EMERGENCY! (Unless you are Professor Plum, in which case please ignore this) · 2:22am Dec 12th, 2013
knighty posted a poll asking whether we should allow meta fics.
I'm in favor of allowing any stories related to My Little Pony, period, for several reasons:
1. For every rule, there are an infinite number of great stories that violate it.
2. Writers, not mods or mobs, should choose what they can write.
3. The ban-happy only ever want to ban things because they think it will stop people from writing bad stories. They forget this is FAN-FICTION. I WANT people to post their bad stories here. Banning bad stories here is like going to a kindergarten classroom and tearing down all the bad fingerpaintings.
4. The ban-happy complain about seeing certain types of stories in the featured box. But those stories only get in the featured box because a lot of people wanted to read them!
5. I've had stories of mine banned for stupid reasons.
6. Clop is allowed. Gore is allowed. Raping foals with the severed head of a unicorn is allowed, I think. Seems silly to ban other things.
But I'm adamant about meta-fiction. Meta-fiction is an especially interesting type of story. If you've heard of this guy named Skywriter, half of everything he writes is meta-fiction. The meta-fiction rule was made in response to a story of his, "Twilight Sparkle Earns the Featured Box", not because people disliked it but because a vocal minority was pissed off that so many people liked it. Shortly after it made the featured box, TAW wrote a blog post that brought up meta-fiction, which mobilized her many followers to complain that meta-fiction was pushing clop out of the featured box, and within a day or two, the meta-fiction ban was put in place. (I don't remember for certain if that was what her post was originally about, or if that emerged in the comments.)
Crossovers with Halo, Transformers, and Marvel Comics are more common, less about MLP, more likely to hit the featured box, less-familiar to the fimfiction audience, and more reliably bad than meta-fiction about fimfiction, and we allow them.
All these stories are also meta-fiction:
Choose Your Own Adventure: Brony Hero of Equestria by Blueshift (1580 upvotes, on EQD)
Shipping Goggles by AbsoluteAnonymous (1453 upvotes, on EQD)
Hoardsmiths by Skywriter (368 upvotes)
Shipping Sickness by Skywriter (1645 upvotes)
A Short Story by Twilight Sparkle by Skywriter (944 upvotes)
Heretical Fictions by Skywriter (609 upvotes)
The Saga of Dark Demon King Ravenblood Nightblade by me (762 upvotes, on EQD)
If you understand fiction better than Skywriter does, feel free to vote against meta-fictions. Otherwise, I ask you to please vote to allow writers to write what they want to write.
Already done. I'm with you 100% on this one.
Already did. I am in agreement. I believe that meta works should be allowed. Sometimes, they are more entertaining than the straight fanfiction.
I just submitted my very first fanfic ( as in it is literally pending approval at this very moment) and it could be viewed as a metafic, since it parodies a particular subgenre of stories.
I can understand that some people may view banning metafics as a way to lower drama ( that is some metafics might actually be nothing more than attempts to mock a particular author) but I think it is absolutely the wrong way to go about it. I mean I am pretty sure I cried when i First read Skywriters Heretical Fictions, which is a Meta Fic Homage to my all time favorite fanfic ( Eternal by Device Heretic)
so yes do what Bad Horse says and go vote in favor of Metafics.
I'm afraid the opportunities meta stories offer to insult and attack other users and trends is just too high for me to agree with you on this at any level.
Sorry, but no.
pinkie.mylittlefacewhen.com/media/f/img/mlfw9091-29529__safe_twilight-sparkle_animated.gif
1597962 Curses! How did you see through my devious misdirection?
1597957 Then make a rule against insulting and attacking other users. I don't care if people attack trends.
The issue with metafics, as I see it, is rather not that metafiction is in itself bad, but that for many people it's... very much an art refined because it's useful as popularity bait. Stuff like "Popular Author (as a Pony) x Popular Author (as a Pony) Having Sex!" is something with a high potential to bring an author fame and fortune for relatively little "cost," as it were.
