Big-Time Mary Sue Story! Read At Own Risk!

[Bob Schroeck]

"Harry Potter and The Unlikely Gryffindor" by "Hera Malfoy"
I stumbled on this by accident last night over at "Sink Into Your Eyes", a "Harry Potter" fanfic site. It had a five-star rating and was in their top-25 listing so I grabbed the whole thing in a lump and saved it to read later.
Well, I read it later, and dear gods I wish I hadn't. I stopped after about two and a half chapters, and that was entirely too late. Quick capsule summary: Draco has female cousin, a couple years or so older than he is, who was taken from her parents by the Ministry of Magic's equivalent of Child Protective Services and put into fosterage during the first Voldemort war; the foster parents are killed and she disappears only to turn up in Texas (of all places) when she's 19, at which point she then goes to Hogwart's as a first year and gets sorted into Gryffindor. She's a goth except she's kept the Malfoy hair, has her own motorcycle, a thick Texas accent, and lots of kewl wicca-themed jewelry. Oh, and she's engaged to marry Draco Malfoy by virtue of a long-ago agreement between their parents. By purest coincidence, she has exactly the same name as the author, and already the beginnings of the Harry-attraction are starting.
You can see where this is headed.
It is also one of the most incompetently-written stories I've seen in a while. Well, that's not entirely fair. "Hera Malfoy" is mostly a fair writer -- no horrendous misspellings or grammatical gaffes -- but she's careless and overconfident as a writer. Every once in a while she'll come out with something like this:

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There rising up out of the darkness, was a castle Hera had only thought could exist in fairy tales. There were huge walls made of stone cinder blocks, spinnerets climbing into the sky, and the windows were each burning with torch light.

---

Cinderblocks? Spinnerets? Bwah? I have found the example I will be using in the "Vocabulary" section of my Fic Writer's Guide...
Anyway, I found this thing to be so spectacularly bad that I just had to share it. And I am seriously considering registering at SIYE just so I can go into the comments for this story and repeatedly post "Are you people nuts?"
-- Bob
---------
...The President is on the line
As ninety-nine crab rangoons go by...

[Rieverre]

You know, I realize that I've displayed a similar lack of shame, but at least I can claim that I try and have my SIs make some minor amount of sense.

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Oh, and just to make matters worse, it's incomplete yet a meg and a half long.

---

My dear sweet kami ... _how_?!

Makes me wonder why the hell I ever started writing fanfic ... oh, right. Gryphon-envy.

-Griever
When tact is required, use brute force. When force is required, use greater force.
When the greatest force is required, use your head. Surprise is everything. - The Book of Cataclysm

[Bob Schroeck]

Sorry, no... mixed it up with another fic I downloaded at the same time. Looked at the wrong size in the directory.
-- Bob
---------
...The President is on the line
As ninety-nine crab rangoons go by...

[Bluemage]

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oh, right. Gryphon-envy.

---

Maaaan, I know what you mean.
Actually, I started because I thought I had a good idea for mutating a series I liked. I stopped because I thought I couldn't do characterization good enough to stand an IG squad's chance in the Warp.
Then I read UF, and learned what good mutation looks like (acquiring my own quantity of envy). I started again, trying to accomplish said mutation with a less character-centric approach.
Fanfiction without enough talking is just as bad as fanfic with too much/bad talking. Needless to say, I stopped.
*Then*, I read DW, and, for the first time, began to participate in fanfic discussion. Now, I write because the good (or so they seem at the time) ideas won't stop coming, and I have to channel that energy somewhere, or else suffer from misdirecting it.
Funny- I've only been able to make sizable strides on fanfic of my own since my personal case of Gryphon-envy died. I could say something meaningful here, about how constant envy of others' talents and works causes one to, by comparison, denigrate one's own, and how the only path to developing one's own talent is to acknowledge the flaws of others- the flaws that keep those writers from being the gods we set them up as.
But I won't.Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines...

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My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.

