Negrek D gr8 said:
I guess I'm not sure what you mean by "parody" if you're talking about people being mean to newbie authors.
Nein, I speak not of being cruel, nasty, downright cruel to particular newbies.
It's something far worse. It's the generalizing that I see.
For example, you know how almost all the non-humor-specific parodies (by humor-specific parodies I mean anything that's just having fun with the games/movies/show/other canon, not the 'This is Mary-Sue and she's a perfect character because that's the way I made her) involve one Mary-Sure (quite literally, in some cases, and the rest have a representitive of her or her brother) and her either overtly angsty pasty or her perfect looks. In either case, she seems to know that she's in a story.
The point I wish to point out is that no newbie does that on purpose. Make a character like that, I mean. They just want to make a character like what their favorite authors have put in their favorite stories and yet they want it different. And, because many of the newbies are relatively young, the differences they put in because of a genuine desire not to have clones of characters running around tend to be a tad larger than life. This is where the overly gloomy pasts (father, mother, friends all dead, nobody loves her/him, nobody cares, etc.) and the overly perfect (generally blond, white, blue-eyed, etc.) come in.
So these newbies come on-line with their works of fictional literature and post them, expecting a 'well-done' or at least a general fix-it job. They have little to no idea that they are one out of a million newbie authors among many millions of n00bs that write just like them.
How, I wonder, are they supposed to know what we are talking about when we say their stories are 'n00bish'? They haven't looked around at the stories that we tell them their stuff resembles because they just wanted to try and fit in with the stories that everybody likes.
And so, with little to no idea what a n00b is and almost no idea that their work of fiction isn't original, is it any wonder that they are mystified and,dare I say it, angry when somebody comes on spouting stuff about 'Grammar and spelling and plot and title and don't you know how to write and please read the example fictions in this thread'.
*shrugs* I guess I'm just wondering why so many reviewers review a twelve-year-old newbie the same way they review a twenty-year-old, five-year-experience established author.
Ir maybe I'm spouting smoke to cover my secret preparations to take over the world and turn it into a giant fanfiction...
SilverBlaz0e9