There are totally good metafics and authors who write solid metafics out there -- you're right with that -- but I afear the much larger flood of people who'll dash off quick'n'easy metafics to take advantage of community in-jokes and the easy popularity you can derive from them.
Now, you might argue that the same is true for quick clopfiction, and I'd agree some people seem to be in the clopwriting business because it's easy fame, but...
Hm.
I guess if there's a particular reason I'm uncomfortable with the vast majority of potential metafics, it's that they're not so much stories about MLP as they are stories about Fimfiction, or its users, or the coalition of in-jokes surrounding those things -- which happen to use MLP as a backdrop.
I'm not sure I like the idea of those being a big thing when the goal is celebration of MLP itself. Even if cheaper clopfics just kind of use the characters as a context for sexin', they're still in some way focused on MLP in particular, rather than the labyrinthine culture that's sprung up around it.
I'm even less comfortable with the idea that new people are going to come on the site, look at "These Two Famous Authors Have Sex!" in the Featured Box, and not have any idea what to make of it because they don't have the requisite community knowledge/experience to understand the story we're featuring prominently on our frontpage.
In general, I'm okay with the idea of metafics being a thing, but... I feel something really ought to be done to keep them from being cheap popularity grabs or otherwise prominently displayed in ways that'd confuse/shut out new folks on Fimfiction. Ideally, if Meta stories become a thing, there'll be some method of filtering them out of the Featured Box in order to deal with both of those as issues.
Just my thoughts.
1597980
Plums are well-known for their ability to detect deceit.
You can't fool the fruit.
1597957 I, too, was concerned about personal attacks but two things were pointed out to me:
1) That's already specifically banned, for blog posts and even comments. Excessive personal attacks can get one banned from the site. (The mods check blog post that are reported, and authors and admins control groups.) Banning personal attacks from stories would not be a change.
2) Stories need to be approved in the first place, making it very hard to get personal attack stories published.
From conversations, it seems that the mods and prereaders are well aware of these issues.
1598030
These ideas have been brought up with knighty. The gist of his response is that, if that's the road taken, it'll be very difficult to implement with Fimfiction's current tagging system. The revamped tagging system knighty/Xaquseg are working on might be able to do such things, but there's no ETA on that yet, so far as I know.
1597997
I would not at all mind having a meta tag, personally, to allow people to easily categorize and filter away stories that they do not find to their liking. That is, after all, one of the primary functions of the tagging feature.
I don't particularly support stories that literally depict Pony authors (absent actual ponies), or that deal literally with site politics. But if you are writing a story, that features ponies, that happens to metaphorically address the process and/or frustrations of writing, I am hazy on how this differs from using ponies to metaphorically address any number of other personal issues we face in our lives.
Yes, you're opening the door to crap. There is no question of that. However misguided it might seem, I still have faith that good stories will out.
1598038
Damnit, you're fast. For anyone else reading his comment, mine was about adding a Metafic tag and filtering stories by that.
So wait the whole metafic ban is because some guy complained that he couldn't jerk it to all the stories in the featured box
and yet some of us wonder why some people think we're strange (despite being better then most fandoms actually helping out each other and the community rather than acting like twelve year old D-bags since that's most of them (looking at you CoD and PewDiePie)). Could you please provide me a link to said blog? I need to see this to believe it.
1598040
Well undoubtedly good stories will turn out. Yours alone are proof of that much. My concern is less stories that deal with the writing process and writing, and more stories centered around the Fimfiction community and Fimfiction itself... So the question for me is rather how we'll handle the inevitable tide of meta stories that aren't good and also very in-joke heavy.
This is a tide which I'm fairly certain will rise high enough to get featured stories at some point, so it's of decent importance to me that we sort out exactly how we'll handle such trends, if metafics get unbanned.
