Fan Fic Writers, Look Here: The Guide to Being Riffed - 2

Greetings, writers of fanfiction! Welcome to Fan/fic/ Theater 3015! I can think of a few different reasons why you'd be here, but there's one that particularly comes to mind as most likely.

My understanding of your general situation is something like this: You wrote a story, more likely than not involving magical pastel ponies from a TV show you really like. You thought this was the greatest work you could possibly produce. It is perfect. You posted it on the Internet so that others may bask in your work and praise you. You may or may not be praised. But what's really important is that it came to your attention that there's people that don't like your work. In fact, they don't like it so much that they copied it into Google Documents and write more text in talking about how much they don't like it. How dare they! Why you have half a mind to go in there and leave a rant at the bottom about how stupid they are. They're idiots. They have to be. I mean, they let just [i]anyone[/i] change their documents, they're clearly asking for it-

[i]CALM. DOWN.[/i] Take a deep breath and, before you do anything rash, look over the following points about having your fanfic riffed by us.


[b]1. We're not critics, we're just assholes.[/b]

Even some of its contemporary audiences mistook the original [i]Mystery Science Theater 3000[/i] for some kind of review show. Not sure how, but they did, and they said that their criticism was lacking. These people missed the point. MST3K wasn't about criticizing B-movies, it was about poking fun at them because you need to make your own laughs with movies this terrible. It wasn't criticism, it was comedy, designed to prioritize invoking laughs in the audience over informing them about the ins and outs of their material.

This is the case here. While I am the one that popularized giant ending paragraphs summarizing what's wrong with the story I just read, we are not critics. We're a bunch of guys and like one girl that get together in one Google Document throughout the week to make jokes. Like the original MST3K crew, we're [i]comedians[/i]. Not to the same razor-edged degree as Joel/Mike and the bots, but we're working on it.


[b]2. We are within our legal rights.[/b]

As legal as anyting involving fanfiction gets, anyways.

Fanfiction sites like FF.net and FIMFiction do forbid the posting of riffs/MSTs, but while we are a FIMFic group, the riffs themselves are not posted on FIMFic and so their rules do not apply. As well, fair use applies as well as it can be applied to fanfiction, as riffs are a transformative work, like the little hats that Game Theory puts on their copyrighted stock photos.

We're basically 100% legal as far as I can tell. If you claim otherwise, that means you're a sore loser. No one likes a sore loser.


[b]3. No, we don't ask permission.[/b]

And we never will, so don't throw a hissy fit about it.

It's like this: Here at F/F/T3K15, we produce four riffs a month, each going over at most 15K words worth of fanfiction with each installment. That's a lot of text. In order to maintain that schedule, we need a large amount of fics we can riff built up.

Some solo projects made a point of asking for permission. I myself did while I was doing [i]Game Over MST[/i], mostly because "Weird Al" Yanokvic is a pretty cool guy. But permission is a tricky thing. Aside from the possibility of being turned down, many fanfics were posted years ago in someplace that the author doesn't actively monitor anymore in search of greener pastures. If the author doesn't respond, whether willful ignorance or simply hasn't seen the request, what is a riffer to do? [i]Not[/i] make use of perfectly good riffbait?

If you're us, you do it anyway. We go through fics too quickly to limit our options even more than our submission guidelines already do. Besides, given the next point, we often don't want fanfic authors to know we're doing this anyway; you found out because of some random act of nature.


[b]4. You may not have good English. We don't really care.[/b]

I have seen cases pesonally where authors try to write in English instead of a language they are more fluent in for one reason or another, whether it's FIMFic's rules or they don't feel their native language doesn't have large enough of an MLP audience to justify the effort. The end result usually looks like the author typed it by banging their head on the keyboard.

We do not take the possibility of your primary language into consideration when riffing your story. There are [i]native English-speaking[/i] authors whose stories looked like they typed it by banging their head on the keyboard. We can't make any assumptions about the author's point of origin without looking up country on FF.net, so we don't. If it's bad grammar and typesmanship, it's bad grammar and typesmanship, whether you wanted it to come out right or not. It makes no difference to us.

Putting your story in Google Translate or some other translation website and putting the raw result on the Internet also doesn't affect our opinion, except of your unwillingness to have the English proofread by a native speaker. Fanfiction.net has a beta reader system; I suggest making use of it.


[b]5. It's nothing personal. We don't hate you.[/b]

There are only a select few authors we utterly despise, because they regularly pump out terrible story after terrible story that we [i]just keep getting[/i], or they wrote one thing with such concentrated terriblness that it's burned into the insides of our skulls. If you are not one of those authors, though, we probably forgot your name by the time we finished your story, especially if it was in a sampler or shuffle.

Do not take being riffed personally. Even if you have some measure of notoritiy, you have to have terrible writing on par with Felix Dawn, Mykan, or Kudzohaiku to make us consider you a person worth hating. We don't [i]want[/i] to hate people. We just want to be funny. It just so happened that we decided to be funny at the expense of your story. Don't interpret it as us being funny at the expense of you.


[b]6. Please don't get involved.[/b]

So maybe you hate your own story and want to see it being torn apart. Heck, maybe you submitted it yourself. Good to hear you have the humility to admit it, and make sure you learn your lessons so you can produce better stories in the future. That's more than most authors we've riffed. But as a caveat, I humbly request you do not riff with us, at least not on your own story. I can't stop you, nothing is stopping you, it's against our rules to stop you, but [i]please don't[/i].

There's precident for this. The author of one of the fics we riffed submitted it for riffing and joined in the activity to our surprise. He proceeded to bash himself to such a degree it stopped being funny and dropped spoilers [i]everywhere[/i]. In the end, a large portion of his lines were cut, including a [i]stupidly elaborate over-a-page long stage show at the end where he sung about how stupid he was[/i].

Don't be that guy. Your position as the writer of the story, even if you think it terrible now, rarely gives you the proper perspective to make funny of it. You know things that the reader cannot, and saying what those things are doesn't make for entertaining comedy.


[b]7. Don't start deleting all your fanfictions.[/b]

There has been at least one case where authors have found we riffed their works, took it the wrong way, and responded by emptying out their FF.net or FIMFic pages of all their stories. Presumably, this is to prevent us from riffing more of their work.

First off, it's rare we do the same author twice unless it's one of those select few we hate. There's so much badfic out there, we don't need to plumb one author for new material. In fact, we make a point of avoiding riffing two works from the same author too close together. Removing your stories doesn't faze us at all.

Second off, this is self-destructing. For all we lampoon something, there are people out there that still enjoy these stories. I can name a few riffable stories myself that I still like. You probably still have a fanbase even despite our riffs. To deprive your fans of that story just because some guys made fun of it is a terrible disservice to them. Since we don't get hurt by your actions, they take all the punishment. As well, with the fics done from the original source, the only way they can see them is in all liklihood for them to look up our riffs, and I thought the idea was to hurt us.

TL;DR: it's not worth the effort.


[b]8. It's just a fanfic. You should really just relax.[/b]

I know what it's like to pour your heart and soul into something and hear someone give a negative opinion of it. It's not fun. Any number of circumstances can result in a riffable story, whether poor choices or a general lack of experience. You did your best (or at least I hope you did). Be proud you finished.

It's not worth getting worked up about us making fun of it, because, again, we're not critics. Any helpful points we make are not readily apparent enough for you to use to improve. It's a bunch of opinions made for the purposes of comedy, and like most opinions made for the purposes of comedy, they are often best left ignored.

Basically, as most badfic authors put it: don't like, don't read.