PDP-11/69

You gotta open up that document and write that freak shit yourself

God I was working on a Planet Twilight spork back in the day. I have no idea why I thought I was gonna be able to get through a whole 100k+ word Twilight badfic with commentary.

For those unaware, sporking was the practice of writing a sort of interspersed commentary on a (usually awful) fanfic (and the occasional original work) for comedic/good-lord-look-at-this effect. It was descended from the older practice of MST-ing (originally, these borrowed the characters of MST3k for the commentary and some aspects of that format, such as using multiple characters from other properties as commentators, persisted throughout). It was a bit like a textual version of the "angry internet reviewer" trend of the late oughts and early 2010s.

In general I think it has aged much the same as its video counterparts for similar reasons, though I will contend that much of it was more thoughtful than most CA-style stuff. I probably owe a lot of my media literacy development to the Das Sporking reviews of Twilight. But more specifically, making fun of bad fanfic is generally just meaner than making fun of published work. Even if the author is revealing themselves to be an awful person given the values represented in their work, fanfic is still an amateurish labor of love. It's not written for money, and it's often written by people who are young or otherwise just learning. It's a bit like going to an art show at a middle school and just eviscerating their use of perspective.

All that being said, anyone have any fics they wanna see me spork?