Personally, if I don't like the concept of a story--if it doesn't sell itself in the description--I don't read it. Full stop.
I don't hate particular categories, although I'm more favorable to some than others. I generally don't like obvious self-inserts, but some of them are good. I generally don't like 'meta' stories, but The Real Conversion Bureau is almost meta (or is; I suppose it depends on one's definition) . . . and freaking hilarious.
Let's ban second-person narration. That will improve story quality about . . . 20%.
Here's my take:
My concern is similar to the second one that 1597997 makes here: that metafics encourage fics that aren't really about MLP in any way, shape, or form, or even a reimagining of MLP, but rather about how people interact with MLP. Now, there's no reason people can't write wonderful or classic stories about that, but as it stands now they have two options:
1) Publish them someplace else. Since they are no longer MLP fanfiction, but "brony" fanfiction, they don't need to be on an MLP fanfiction website. They can go on fanfiction.net, or ArchiveOfOurOwn, or livejournal, or a number of other places where general fanfiction can be published. The author and anyone else can even link them in a blog post.
2) Make them enough about the world and characters of MLP that they actually are fanfiction. You mentioned Hoardsmiths, which I loved. But part of the reason I loved it was that it was subtle. Skywriter (or someone not-as-good) couldn't write "Rainbow Dash Gets Sad About Fighting is Magic." So that made for a story that A) made total sense in the setting of MLP and B) stands as a broader metaphor than a meta-specific story would. One could do the same thing with "Daring Do goes to DaringCon" as one could with "The Mane Six go to BronyCon" and it would almost certainly be a more interesting fic.
So, my take is to continue the ban much as it seems to be-- allowing meta-stories through when the meta is subtle enough that it has to be recognized through the story, rather than it being the story.
1598047 I can't find it now. It's too hard to page through all her old blog posts. But it's entirely possible that her post was primarily about something else. I just remember the comments were full of complaints about metafiction, which spilled over onto the chat at some point.
Was the meta-fiction ban really put in place because it was pushing clop out of the featured box?
But really if you want people to read your stories you shouldn't eliminate other stories to make your story seem better, you're only cheating yourself.
Maybe people should start writing better clop.That's a horrible idea.1598094 that metafics encourage fics that aren't really about MLP in any way, shape, or form, or even a reimagining of MLP, but rather about how people interact with MLP.
I listed 8 good meta-fictions. I challenge you to list 8 metafics that "aren't really about MLP in any way, shape, or form, or even a reimagining of MLP, but rather about how people interact with MLP." You're asking to ban known good stories out of fear of something imaginary.
As ever, you are far too flattering for my own good, but thank you for your words at any rate. Between my response to Obs and my own blog post on the topic, I think I've said my personal piece, but I didn't wanted your nod up there to go unremarked-upon.
1598109
I can't list eight of them, in part because the ban went into effect a few months after I joined.
But I can list one:
Twilight Sparkle Makes the Feature Box
Yes, it's a great meta-fic. And yes, it does feature Twilight. But, if I were a fan of the show, had memorized every episode, and had no knowledge of FiMFiction, I would have no idea what this story was or what it meant. It would make no sense to a fan of the show on its own, or even in connection with another story, so it's not really Friendship is Magic fanfiction, is it?
ETA: This is what makes Hoardsmiths or The Saga of Dark Demon King etc. different, to me. They might be commenting on aspects of fandom, but they are still stories in their own right about the MLP universe. Someone who isn't up on the habits of the fandom might not get the joke or the specific reference, but they will still make sense to those people, and can be enjoyed on their own merits outside of the meta.
1598109
Speaking as someone with access to the approval queue, the reason it'd be difficult to name a lot of bad metafics that "aren't really about MLP in any way, shape, or form, or even a reimagining of MLP, but rather about how people interact with MLP" is because the staff tends to bounce those.
That's... sort of what a ban does.
We do get an awful lot of them, incidentally, and they're generally pretty bad.
