Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Rick R's "bottom six" best worst fics


I’ve read a lot of badfic. Gord alone knows how much, but… lots. But even amongst all that crap, there’s a few that stick out and have strange soft spots in my heart. So here are my top (or bottom) “best worst” fics. All of them are available at the Elmer Studios Archive for your “pleasure”.

(dis)Honourable Mention: The Dark Spiner
Had Elmer Studios still been in the MSTing business c2003, then this one would have been in the lineup. It’s your basic idiotic, horribly over-powered, centre of the universe Gary Stu (Who shares their name with the author, no less!) in a loopy, incoherent fic that isn’t so much read as it’s shouted at you by your monitor. Added to that, it somehow became the sort of fanon that gets mistaken for canon by idiots, which only increases the suck.

(dis)Honourable Mention: Robotech Sentinels Rubicon
Sentinels Rubicon isn’t a fanfic, but rather it’s a professionally published comic. Yet, it manages to reach levels of stupid and crap that makes some of the worst fanfic you’ve ever read seem professional by comparison. It manages to be bad on every level; bad art, bad writing, bad chracterisation, bad plot, bad inking, bad toning, bad lettering and even bad staples. And then when you go behind the scenes and realize the sheer levels of BS that went into the creation of the comic, it gets even worse.

On the other hand, it gave me the White Light Of EEEEE, so I can’t fully hate it.




Bubblegum Shift
One of the early fics and (though I’m probably wrong) our first Bubblegum Crisis fic and Self-Insert. Jim “Darkwind” Williams is pretty much the textbook Gary Stu; he’s all-powerful, posses contrived abilities and walks all over the cast. Added to that he has a rival who, while he also effortlessly walks over the canon characters exists only to be spanked. On the other hand, while not the authors’ intent, Jim comes off as being as dumb as a bag of hammers.

Recollections of a Tekkaman
When you’re writing a fanfic within an existing world but featuring an entirely new cast, great care has to be taken to creating a believable and solid cast. This fic doesn’t do that. Instead, what it does is present a cast full of one-dimensional idiots with contrived powers who then promptly proceed to contrive more powers as they go along. Throw in an idiot hero and a villain who’s pretty much a walking cliché, and you see why I love this fic. The pointless nonsense crossover is just a bonus.

Neon Exodus Evangelion (The Other One)
Inadvertently transgendered Shinji! Butch square-jawed space hero Kensuke! Ferociously stroppy and inane doctor lady! The dreaded yellow dot! Potentially interesting premise that was poorly executed? Maybe. Pile of crap? Probably. Funny? Damn right.

Bubblegum Climax: Freefall
An original villain in fanfic is one of those things that can be crappy in so many different ways.  One of those is to simply be a boring, generic idiot like Demmond in this fic is. He’s dumb as a bag of hammers, sprouts cliché lines (Hmm, notice a pattern forming?) has a nonsense plan and doesn’t even begin to look like a credible threat to anyone, especially not the heroes. And, as a bonus, it has an incredibly inane extra character who we’re supposed to care about but don’t.

Hellstorm Evangelion
Putting aside claims about the fic’s author, the Hellstorm series is one of my personal guilty pleasures. It should be awful, what with the nonsense plot, terrible writing, atrocious spelling and punctuation and what could only be described as complete canon defilement. Instead it’s frigging hilarious, coming off more of an Evangelion version of Axe Cop – Only a decade too early.

DELTA Invasion
Oh, you knew it would be here.

There’s very little that I can say about Delta that hasn’t already been said a zillion times over. Tom is so stupidly over-powered, the characters are OOC to the point of camp, the Invadors are doofy mix-and-match critters and John Barren is Special. So instead I’ll link you to the Random Delta Invasion Episode Generator, which  summarises the plot far better then I ever could.

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