I've been writing a bit.

[drakensis]

> Makes me wonder why the hell I ever started writing
> fanfic ... oh, right. Gryphon-envy.
Amen, brudda.
D for Drakensis

You're only young once, but immaturity is forever.

[Bob Schroeck]

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*Then*, I read DW, and, for the first time, began to participate in fanfic discussion. Now, I write because the good (or so they seem at the time) ideas won't stop coming, and I have to channel that energy somewhere, or else suffer from misdirecting it.

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I think that might be because -- whether it's intentional or not -- the forums act something like a writer's workshop. There's all this feedback and fertile ground and cross-pollination, and you can't help but be inspired and improve as a writer at the same time.
-- Bob
---------
...The President is on the line
As ninety-nine crab rangoons go by...

[Star Ranger4]

Damn... Thats amazing about how many of us can link the start of our fic writing back to Gryph.
And I can sympathise with the writer envy too... Just ask Bob about some of the comments I made early on when I was first releasting Tales of the Wanderer vs Drunkards Walk...
(shortest form? People on the FFML raved over DW. TotW tended to vanish into the background noise)"I was an Otaku before those kids came along and changed the meaning of the word."
-- HM "Howling Mad" Wilson to more than one team-mate.
Hear that thunder rolling till it seems to split the sky?
That's every ship in Grayson's Navy taking up the cry-
NO QUARTER!!!
-- "No Quarter", by Echo's Children

[Norgarth]

Well, I can't speak for anyone else, but I enjoyed Tales of the Wanderer. __________________
I feel like I'm diagonally parked in a parallel universe.
___________________________
"I've always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific." - George Carlin

[Morganite]

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You know, I realize that I've displayed a similar lack of shame, but at least I can claim that I try and have my SIs make some minor amount of sense.

---

It certainly sounds like a story that puts one's on excesses in perspective...
(I think I've at least tried not to take everything too seriously in my own stuff... And is it still a SI if a bunch of random people show up in your house?)
-Morgan, thinks much of the rest qualifies as self-defense..."I have no interest in ordinary humans. If there are any aliens, time travelers, or espers here, come sleep with me."
---From "The Ecchi of Haruhi Suzumiya"
-----(Not really)

[Acyl]

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Damn... Thats amazing about how many of us can link the start of our fic writing back to Gryph.

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Well, I can't...I was trying my hand at fanfiction, albeit very bad fanfiction, before discovering UF...
...but Gryphon and the Eyrie crew are probably the fic writers I admired the most...at least during their really active period between, I dunno, 2000-2005 or so. Somethin' like that.
See, I think there's something compelling about their stuff. G and his collaborators have this massively epic universe with amazing characters. But it was built on a SI parody thing. And right now, they continue to rope in bits from every possible source, and make it work.
That gives us hope that we can make our ideas work, rather than, I dunno, simply discarding them as silly or unoriginal.
'course, I say this, but I've never really done anything in the way of actual "published" fanfic...like, never thrown anything up on a site or mailing list for widespread public distribution.
(well, aside from the City of Heroes stuff I've posted to the boards here, but that's still 'internal consumption', really)
Hm.
I probably should. I've certainly got the material lying around...
-- Acyl
(on a side note, Drunkard's Walk is actually my all-time favourite insert-type story, so nyah)
-- Acyl

[Bluemage]

---

continue to rope in bits from every possible source, and make it work.

---

The mere concept of flawlessly blending Utena/MKR/OMG! together, to the point where I have to intentionally shift my paradigm in order to consider the *canon* series, is the test case for, and second inspiration of, my Stagger.
If I hadn't already seen that rewriting parts of a series in order to make it make sense, even in conjunction with other series, was possible, I'd never try to take on the much less difficult task of creating my own backstory to tie together the fragments of an incomplete paradigm, while linking it to a transfictional metacosmology.
The only problem is that I now have a larger history for the Big O-verse than I need for the story, and I don't want to see parts of it left unmentioned....Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines...