The way they phrased the question in the poll makes it easy to misinterpret what metafiction is, I think. When the examples are stuff like "Alexstrazsa and Wanderer D Have a Completely Platonic Relationship" which (potentially, anyway) has absolutely nothing to do with ponies, it gives the impression that the "problem" with metafiction is that it's not MLP-related.
I'm not really sure what problem one could have with pony-related stories which happen to include and/or deconstruct fandom elements being posted, personally.
1597997
Isn't there already a rule about this, though? I don't see why you'd need to make a new rule to stop stories that aren't really related to FiM.
1598040
This is something I've always felt a little weird about, given that my first story in this fandom was basically a sendup of bad fanfiction and a backdoor handbook to trying to write better. I managed to not take the meta hit, but that thing is hopelessly meta. And it's probably the only reason I'm still here today, since it got me enough reception / attention to convince me it was worth jumping back into the unchlorinated pool of fanfiction.
1598142
1598143
MLP-relation being the primary issue with these stories is... tricky business, without an accompanying rule to deal with Metafics specifically. "Alexstrazsa and Wanderer D in Equestria" is functionally MLP-related, insofar as it takes place in Equestria and might have various pony characters, but it's no more comprehensible to anybody who's never heard of Alex or D.
-
Is "Alexstrazsa and Wanderer D Have a Completely Platonic Relationship" MLP-related if they're cast as ponies? Does it become acceptably pony if Rarity cameos dressing D up for his date? Or is it ultimately still subject to the issues of "Who in God's name is Wanderer D anyway?"
Food for thought.
1598167
I would think that such a story should be treated exactly the same way as the fic "James Galloway and Nick Punto Have a Completely Platonic Relationship." Would that fic be approved if they were ponies/if Rarity had a cameo/if you had no idea who James Galloway or Nick Punto were?
I really hope the answer is "no, that would be failed hard," by the way. But my point is that the meta-element isn't what's wrong with that story.
1598201
The point is more along the lines of "Being related to MLP" isn't the issue at stake for many of these hypothetical meta stories, because it's very easy to drop in just enough MLP that you could go "Hey, there's pony."
So, like, the question goes back to "Are stories centered around Fimfiction/Its Userbase/Whatever-Meta-Aspects desirable?" rather than "Well, it seems the problem is that some meta stories just wouldn't be related to MLP anyway, right?"
Personally, I don't define most of those stories as metafiction. Metafiction is, in my opinion, stories about stories. I disliked 'Twilight earns the feature box', but not because of some stupid reason like 'too many people like it'. Rather, I thought it represented a significant drift from what this site is supposed to be about- FIMfiction. It had little to no connection to the show, and could as easily have been a second person story and had no significant changes to be made. It has it's merits, I just don't feel it classifies as fiction on the subject of MLP:FIM. That said, metafiction in general is not bad- I'm a massive fan of things that challenge our perspectives on things, so metafiction, which at its best can be used to enlighten and explain issues we might not notice(I recall a fic talking about misuse of the track/favorite system which preceded the new system by a remarkably short period of time, leading me to believe it had an impact on the website, thus representing a key example of what this genre can be) is right up my alley. That said, it is RARELY FIM related, and when it is, it is usually in the form of a thin guise. If we wouldn't allow a story about a group of young women who happen to be named after the mane six, why should we accept a story where the main character is Twilight Sparkle in her least Sparkl-y moment, with no significant character or setting developement?
1598154
See, to me, that is exactly the way meta should be written, and it is totally MLP fanfic. I've never seen the rule block stories like that... there are still plenty of meta-fics around that are also fanfiction about the show or universe, and I like that. I don't like meta that becomes no longer about the show, but about the fandom with trappings of the show.
Basically, if someone wants to write "Wanderer Hoof" and "Axle Strider" as two ponies the mane six are trying to fix up with each other, I don't really have a problem with that because they're veiling the meta commentary in something that other people could read as just another pony fic with OCs. But they should have to do a good enough job with the veil that people can read it even with no idea who this is about, even if it's funnier if they know.
