Let’s be serious for a moment.
No, really.
As a lover of badfic I am a regular reader of Topless Robot’s Fan Fiction Friday, and as such I respect Rob Bricken both as a sporker and a person. Seeing this week’s entry for FFF only cemented that. And, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry Rob. I’m sorry you were subjected to that, I’m sorry I subjected anyone else to that.
Looking back over my sporking recently, I realize that my comments do not do justice to the horror of the fic, that my “riffs” seem flippant and, well, dumb. I told myself that I was trying to make the best of a bad situation, but looking back on it I realize I was just trying to combat the horror, come up with some retort that would render it powerless. And I did not succeed.
Of course as a sporker, the thing you should ask yourself after stating “I can’t make this funny!” should be “...should I make this funny?” and, however rare, sometimes the answer is a firm and final “no.” To be able to laugh at the awful you must distance yourself from the situation and, let’s be honest, some things you just shouldn’t be able to distance yourself from. Empathy, it’s what makes us human.
It’s a bit like rape jokes. No matter how absurd, how “harmless” you try to make it, there is always a chance—a very big chance in some cases—that someone, somewhere is thinking the exact same thing as you. And they are dead serious. And sometimes, unfortunately, you or someone you know finds that out the hard way. And those jokes aren’t funny anymore.
Which brings me to my next point: this is the fic that killed me. I don’t mean that in an over-the-top “this fic killed my childhood!” way, I mean it killed my enthusiasm for fannish things. For the past year or so, it’s been on the wane, and I can pinpoint the origin exactly. This is the fic that ruined it for me, this was when it stopped being fun.
I would write entire fics and delete them. I stopped trawling for badfic, stopped looking for fic to read for fun. For every fic that honestly took a show’s premise and ran with it, intent on creating new worlds and further developing loved characters, there were always, it seemed, three or four more that seemed like dangerously close insights into someone else’s psyche. I couldn’t read fic anymore without that elephant in the room whapping me with his trunk. The fun just...stopped.
I’ve been slowly growing away from livejournal, because even the fun times are not worth the despair. And even if the good outweighs the bad ten to one, it’s always the bad that sticks with me. Although I’ve met some cool people on here and you guys do rock(Weepingcock, I’m looking at you) I just can’t do it with my old enthusiasm anymore.
I’ve taken off the sporking, and I will not divulge content or context to anyone. Some things deserve to stay buried.
amused
creative
cranky
uncomfortable
sad
grumpy