The Fic That Hooked You: And How Bad Was It?

I do too, because Gabriel ruined Akitsu. Now that's the only character she ever gets. A retarded sex-puppy.

 

She gets alot of fics?

 

Isn't that actually pretty close to how she is in canon? I haven't seen the anime, but the description of her personality on the wiki seems to match how most people write her, in the fics that I've read. Other than the part about her being a nympho, but she'd probably become obsessed with "affection," with how she can't be winged.

 

Hmm. Maybe I'll give it a look over then. I guess I may have fled a bit bit quickly from the adjective!character things popped up, but my shit reflexes are a bit trigger happy.

What did you think of it? A lot of people complain about it nowadays, but I think it's a decent story. It's got a number of flaws, and popularized some obnoxious things, but it wasn't utter shit either.

I'll be honest, from what little I saw of Akitsu in the 30 or so chapters I could stomach of Sekierei, that's pretty much what she seemed like to me.

 

I liked Hill of Swords - it's one of the few fics where an overpowered protagonist is written in character and actually finished.

The fact that the fic is completed is a big plus for me.

(And I like LNs like Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei - where the main character is literally a strategic class weapon that could probably blow a city or two in seconds. )

 

It's decent, and it's completed.

 

I haven't actually read Hill of Swords (it is on my to read list, but I was never very into Familiar of Zero, so I haven't gotten around to it), but I know I enjoyed In Flight quite a bit. I have never understood why so many people seem to have a problem with it (the Saber/Rin thing aside, but I think anyone who has read that far disliked that part), but it is a fairly well written crossover that is complete. That is way rarer than it should be honestly, and makes it worth giving it a shot by itself if you ask me.

 

I enjoyed In Flight, but I hated its ending.

As I mentioned before, I rate completed fics highly, but... I think the biggest thing I felt from that fic is how Shirou was just wishy-washy. He could have ended the entire thing by sniping the entire MIB tower in 3 seconds, and if he was as ruthless as he was supposed to be, then he would have never did half the things he did in the fic. (He would never confront anyone - just snipe everyone to death with a BP and be done with it)

 

I just took the not being as ruthless as he could have been as a plot device to make the story interesting. Shirou was already pretty OP from the start, if he just spammed Broken Phantasms at everything there wouldn't be a story. Pretty much the same reason Archer didn't just snipe Shirou's home with a BP in Fate/Stay Night cannon honestly.

 

Everyone started with popular fandoms, in my case it was 7-9 years ago with some shity Naruto fic. You know, the bad one, Good!Powerful!Smart!TimetraverlNaruto. From my memory there were something in lines of already powerful Naruto getting hit by secret Orochimaru's technic that send him at least 5 hundreds years into the past, unstopable traning montage, at some point he adopt orphans, flirt with easily swayed womans, build merchant-hot springs empire, help Hyuuga and everything in shity writing. Thought it was pretty big and I was not yet choosy in fics, so that is that

 

I remember there's this one Naruto x Warcraft fanfic by General Grievous on FFN. Beautiful and well written. Unfortunately, RL happened, and he's . . . gone.

There's also another Naruto x Warcraft fanfic which I, ah . . . was really big in. Written by PyroC0ntrol. Let's just say it was one of my chuuni phases and leave it at that (well, and I wasn't as picky during those times)

 

The one where he learns shamanism from Thrall? And they kill Onyxia at the end?

Yeah that was great.

 

Yep, that one.

 

I remember I got hooked during a summer job I had back in '96 or thereabouts. The task I was hired for ended up being delayed so I basically had 8 hours a day and an Internet connected computer and was bored. I gobbled up a lot of Star Wars and Star Trek and crossovers between them, I vaguely recall a fic called "The Return" or something like that as one of the first stories I read. Mainly USENET and later FFML in those days..

Regarding stuff I've read that I now can't believe it.. well, Jeff Wong's Just Won't Die series makes me cringe now but I read it with gusto.

 

Strawberry Panic! is a popular fandom?

(Or I guess you could have meant "nearly everybody.")

 

At least you didn't start off with Undocumented Features. That's pretty much THE wanking SI fic. Though they've gotten... somewhat better? I'm not even sure if what they built is a definition of better or not...

 

UF was a bit old even back then, but I've read a bit of it. Felt a bit silly when they dug up outdated computer hardware and used it for stuff we can't do even now.. For some reason I liked their XCOM/NGE/kitchen sink crossover even though the obviously gary stu main character was reaching a bit far.