Already voted to lift the ban. Unlike SOME people, I am NOT too busy trying to take over the world to notice admin posts.
1598133
My attitude is still that stories don't cause problems by their existence. If someone posts a story that isn't right for the site, it will either get ignored or thumb-bombed. If it winds up in the featured box, either the users have spoken and declared that it's right for the site, or the featured box is terribly broken and the problem is with the box, not the stories.
If knighty fixed the featured box so stories couldn't stay in it more than half a day, most of the complaints about this and that being in the featured box would disappear. People don't hate having crap in the featured box so much as they hate having the same crap staring at them from the featured box for three days in a row.
Skywriter is IMHO the best writer on this site, and about a third of his stories are meta-fics. I'm not aware of any good stories that the mods have rejected under the ban, and I'm happy about that. But it still means that writing a good metafic is a risk, or at least a perceived risk.
I'd be more sympathetic to the mods' positions if we didn't have so many rules already. A rule against scripts, a rule against manuals, a rule against non-English stories, a rule against Pony Does X. What are these rules for? They aren't to keep non-MLP material out. They aren't to keep stories the readers dislike out. Will they ever be repealed, or will we just go on acquiring more and more rules? I wish we at least had a maximum number of rules, after which the mods would have to throw an old rule out to add a new one.
1598236
I voted to allow everything, myself—primarily because I think just about everything can be done well enough that it'd be worth reading, and I don't like the idea of things that are good being blocked on account of content, be that mature stuff or meta stuff.
Perhaps more importantly—because I tend to trust the gatekeepers, having been one myself for EQD, and I think good stories are probably going to get allowed anyway—I'm not big on discouraging writers from writing good story ideas that may be a little wonky where rules are concerned. And while, yes, you can go publish your stories on ArchiveOfOurOwn or ff.net and throw a link in a blog post, anyone doing that is going to lose a lot of potential exposure. New authors who have decent stories but few followers will get almost no exposure for anything that goes up elsewhere. Established authors who have a decent shot at hitting the feature box with their stories also lose exposure since off-site work is, again, only really available to their followers (and people reading MLP fanfiction elsewhere, which I'm guessing is a pretty small crowd because Fimfiction is just so good for what it does). So there's a major disincentive toward writing good meta from a readership angle, since the story may never see much attention.
To me, that's set up against the fact that a lot of meta stories will be crap and many will be minimally MLP-related. But even though I think the overall level of quality here is higher than in a lot of places for stories on the internet, I'm not interested in reading the vast majority of what gets posted here right now, anyway, and it's not clear to me that allowing meta will in any way impact my ability to get the content I want. I will admit that I am a little worried about this, though, which is why I'd really love a view-meta checkbox like the view-mature one so that I can filter it if I want to scan the feature box and popular stories lists without having to deal with meta. The view-mature checkbox is probably one of my favorite site features. I usually leave it checked, but depending on my mood, I can kill the mature stories and get to see a slightly different range of stuff hitting the radar.
I have essentially zero interest in Alexstrazsa's platonic pony adventures, but I have a lot of interest in a lot of the Skywriter meta stories (and Heretical Fictions is high on my list of favorites overall). To me, writing is a very collaborative thing, and I want the ability to play around with that. I'm generally willing to do that anyway, and I don't know if the sort of things that interest me are ever likely to run afoul of the meta rule, but I'm just one person and I'm sure there are people who would butt up against it writing stories I think are worthwhile.
1598377
God, I need to write shorter comments.
This is why I can't get my statistics work done.
1598365
Why isn't the Republican Party adopting this as a platform plank? It's a certified electoral winner. It may even be a decent idea.
imageshack.com/a/img844/9177/lh7e.jpg
1598387
Republicans with a decent idea? That'll be the day.