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My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.

I've been writing a bit.

[Bob Schroeck]

---

The mere concept of flawlessly blending Utena/MKR/OMG! together, to the point where I have to intentionally shift my paradigm in order to consider the *canon* series ...

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A few years back, I once mentioned to Gryphon that his version of Utena resonates so strongly with me that I sometimes forget and cite his stuff as canon... as I recall he was pleased and flattered and a bit at a loss for words upon hearing that.
-- Bob
---------
...The President is on the line
As ninety-nine crab rangoons go by...

[Disruptor]

Strange, I have never read Undocumented Features, even thoug I have read some of the other stuff.
As to my writing, I still have the pieces of paper that I wrote on in fifth grade. They might not be stories, but background and data sheets(bios, equipment, ships). Long before the internet was around.
Wheee. Some of this stuff I came up with makes me wonder....
Hovering above a placid ocean is a giant roller coaster. The roller coaster car stops when it is almost at sea leve. At that time a talking dolphin breaks the surface and answers questions and offers wisdom. After getting answers, the car continues on to the end of the ride.
--------------------
Tom Mathews aka Disruptor
--------------------
Tom Mathews aka Disruptor

[katreus]

I've heard tons of stuff about UF and its greatness but I've never actually gotten around to reading it.

[Bob Schroeck]

Skip the core stories until you're more familiar with the universe, because quite frankly they're crude and primitive compared to Gryphon et al.'s mature work. (Or, as Gryphon himself puts it, they come from his "crap period".) You could do what I did and start with Symphony of the Sword, and then branch out as things catch your eye. Just understand that virtually anything might be thrown into the mix and surprise you by coming from an odd angle, and you'll be fine.
-- Bob
---------
...The President is on the line
As ninety-nine crab rangoons go by...

[classicdrogn]

I continue to maintain that I like the first two Core stories the best, but I won't dispute that they're less polished than later work - by the nature of things. They also have multi-page addenda to explain the many, many injokes, so if that isn't your kind of thing, again steer clear until more conversant with the setting - maybe stick a toe in with Phil Moyer's not-really-related-except-conceptually thing, which also deals with having anime-archetype extradmiensionals show up and hang around with a college student. Similar crack, less injokes, or at least less blatantly so.
- CDSERVO: Loook *deeeeply* into my eyes... Tell me, what do you see?
CROW: (hypnotized) A twisted man who wants to inflict his pain upon others.
For the next 72 hours, Itachi intoned, I will slap you with this trout. - Spying no Jutsu, chapter 3
"In the futuristic taco bell of the year 20XX, justice wears an aluminum sombrero!"hemlock-martini
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[Bluemage]

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Skip the core stories until you're more familiar with the universe, because quite frankly they're crude and primitive compared to Gryphon et al.'s mature work.

---

True, but there is a lot to be said for reading the whole enchilada in order. Early UFCore may be crude, in terms of writing style, plot, or other stylistic/structural criteria, but they really shine when it comes to fun and accuracy.
Before anybody goes crazy about me calling such a megacross 'accurate', what I mean is that the early Core stories present the best 'if I got all this cool anime stuff, this is what I'd do' vibe I've ever seen. Really, if a bunch of college gweeps got a hold of all that sort of stuff, wouldn't they be hopelessly in-jokey? Wouldn't they play around with it?
Really, the early stuff should be crude, because the characters, in many senses, are crude. UF-Gryphon shouldn't start out in his full, demi-godly, Future Imperfect character style, because *that isn't him yet*. The earlier stuff gives the reader a reason to enjoy the powerful, well-adjusted, quirky SIs, because it lets them see those same SIs grow, both in power and maturity. Symphony-Gryphon would be just another overpowered SI without that backstory, even if he does very little personally. By that part of the series, he's a walking plot device.
Symphony builds upon the original arcs to enough of a degree, or so it seems to me, that the original series is necessary as a foundation- the people, places, and recent events really need some explanation, in order to make the story make sense from the beginning. I would certainly have been lost, if I'd started like the Boss had.
I've read the entire series, beginning to end, at least four times, and I still find new and interesting things to think about, references to investigate, and jokes to chuckle at every time. My favorite aspect of the series, aside from its general quality, humor value, and length (important when you speed-read!), has got to be that it's a SI that evolves into a non-SI along the way: a frivolous read that becomes more meaningful over time- a series that grows with its authors and characters.
If you have the time and the dedication to get through so much fanfic, read it all in order. It's worth it.Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines...

