I've decided never to spork stories featuring classic female Mary Sues--unless they overlap with my preferred targets, like Lifetime!fic and those which feature obnoxious male Mary Sues.

There's a couple reasons for this. One is that the moment a fic like this gets discovered you see dozens if not hundreds of snarkers lining up to bash the hell out of it. I feel like there's often a sexist dimension to it as well, since a lot of the time it seems like people don't comment on the very real problems found in stories like this, such as the fact that they often contain sexism, racism, homophobia, callous disregard for the well-being of anyone who isn't Mary Sue or her slobbering sex slave du jour, or some combination of the four; but rather their commentary often falls along the lines of "LOL STUPID LITTLE GIRLS WITH THEIR STUPID MARY SUES CORRUPTING POOR INNOCENT STUD-SAMA BY FORCING HIM OUT OF CHARACTER!"

So instead I'm sticking with problems which it seems like snarkers rarely talk about--including Lifetime!fics which receive a distressingly low level of criticism for their blatant misogyny, and (perhaps, as is the way of these things, ESPECIALLY) male Mary Sues, who often don't get any attention or criticism whatsoever from the fandom despite being every bit as bad as their sisters.

I've also considered sharpening my Ron the Death Eater snarking skills, and spending less time snarking at DILP in so many words, because again, it seems to me that Draco in Leather Pants is condemned as the worst and most poisonous thing ever!!!! that a fan can do, while RTDE gets a free pass (unless said Death Eater is a character you personally like, that is...).

What I'm really hoping is that I'll eventually tackle bad snark. It seems to me that there's an unspoken belief in fandom that snarkers get a free pass to say whatever they want just because they're tearing apart "bad" works, when really, there's a way to do snark well and a way to do it poorly.

 First of all...anyone who implies that Draco in Leather Pants is something that only women do, or that only applies to male characters, needs a good kick in the face. In fact, one of the fics I plan to spork down the road is an absolutely obnoxious DILP work--with a male Mary Sue and a female DILP (and the fic was written by a man too). So yeah, they exist and they're every bit as obnoxious as the more common (or at least more commonly-cited) version with a female Mary Sue and male DILP.

Oh, and here's another thing: I strongly suspect (though have no evidence to prove, admittedly) that if you were to take the sum total of all instances of Draco in Leather Pants and Ron the Death Eater across all fandoms, you'd end up with fairly comparable numbers of each (based on my own experience, RTDE is WAY more common in the Pokemon fandom than DILP, to cite one example--granted, Cori Falls and her ilk notwithstanding). Yet DILP receives almost all the attention and condemnation from wankier fans. What's even more annoying is that a lot of these wankier fans think ANY interpretation of the character that doesn't make him out to be pure evil is DILP, no matter how well-thought out. Apparently you can make N, or Grimsley, or Dawn (yes, THAT Dawn--I once saw a fic of her as a psycho murderer) a mustache-twirlingly evil bastard and everyone's okay with it, but the moment you try to argue that Voldemort might have been a victim in his childhood at one point rather than being an innately evil monster, well, you're just a stupid brainless fangirl who is obviously too besotted with Voldiecakes to understand how evil he is.

And before anyone says, "But DILP is so HARMFUL because it glorifies the villains' antisocial behavior," well, RTDE has the potential to be every bit as harmful, because its logical extreme is character bashing. Which part of Cori Falls's work was more obnoxious, her declaration that Jessie and James were the real heroes or her insistence that Ash was pure evil and deserved to be abused both verbally and physically just for not liking Jessie and James? Both DILP and RTDE have the potential to glorify antisocial behavior if they go too far--it's all to do with context.

 I would treat the slash ships in your fandom with more gravity if you didn't treat them like they were the end-all be-all of shipping and the "Death Note" fandom in general.

Seriously--the mind boggles at how SO MANY PEOPLE could watch a psychological murder mystery about a notebook that kills people, and come out of it with nothing but gay bishounen porn to show for it!

(Before anyone asks, I'm not trying to come across as homophobic. I actually buy that Light and L might have a thing for each other. I'm complaining about how very, very overgrown this fandom is with shipping in general and slash shipping in particular)

 Everyone who participates in fandom, no matter if they do it casually or religiously and no matter if their fandom is big or small, should read this article.

And maybe its follow-up too, for completeness.

The author principally focuses on Harry Potter, but these same ideas can be said to apply to every fandom everywhere, so no matter if you're in Harry Potter fandom or not, you should read it.