The Coal Game

[coalcube]

We're scrolling
And watching coalies make errors
The most pathetical errors!
We're watching experienced coalies
Who stayed up all night tracking a source in its original Latin
Up, writin'
And writin' bad!

Default deadline: Sat 11 Dec
Assignment deadline: Sat 18 Dec
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Comments

Re: Mediocrity

[(Anonymous)]

Bland canon rehash.

Shipfic where you could c+p different names and it would still work.

Porn where I can't tell why it's supposed to be hot.

1000 words that's just uninteresting introspection.

Re: Mediocrity

[(Anonymous)]

What do you consider bland canon rehash?

Re: Mediocrity

[(Anonymous)]

SC Usually in an exchange, it's stuff that retells a canon scene from a different POV without having anything new to say.

Like that can be really good if it's transformative, if the new POV casts an entirely different light on the scene! But a lot of the time it doesn't really.

Which isn't to say even the mediocre version is coal - it's a valid way to deal with a signup that didn't offer better options, and if the new POV is recip's absolute fave it may be exactly what they wanted. But it'll probably still read as mediocre to everybody else.

In longform it's often canon divergence that changes one thing and literally nothing else.

(Honestly most of my examples probably reduce to "technically competent, nothing interesting to say about the canon or characters.")

Re: Mediocrity

[(Anonymous)]

You're not SC, you would have said CYRT.

Re: Mediocrity

[(Anonymous)]

Shipfic where you could change the names isn't mediocre, it's outright badfic.

Re: Mediocrity

[(Anonymous)]

+1

Re: Mediocrity

[(Anonymous)]

OOC shipfic is badfic.

But at YT length it's entirely possible to write something that is both mostly IC *and* utterly generic. (Much longer than that it gets less likely.)

Re: Mediocrity

[(Anonymous)]

True. A lot of fic is generic "those two guys/girls but with a different hat" and it's not necessarily bad.