The Null Device

Fanfic atrocity exhibition

The deleterius Memorable Posts list is a veritable trove of all that is inane, retarded and simply wrong in the world of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter fan fiction; and is very entertaining to read, in much the way that the Darwin Awards are.

The various teen-angst subcultures are well-represented, with Tathiel the multiply-pierced Mordorian Elf/Vampyre, who seduces Elrond whilst having a fling with Grima Wormtongue (who, in this story, is terminally shy, sweetly awkward virgin, and really a nice guy deep down), Christa, the irritatingly bitchy teenage goth with bad attitude, whose Aura of Smooth prevents her from being decapitated by the Tolkien characters she abuses, Candie, the bad-ass Avril Lavigne-quoting skate-punk member of the fellowship, and this Harry Potter-universe ad for US mall-goth clothing chain Hot Topic:

In the begging of the summer she went to a muggle mall in London. While she was there she found a store called "Hot Topic". She went in and fell in love with the clothes. She had been what you would call a prep all her life but now she had found out what punk was.

(Hot Topic in London? And to think that had they done some research, they could have had her just go up Camden High Street. Oh, and replace "prep" with "townie" or something.)

Meanwhile, key characters from Middle Earth offer group hugs for alienated self-cutters; meanwhile, Bilbo is warped into contemporary America, only to be adopted by the teenaged Mary Sue, who calls him "Elijah"; and Melissa and Joy smash up Middle Earth - with a car. And then there's this all-powerful Mary Sue, who's loved by all sides, wiser than Gandalf, and gets to slap Galadriel around; oh, and she has a horse named Kyouryoku, who came from a village of "Ramen elves", I kid you not. Then there's this horribly convoluted Harry Potter/LOTR/Sandman crossover. And who could go past this piece of wish fulfillment by a 38-year-old "bardess", who has herself going to Middle Earth, charming everybody to her will and having hot sex with Haldir, with them becoming ancestors of Socrates, Confucius and Tolkien.

It's a sobering thought that, as you read this, in candle-lit suburban bedrooms all over North America, pizza-faced teenaged girls in size-XXL Hot Topic fishnet tops are pouring her fantasies about Legolas ("OMG he's so hott!!!1!") and angst about their lousy non-pony-buying parents into their PCs, thus endlessly replenishing this cornucopia of pure shite for future visitors.

I haven't had a chance to look through the Potter ones in great detail, except that there are a lot of über-k3wl American exchange students/teachers who introduce those stuffy Brits to things like punk and goth that they haven't heard of over there yet. For all I know, someone could have written a Harry Potter story in which all the characters are furries, like, Snape is a snow leopard or something.

There are 7 comments on "Fanfic atrocity exhibition":

Posted by: Graham http://grudnuk.com/ Fri Mar 12 10:58:31 2004

My brain's starting to hurt.

Posted by: gjw http://the-fix.org Fri Mar 12 11:37:03 2004

Wait 'till you see the home movies.

Posted by: toby http:// Fri Mar 12 22:32:24 2004

I'm torn. Yes, they're really bad, but at the same time, imagination of any kind is becoming a rarity amongst the children of this world.

I'd like to say that I welcome anything in this world that doesn't come from TV, but of course there's no guarantee any more that someone who writes Tolkein fanfic has actaully picked up (and read) at least one book.

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org Sat Mar 13 14:04:00 2004

Movies being a collaborative venture, they're less likely to have quite as much Mary Sueage (sewage?)

Posted by: Graham http://grudnuk.com/ Sun Mar 14 00:30:07 2004

For what it's worth, I once wrote a Footrot Flats Mary Sue when I was ten.

Posted by: conrad http://substitute.livejournal.org/ Mon Mar 15 07:59:17 2004

http://www.livejournal.com/community/rarelitslash/ the "rare lit slash" is far worse; watch them slash up the books that actually matter. The userinfo page http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=rarelitslash is a gold mine for certain values of "gold".

Posted by: conrad http://substitute.livejournal.com/ Mon Mar 15 08:02:30 2004

Then again, I'm enough of an idiot to post my info as a blog at the wrong url, dot org instead of dot com. Maybe I should switch to writing Moby-Dick slash instead of blog comments.