(no subject)

[castalie]

Isn't it weird how the format of a fic will influence you? I mean, I guess it shouldn't matter that the formatting is all 'wrong', ie spacey with a different font than the one we're used to seeing on LJ, with bold text etc... but I can't help it, as soon as I see a story which template looks odd, with weird fonts, break lines all over the place or, even worse, with different font colours, I lose all prospective interest - unless I know the author and already like their fics, I mean.

Or maybe I don't necessarily lose all interest, but I can't help being, I don't know, prejudiced? This is stupid, I know, I'm trying to get over it, promise.

Though I guess it doesn't help that when I do decide to stop being silly and anal about formatting and actually read the fic, it often ends up in the bad!fic category. Admittedly it could just be bad luck on my part, mind. As usual, bad!fic is in the eye of the beholder blah blah blah but still...

I just saw that kind of story so that's why I was thinking about that.

Anyway! Had a great weekend; I spent the whole day at my sister's today and we had a BBQ and all lazed around under the sun. Awesomeness.

And yesterday I went to Pride with greedy_dancer and we had an fantastic time, as usual. There's so much energy in that event, it's absolutely wonderful! A bit tiring, mind, because when you reach Bastille - where the parade ends - you're kinda dead on your feet but it's so worth it! Definitely one of my favourite time of the year :-)

GD also reminded me that this year's Pride marked the fourth anniversary of our meeting which, yay, anniversary! I totally consider Pride as one of our traditions, I have to say, so I'm glad we usually manage to go together.

Comments

[turlough]

This is stupid, I know

Nope, I don't think it's stupid at all! A story's got to be very, very, very good or I've to be very, very bored for me to read something posted on LJ that's using a set font/colour/size! It's common curtesy to let people chose how they want to see your fic, dammit!! In the rare case I'm reading something off a website that I think's too tiny/weirdly coloured/whatever I use the very handy Page Style -> No Style command in Firefox :-)

[castalie.livejournal.com]

Sometimes it even seems to go a bit further than that, as if people who wrote bad!fics often used weird font and unusual and weird formatting and I can't help but associate the two together now...

Wonder if there's a correlation between good format and good fic. Which, well, I know there isn't per se, because I've read some incredibly OTT OCC bad!fics that were well formatted but, on the other hand, I've rarely seen a weirdly formatted story that turned out to be good, so...

Oh well...

[briarwood.livejournal.com]

Isn't it weird how the format of a fic will influence you?

Depends. I saw an SG-1 fic once which was essentially a script - all talk, no narrative prose. The author had colour coded the story so that each character voice was in a different colour, but she didn't let on which colour was which character. I guess she thought her voices were good enough that the reader wouldn't need that information (they weren't). It was an interesting experiment, if nothing else.

What gets me? Is fans whose LJ layouts use this teeny-tiny font or hard-to-read colours, and they post fic and expect everyone to struggle through it like that. I was trying to read a fic that was recced to me yesterday and I had to increase my browser font size four times just to read it.

I mean, it's easy enough to add ?style=mine or ?format=light to the link and make it readable, but why bother? If the author doesn't care enough to make it legible, she obviously doesn't want it read...right?

[castalie.livejournal.com]

It does depend, of course. Technically, everything always 'depends,' even. And I agree, I've seen stories with odd formatting which worked just fine because it was part of the actual narrative. The format was part of the story and it was very original and helped with the storytelling.

The stories I had in mind are just badly formatted - again, for me, it might be a dream format for someone else, obviously - and, coincidende or not, also badly written. You know, OTT, OCC, sometimes even bad grammar, the works.

And I've seen so many of those stories with that kind of formatting, that sometimes I can't help but associate the two.

Which, honestly, isn't even a problem but I couldn't help but ponder about it when I wrote my entry. The mysteries of fic writing and all that :-)

If the author doesn't care enough to make it legible, she obviously doesn't want it read...right?

Sometimes you do wonder whether the writer actually wanted their story to be read; like the ones who post a fic in a comm but you have to friend their journal first to do so.

Or the ones who post a WIP and when you go to a part, you have no other links for the previous ones and of course the story hasn't been tagged at all. What, am I supposed to go through a gazillion of her personal entries to be able to find the rest?

Often I've seen people who just forgot, but some just don't care. So I guess it's not surprising that potential readers don't either.

And I know many people will call that 'entitlement' but if someones posts a WIP with, like, 15+ parts, I do think it'd be logical that there's a way to find the previous chapters without having to hunt them down...

Linking to each previous part is tedious, I totally agree, I don't even need that at all, but tags are there and easy to use, both for the writer and the readers, so why not use them?

[turps33.livejournal.com]

A lot of the badfic sites I go to have weird formatting. Though, actually, what distracted me the most lately was someone who had a line of animated gifs of Mikey doing his head turn-neck bared thing down the side of the page. Which sounds lovely, but when it's constant, and all you can see out of the corner of your eye, not so much.

I'm glad you had a good time at pride!

[castalie.livejournal.com]

Lol So there is something as too much MikeyWay, after all, who would have thought? :-) But it would have been distracting, yeah.

Pride is AWESOME! ♥ ♥

[yami-tai.livejournal.com]

as soon as I see a story which template looks odd, with weird fonts, break lines all over the place or, even worse, with different font colours, I lose all prospective interest

I know exactly what you mean, personally it makes me think that a person who can be bothered to format a fic isn't going to put much effort into the storyline.

Sounds like you had an amazing weekend ^_^!

[castalie.livejournal.com]

personally it makes me think that a person who can be bothered to format a fic isn't going to put much effort into the storyline.

Among other things, yeah. And sometimes someone will put some effort into the storyline, except they'll just write badly - I'm talking about the outrageous OOC, OTT bad!grammar kind of fic -

Sounds like you had an amazing weekend ^_^!

It was a pretty awesome weekend, yeah :-) And my weekend now is all lazy and quiet. Nice too. Especially after the busy week I've had *g*