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My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.

I've been writing a bit.

[Bob Schroeck]

I started Peggy in with SOTS and no background on the UF world at all, and explained anything that needed it as we went along. It seemed to work -- she's a big fan of UF, now.
-- Bob
---------
...The President is on the line
As ninety-nine crab rangoons go by...

[classicdrogn]

Bluemage: But would you have been Hopelessly Lost?
- CD ducks and runsSERVO: Loook *deeeeply* into my eyes... Tell me, what do you see?
CROW: (hypnotized) A twisted man who wants to inflict his pain upon others.
For the next 72 hours, Itachi intoned, I will slap you with this trout. - Spying no Jutsu, chapter 3
"In the futuristic taco bell of the year 20XX, justice wears an aluminum sombrero!"hemlock-martini
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[Bluemage]

Gods Willing, I might've ended up in The Iron Age...

All I'm really saying is that the early UF has its place in the story, that its lack of structural merit is compensated for by how fun and appropriate it is, and that one's enjoyment of the rest of the series can only be bettered by reading it.
It'd be harder to understand SoTS without the early stuff, but not impossible, especially if somebody's explaining things as you go along. Explanations, though, aren't as fun as the real thing, and aren't we all in this to have fun?
Sorry for getting so involved with this, but I'm a bit of a completist (I've been known to ignore DVDs of anime that I really, really want, just because they didn't have the entire series there to buy). This sort of thing happens every time I get into a really good series.
Incidentally, I've been wishing for a time machine recently, just so that I could see the stories that inspired the Walk. Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines...

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My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.

I've been writing a bit.

[Bob Schroeck]

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Incidentally, I've been wishing for a time machine recently, just so that I could see the stories that inspired the Walk.

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Most of them are still out there somewhere. Twisted Path is the only one you might have problems with, and I have copies that I could put up somewhere.
-- Bob
---------
...The President is on the line
As ninety-nine crab rangoons go by...

[Bluemage]

Actually, I tracked down copies of all four complete books *years* ago. Heck, I even got the "Alternate Zone" stuff off one of the threads here (I believe it has some slight connection, though I don't remember what). I also heard there was a TP5 in progress, but I never did get my hands on a copy...
Thank you very much for offering, though.
What I was actually (obliquely?) talking about, and the reason for the time machine comment, were the stories that formed the primary inspiration for the Walk- the unpublished stories of Warriors' World. I've even done a bit of research, trying to find an easily accessible copy of V&V, just so I might possibly have a way to understand the nuances of the ever-nutty Loon's writeup.
Sadly, I am of a newer, less spiffy age- one where even such a nerd's geek as myself cannot find a game of anything but D&D (3e or higher, no less, and those are few and far between!) at a state university! After one year of college, I've been in approximately 10 minutes of a Mage game (which fell apart- the ST and I were the only ones who really had any clue), and a one-shot game of Paranoia.Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines...

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My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.

I've been writing a bit.

[Bob Schroeck]

Ah. Well, sadly, most of them are still word-of-mouth, "remember when..." stuff. Helen and I are theoretically collaborating on "Tales of the Warriors", with the first installment to be the story of Doug's... um.... "audition" for the team (working title: "Douglas Sangnoir and the Overlong Probation"), but other than some basic discussions and about 3K of text, not much has yet developed from that.
-- Bob
---------
...The President is on the line
As ninety-nine crab rangoons go by...