Disclosure: I have been a Democrat for 42 years, though the last few have been motivated by the desire to be the last grownup standing after the children running the party go all Lord of the Flies. Which they will.
This is, however, even farther off-topic than any metafic I can imagine, which means that (1) I have a limited imagination and/or (2) this may not be here by the time you read it. Or something like that.
1598365
I disagree. Were we to allow stories with nothing at all to do with ponies, it's entirely possible that Pokemon fanfic would make the feature box regularly. Does that mean that Pokemon fanfic is right for the site? Of course not, it means that people who like ponies are often in the same audience as people who like Pokemon. That doesn't mean it had anything to do with the aim of this site, or that there's anything "broken" about the feature box. (There might very well be something broken about it, but "stories that are popular for reasons other than pony making the feature box" is not a symptom.)
I like this website.
Sometimes, it makes me think arguing on the internet isn't a fundamentally fruitless endeavor.
1598477 That is a plausible hypothesis, but we should test that hypothesis before banning good stories because of it.
1598496 ...but not today.
1597997
I agree with this; metafiction is mostly just an excuse for cheap boosts, and I really don't want to see them in the feature box. It is rife with poor stories, to be sure, but at least they're poor MLP stories.
1598573
I've seen a VAST number of stories in the feature box with far more negative votes than positive ones. Thumb Bombing does not stop things from reaching the feature box.
1598909, 1597997
Question:
Back when this was first being bandied about, the option of making meta "permissible but unfeatureable" was raised. Was any more thought given to this? It seems that many people's objections to meta content are centered on that box, and it might make the greatest number of people happy to institute "unfeaturable-if-meta."
This will admittedly only make people philosophically happy, because the problem would then be, would people be willing to tick a box that will make their stories less popular? Especially with the nebulous criteria of exactly what constitutes a metastory. You'd need to really square away those rules first, and then enforce them as you would any poor-tagging issue.
Yeah, it's not surprising that TAW did have a special say about what goes up and what not as knighty's personal clop supplier.
1599096 I've seen thumb-bombed stories in the box, but that goes under "the featured box is broken". Or more likely, "knighty's goals for the featured box differ from what the community wants out of it." Anyway, you can skip them when you see the thumbcount.
1598909 Again, if you're going to claim metafiction is "mostly" cheap crap, name stories. I've named 8 extremely good metafiction stories. To clear Sturgeon's law, you need to now list 72 extremely crappy metafiction stories. If you can demonstrate that there are 100 terrible metafictions for every good metafiction, and that the ratio is lower for all other types of stories, I'll consider your point of view.
So, rather than think independently about something we should just appeal to authority? Good to know.
P. S.
Not a jab against Skywriter or even his position, 's just a weird thing to read...
1599224
Yeah, it would require some solidifying of the rules defining meta and careful enforcement, if that's the route that's taken. It's kind of a hypothetical concern right now, though, given that knighty's given no clear indication yet of what his plans are on the meta ban.
1599493
I think it's worth repeating that the reason people won't see the vast majority of cheap-crap metafiction, potential and extant, is because there's a ban on them. Most people recognize there's a ban and won't attempt to submit them in the first place. Even then the staff has to bounce a startling quantity of pretty bad metafics -- ask Meeester about it sometime.
Asking people to name a bunch of cheap-crap metafics when cheap-crap metafics have been banned for over a year is kind of... manipulative, as an argument. For lack of a better word.
(Also, obviously it's easier to find and remember the names of the really good stories, since those are popular and memorable. It's a lot harder to dig up the bad ones because they're bad enough as to be unmemorable. By the same token, everyone knows there are a lot of pretty bad OC alicorn stories out there, but it's not like most people can name a bunch of them off the top of their heads.)
Writing words about Tara Strong fucking Mic the Microphone with a dildo is for Fanfiction.net, where there are no rules on quality. Go there, don't bring that shit here.