InsertAuthorHere wrote:What's even more confusing about that criticism is that Magic Duel really
doesn't follow the typical "Trixie redemption" fanfiction mold. The majority of stories I've been able to find in that genre focus more on Trixie being homeless and without a career, being found by one or all of the Mane 6, and learning about how wonderful friendship could be. Not too many of them involve revenge, mind-warping amulets, rock farms, Ponyville getting put under glass, and Trixie actually being an antagonist rather than a poor victim of the Mane 6's cruelty.
The only episode I honestly think could be considered "fanfiction-like" is Slice of Life, and that was really the whole point of that episode. It took the same bits and pieces the fandom has latched onto, put its own interpretation on them, and connected it back to the actual show with a moral about how everyone has their own story. It's part of the reason why I think SoL is ultimately fated to age poorly, especially when the show ends and the fandom moves on.
The reason the criticism is so common is that it's easy to say and you don't have to justify it. People inherently associate "fanfic" with "crap," so saying that an episode is "like a fanfic" is a shorthand way of saying you think the episode is crap without actually
saying why you think it's crap. If you actually pointed out stuff you disliked, then people might challenge those reasons or simply disagree, but if you blanket the criticism by associating the episode with something that is popularly disdained, you've effectively prevented any sort of actual response. See also, "Don't delude yourself into thinking this is good," and, "Only drones would like this episode."
The way I feel about the "fanfic" criticism is this:
Saying an episode is "like a fanfic" isn't, to me, just shorthand for "crappy" or "lazy"—or at least it might be for some people, but not the ones who are trying to make the charge mean something. Rather, it's pointing out specific characteristics of the story or the presentation that you
do see exclusively in fanfics, particularly bad ones.
I'm not talking about concepts like "Trixie returns". There's nothing inherently fanficcy about that. What
is fanficcy is direct callbacks to
specific gags that had felt at the time, in their original appearances, like imaginative one-off stunts meant to show off how wacky and unpredictable the universe is. Case in point would be one fanfic I saw that painstakingly described Twilight reacting to something that made her mad: "Her coat turned white and her eyes became red, and her mane and tail were replaced with bright flames as she hovered several feet above the ground". In other words the text just slavishly described a cartoonish sight gag that nobody watching the original episode (FPK) ought to have understood to be
literally what happened, but the fanfic treated it as a literal narrative anyway. And all that does is expose the fanfic as being devoid of the kind of imagination and inventiveness that the writers of the show, who come up with ways to treat concepts like "Trixie returns" that don't feel like retreads of old material, can bring to the table.
So I don't begrudge Magic Duel its use of concepts like Trixie returning for revenge, or Trixie being a neurotic weirdo with a phobia of wheels, or even a gag in which Pinkie loses her mouth to an in-universe Flash animator. Those are pure Larson wackiness. What
doesn't feel like it draws from the same creative well are the extremely specific callbacks to previously seen gags, like the parasprite out of nowhere, or Pinkie doing her one-pony-band bit, or the rock farm reference (I kinda wanted Pinkie's past to remain a misty no-man's-land that might be canonically an Amish moonscape of depression or that might all have been bullshit she was making up on the spot, who the hell knows, it's
Pinkie Pie). Those gags had their best impact when they came and went and we never saw them again, and the show replaced them with new and more fanciful things like felt-constructed imagination or live-action rubber chickens or a pony who loves to soak in jelly jars. Don't bring those things back!
That's the kind of thing that fanfic—and specifically
bad fanfic, the kind that doesn't know how to come up with new stuff and can only iterate endlessly on the scriptural canon that's been seen on screen—does.
E: Of course, when an episode manages to reference an old one-off gag and actually make it into something bigger and better—like Flutterguy—then that's something special, something that transcends the "fanficcy" nature of the story. But it's something you can't get away with too often, because it's rare that such a gag can actually be mined for legitimate story material.
Last edited by Headless Horse on Wed Jul 29, 2015 11:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.