I just want to get these out of the way. I spend a lot of time writing about excellent, thoughtful, provocative derivative works. But there’s some serious crud out there. These two are in the bottom echelon of awful, to the point where they shine in a cruel brilliance:
Both of these are famously bad–if you search for “worst fics ever” My Immortal squats on the top 3 hits. And “First Encounter”, the title of Hogwarts/Giant Squid fic, is the only one where the following was part of a review:
Am I tripping? Has someone really written this down, or is this just some elaborate, horrible nightmare?
So I admit it. There are some truly terrible writers in the fanfiction world.
But just as it takes little skill to make simple concepts complicated, and much to make complex ones simple, there is an entire genre of fanfiction designed to be horrifyingly bad. It’s called crack fic. So what do you think: are these two crack fic, or just abysmally written?
Inspirational Quote:
The Doctor: You graffitied the oldest cliff in the universe!
River Song: You wouldn’t answer your phone!
I found the writing for “First Encounter”/”Hogwarts/Giant Squid” to actually be good. The writing was good, but the subject matter confounded me as to why anyone would write about such a thing. I guess someone was having fun with taking something to extremes.
That image you posted, btw, is a central image for the movie, “The Squid and the Whale”.
Gotta agree with Chris here. It’s ridiculous, but intentionally so, which makes it better than some other stories that were written for the intention of being srs bzns, like the glorified Snape gangbang that is “Subjugation”.