 

Fic that got me hooked? It's been a long time (nearly ten years now crickey, I'm getting old) so I don't remember that well but one fic that seem to stick out in my mind is a Naruto fic about a bunch of OCs in a village called hidden village of cupcakes......... Yes, I know

 

there are some good Strawberry Panic fics.

 

Did I imply otherwise?

 

No, I had just forgotten all about it's existence. It was an comment not a argument.

 

The reason was that Archer did not remember Shirou. He did not lie when he talked about losing his memories. It took him a while to put everything together and remember enough to make a plan.

 

Hmm...

It is difficult, to be honest. I mean, I'm 100% sure it started by browsing TV Tropes, then clicking Fanficrec. Back then, I already compiling stuff into ebook, reading from proto-smartphone that is Symbian OS 2. Before that, I never really into fanfic because... well, they are multi-chaptered stuff that's kinda annoying to save, you know? Don't have internet connection handy, at that time.

Anyway. I can't remember the first fic I read, but I can remember I read Shinji and Warhammer40k - I can still feel my annoyance at its formatting, heh. Also, I give-up when Shinji... going to tibet for meditating or some shit, can't remember.

After that, I remember reading Durandal's (may his legacy lives forever) stuffs - yeah, that means I read Kyon x Haruhi. I think there's another fic before that, that is not written by Durandal, 'Meet the Suzumiyas', I think? It is too... cheesy, for my taste.

The next would be Alicorn's Twilight fanfic - oh, don't run away, she turn it into something beautiful. Or at least not as bad as original Twilight, which is not a high bar to pass. I found out about her from Harry Potter and Method of Rationality, which has interesting ideas but I find the prose drier than Gobi.

 

Interestingly enough, I haven't had this happen to me, even after reading fan fic for years. (For reference, I'm older than the NES by a few years.) I guess I either have low standards, or I just don't go back to stories that were entertaining for a read through, but not actually good.

 

Alicorn's short original work is amazing. And her original novels are pretty good.

 

You know, I remember that there's this one Cardcaptor Sakura fanfic that is a little darker, but is/was quite awesome to my younger self. It's quite old too, and is hosted in its own website.

I'll see if I can remember its name later - got introduced it through TvTropes or something.

 

Aha! Found it!
Wishluv's The New Trials of Cardcaptor Sakura, Syaoran and Friends

 

Let's see, I first got into fanfics thanks to hearing about the upcoming SRW game Super Robot Wars W. I saw the series listing and got interested because Detonator Orgun (and Go-lion/Voltron) was in it and I had just bought it on DVD a few months ago, I then looked up Tekkaman Blade since it was also a power-armor/mini-mecha series and on a spur of the moment decision I decided to look and see if any of these "fanfics" I'd heard about had a Hayato/Yumi ship since they sounded cute together (I do that for series I've never read/watched/played a lot).

I popped in Tekkaman blade fanfiction hayato yumi into google search and up came a link to ff.net and an OC tekkaman story called Zero Divide, thinking back on it now it was kinda meh. After that I really got started in the Gundam SEED section after searching for Shinn/Stellar fics (Screw the haters and the Shinn/Luna fans, THEY'RE ADORABLE TOGETHER DAMMIT!) since I'd already finished Gundam SEED and Destiny was supposed to be shit and I found Shadowcell's DARK AND EDGY! rewrite, it's pretty bad but my younger self enjoyed it at the time

 

For me, a Halo fanfiction hosted on the Bungie.net boards, written by an author named "Mr Clark" IIRC. It was a Halo 2 continuiation fic and I no longer remember the exact details, but I do remember fruitlessly checking the thread again and again after it was dropped.

From there on, basically, whenever I found a fandom I liked, I set the filter to fics with wordcounts > 100k on FFN with the generally correct assumption that longer fics tended to be higher quality and trawled and trawled and trawled. I trawled so much that even for mid sized fandoms, ~2k stories, I had basically read everything with wordcounts > 40k words.

From what I can tell, my Fanfiction profile favourites are some of the most diverse in terms of fandoms of anyone I've met. Certainly more than that one profile I see linked alot where it's basically 490 Naruto and HP fics with maybe 10 things from other fandoms.

 

This sounds familiar.

Now, though, I tend to look at chapter length. If word count divided by chapter number gives me somewhere in the ballpark of 5,000 words, I expect a pretty good fic. If it's at least 2,000 words per chapter, I'll give it a try if the summary seems promising (that includes, y'know, having been proofread). Less than 2,000 words per chapter and the likelihood that the story is shit gets too high for me to bother opening it, most times.