Title:           >>26036322 >/fft/ Who? Us? We don't have a uniform set of standards, since
Author:          Anonymous
Pastebin link:   http://pastebin.com/HPa6BPTt
First Edit:      Friday 8th of January 2016 07:17:04 AM CDT
Last Edit:       Friday 8th of January 2016 07:17:04 AM CDT

>>26036322
>/fft/
Who? Us?
 
We don't have a uniform set of standards, since a lot of us like quite different things, so I won't be able to say anything about content. But I can try to name some of the things that's often complained about, so that you get a certain idea of what you should/shouldn't do. It will naturally be dominated by my personal view on matters.
Please excuse me, as I will be rambling.
 
>Grammar
Obviously, you should be able to write English well, and use correct spelling and punctuation. This may sound so basic that it's hardly worth mentioning, but this is FimFiction.
 
>Be aware of the medium
Be very aware that you're writing fanfiction about a land of colourful magical horses. The reason is twofold.
The first is that a lot of stories seemingly forget that the majority of their characters very likely will be ponies, and end up having them move, talk, think and act like humans. This also means that people often introduce items and technology that is essentially human. To give an example, I once read a thing that said that one of the ponies rode a motorcycle, which was a mental image that I was unable to take seriously.
The second reason is in terms of style. The reason why, in my opinion, a lot of dark and grimdark pony fiction is so bad, is that it's trying to force very foreign elements into a setting that doesn't have anything to do with them. That doesn't mean that you can't introduce themes of death, sorrow, and danger, but doing so should be done with great care. If you don't feel like you have a good way of doing things that lie outside of the scope of the setting, please don't. [spoiler]No tiger tanks and gommunism.[/spoiler]
 
>Don't be dark for the sake of being dark
Dark themes can be used to provoke or enforce a feeling or an idea, but you do unfortunately often see things going unnecessarily dark seemingly just for the sake of the dark, or because it strikes the author's fancy. It's okay if someone dies if you want to examine loss, but it's probably not okay to kill someone off because you want to write Ponyhammer 40Hugs, and need to fill some kind of gore quota.
 
>Don't write crackfics
They might be funny [spoiler]that's a lie[/spoiler]. but they aren't good.
 
>Shipping
Use common fucking sense. You can probably ship canon character with canon characters if it makes some degree of sense, as long as you're tactful about it, but be fucking careful about shipping with OCs. As a general rule, don't do it. Especially not if that OC is a blue-haired highschool harem cunt you've written as a self-insert to forget how sad your life actually is.
 
>Self-insertion
Don't.
 
>Humans
Don't.
 
>Anthro
Don't.
 
>EQG
Don't.
 
>Romance
Most romance out there is shit, and I'll tell you why. There's no character motivation, only author motivation. Twilight fucks Rarity not because of shared interests, personal magnetism, growing appreciation of each other or personality trait, but because the author's cock gets hard when he thinks about it. In other words, it "just happens", because it's in the sense of the story predestined.
In bad romance, characters fall in love as if some alien presence is slowly altering their personalities until they think in the way the plot requires. In bad romance, Twilight can't understand why Rarity attracts her. Rarity is just "somehow" alluring, and you usually go from A (not in love) to B (in love) through a series of mandatory clichés that don't actually have anything to do with the characters themselves.
Twilight goes through a series of very forgettable "love actions" (introspective walks, confusion, weird gut feelings, cheap drama, obliviousness to the obvious) because the writer feels like this is the way people should fall in love. Hence they act like puppets. It doesn't include how Twilight and Rarity as characters would grow attracted to each other.
Moreover, it's usually not even about the relationship. If you examine it, the focus often isn't that TWILIGHT wants Rarity, but that Twilight WANTS Rarity. It's not about one character being attracted to another, it's about one character getting some sort of validation in the form of a relationship, that doesn't really have anything to do with the people who make up that relationship.
It's shallow and it's dull, and very forgettable.
 
>Motivation
Character motivation and action is what drives as story, and most things that happen should reflect around that. If your story at any point depends on the words "for no reason", "somehow" or "randomly", you probably have a very bad story. We as readers are invested in what characters do, and how that resonates within their world, and how those motivations and actions echo back at them. To use a personal example, I tend to hate fics that shift the blame of NMM away from Luna. Maybe she was "somehow" taken over by alien powers. That's bullshit, because it removes the things we care about, motivation and action, from the result. Character motivation, character action, and the result are the three things we care about, the why, how and what of writing, and they need to be kept in close proximity.
 
>Emotion
Emotion is for girls and pussies. Except it's actually not. Emotion is how a lot of stories, if not all of them, are told.
But the thing is, these emotions actually have to be produced by the story, and they have to be genuine in some sense. Again, take romance. What happens in bad romance is that ponies act out the way falling in love "should be", but it doesn't actually create emotion. It's like crossing checkboxes most of the time. We're supposed to feel because Rarity just gave Twilight flowers and chocolate, because that is a thing that Romance does, hence you should feel. But I don't, because this is trying to provoke emotion by reference, not by the act itself. Never write anything because the action is a trope of the type of story you're writing. Only write it if the action itself is actually going to provoke emotion.
When bad comedy fails to be funny, it's often because it uses tropes to tell you that something should be funny, rather than actually making it funny. It's almost like when a sitcom character tells a joke, and the laughtrack kicks in. It very often isn't actually a good joke, it might not even be a joke at all, but the show is insisting that this is a joke, hence it's comedy, hence you should laugh. Be concious about the word you use and what they actually mean. Understand why all the elements you use in your story work. If you can't don't include them. Know how to write action, and know that you should play on emotion.
 
>Mood/tone
Generally speaking, a story has one mood, and everything should ultimately build towards that. This is why it's so offputting to see a story with eight tags on FimFiction, because it's clear that the author doesn't actually know what kind of story he's writing.
Now, this doesn't mean that you can't have jokes in a sad story, or sadness in a funny story, but consider this: Your story is nevertheless going to have one dominant mood, that you want to support by creating emotion, and it's only going to have one ending. The mood of a story doesn't have to be the same as a genre, just a general feeling or thematic. It's there to enforce consistency.
If a bleak horror story (with a mood that's downthrodden, slow and lonely) suddenly decides that, in chapter 31, all the characters have a rave, that would be bad because it clashes with the mood the story has been setting. If the story from there on still stays a horror fic, but starts building a completely different mood, it would make the story very poor.
There's a story on FimFic that has: Comedy, a Holocaust, drunken shenanigans, terrifying war, and romance. Which tone do you think this story has? The answer is several, because it's a piece of shit that doesn't know what it's trying to be. The humour isn't eve black, just bad.
This is also why the Star Wars prequels suck. You can't put child murder in a story and expect us to not find that extremely jarring next to some of the other elements that have a completely different tone.
 
>Consequence
Consequence should always matter. One of the crowning achievements of bad writing is a HiE I read where the human stabbed Celestia in one chapter, but everyone said it was cool, and it never had any consequences. Fuck that.
We're invested in characters, and in character actions. And those actions have consequences. In fact, the consequences are what make actions matter. Be very careful about having characters do something that should provoke strong consequences, and then dispelling or ignoring that.
 
There's plenty more to talk about, but I don't feel like doing it right now. I don't even know why I wrote this. It must be the 'tism.
 
Keep in mind, this is an unedited rant, and none of the things here are absolute, inflexible rules set in stone. Some of them might even be wrong. But I hope it works to give you a general idea of what adds to a story, and what subtracts from it.