Yeah, basically what Necratoid said, though some calrification of my position:
Bashing doens't involve making a villain an villain, or a foul character a foul character.
You could bash Umbridge in your fanfic. For example, you could have a otherwise serious fanfic where, after every second paragraph you included the line
"Oh, and by the way, Delores Umbridge was being raped to death by demontors in the vbackground, Nobody cared." Nothing to do with the plot, nothing
to do with the story... just constantly mentioning Delores Umbridge getting raped to death by dementors.
Bashing is as much "I will inflict terrible things on this character for no plot-acceptable reaosn other than I hate them and am the author" as much
as "I will Flanderize this character as much as possible to unsell them to the audience" in my mind. Its when the author clearly hates a character,
has an Agenda of hating the character and then exploits his authorial control to basically destroy the character for no reason other than his own hate.
It's not really sloppy writing, its obnoxious writing. I'm not here to read you hate screeds. I get enough of that off the evening news, thank you very
much.
No, if you have a plot which just happens to involve Delores Umbridge being raped to death by dementors or Sasuke getting a massive brian injury that turns him
into a vegetable that's okay... as long as you aren't kludging this into your plot or at least make it not obvious the entire goal of the fanfic is to
engage in torture porn.
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Epsilon
Bashing doens't involve making a villain an villain, or a foul character a foul character.
You could bash Umbridge in your fanfic. For example, you could have a otherwise serious fanfic where, after every second paragraph you included the line
"Oh, and by the way, Delores Umbridge was being raped to death by demontors in the vbackground, Nobody cared." Nothing to do with the plot, nothing
to do with the story... just constantly mentioning Delores Umbridge getting raped to death by dementors.
Bashing is as much "I will inflict terrible things on this character for no plot-acceptable reaosn other than I hate them and am the author" as much
as "I will Flanderize this character as much as possible to unsell them to the audience" in my mind. Its when the author clearly hates a character,
has an Agenda of hating the character and then exploits his authorial control to basically destroy the character for no reason other than his own hate.
It's not really sloppy writing, its obnoxious writing. I'm not here to read you hate screeds. I get enough of that off the evening news, thank you very
much.
No, if you have a plot which just happens to involve Delores Umbridge being raped to death by dementors or Sasuke getting a massive brian injury that turns him
into a vegetable that's okay... as long as you aren't kludging this into your plot or at least make it not obvious the entire goal of the fanfic is to
engage in torture porn.
-------------------
Epsilon