms with no good fic, and I'm sure I've read some that were at least 99% without good fic before. I think that messes up the balance too - maybe makes the fanon which develops "worse" (blander, more generalised, less related to canon) because it's made entirely of badfic, without the injections of innovation which good stories usually provide.

[egelantier.livejournal.com]

I guess in the fandom with no good fics from the start overall quality level is low because every new author orients on 'bad' as an example: i remember starting in fandom populated entirely by 13-year girls (not that i was much older) and writing very, very mediocre fic because there was nothing better to compare with. and then i discovered 'elite' part of fandom, and much better written fics, and my own improved accordingly since i had to comply with much higher criterion.
although you're raising a very valid point - usually there're some metafandom to individual ones, and if your current one doesn't have something, you can just pick it up in neighborhood.

[jocondite.livejournal.com]

Here from metafandomyes. I love the comparison to children's art; I've never thought of badfic in quite those terms, but that's a perfect parallel.

I came across this badfic novel, hundreds of thousands of words long, a couple of weeks ago, and missed class the next day because I was up all night simply howling with laughter. I don't think I've been as amused in an age, even though the way I was amused wasn't at all the way the author intended the story to work. I love that badfic can be so ridiculous and endearing - the child's art comparison really works, because even though it's patently flawed, it's somehow a scream and strangely cute.

...er, I got distracted. I was going add, re: your point about fannish unconscious, that I love how so much badfic is pure id fic. There are tropes I love that I wouldn't use in fic because I know they're out of character, or overdone, or just plain wrong (and if I did use them, it'd be as crack and self-consciously) but badfic doesn't care - it does them anyway, in patent seriousness and without apology.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

I love that badfic can be so ridiculous and endearing - the child's art comparison really works, because even though it's patently flawed, it's somehow a scream and strangely cute. Yeah, and in that way it somehow never gets old, just like the bizarre things children say don't, even when it's made of (mostly) the same clichés and makes so many of the same mistakes. I've been up all night engrossed in a badfic novel a few times myself! They can be really mesmerising.

In a thread above emmuzka and I were just discussing how badfic makes much freer use of cliché and how people's hankering for those clichés leads them to seek them in bad (or just partially bad!) fic when they can't get enough of them in goodfic. The ironic or postmodern use of the same tropes that is often made when they're adapted by more sophisticated writers isn't as satisfying (in that particular way, though perhaps more satisfying in others!), as a direct and earnest attempt at them from badfic, filled with straight-up fannish love.