redwoodalchan

 I've been rereading "Family Matters" recently (just because), and it really stuck out to me just how much of a copout the part where Jessie realizes she's not pregnant is. The thing is, at the beginning of the story she mentions taking THREE separate pregnancy tests and having all of them come up positive. I actually did a bit of research into this (since I'm writing a fanfic of my own that features a scene in which the main character's mom realizes she's pregnant with him), and it would be really very rare for even one pregnancy test to throw a false positive, if they were used correctly (as in, once the woman realizes her period is late). Maybe it would have been more believable in the Nineties, but even that seems like a stretch. They try to explain it away by claiming that the birth control hormones circulating in her system were tricking her body into thinking it's pregnant, but that's such a forced rationalization it's hard to take seriously--particularly since it raises the question of why Jessie didn't think of that herself earlier (or, for that matter, why Jessie would even notice her period was late in the first place if she'd been taking her pills at the time).

Just...the entire thing reads like Cori really, desperately wanted Jessie to be pregnant at that time, but couldn't reconcile it with the fact that she wouldn't have been pregnant at this point in canon. So, she wrote all those pages of hand-wringing about whether Jessie was pregnant--which she actually WANTED to write--and then pulled some explanation for how she wasn't actually pregnant out of her ass as a sort of retcon and hoped her readers wouldn't think too hard about it.

The really funny thing is that in "Never Too Late" she writes a scene almost EXACTLY like the one in "Family Matters" in which Jessie's mom reveals she's pregnant with her. Since I'm pretty sure she wrote "Family Matters" before "Never Too Late," she probably decided to make "Never Too Late" the surprise pregnancy fic she really wanted to write all along.

So, those of you who follow my sporkings may notice that I'm actually not the biggest stickler for canon there is. Yes I'll complain if I see something that contradicts canon (particularly if it's a character behaving in an OOC way), but it's not my primary focus when I spork or otherwise analyze a fanfic. If the fic is interesting enough (for good or for ill), it's kind of an afterthought. For awhile now, in fact, it's been my impression that after a certain point, if a fic is sufficiently interesting or straight-up crazy it kind-of doesn't matter whether it adheres to canon or not (though I do tend to get annoyed if I see a fic where you could replace the names of the characters and locations with anything and have difficulty noticing).

Case in point: sometime ago I found a Pokemon DPPt fanfic that featured, among other things, Saturn and Jupiter as cousins from England and Canada (respectively); Mars turning Saturn into an Eevee for no reason in the hopes that he can escape from Cyrus, who's now an alcoholic; an autopsy on Hunter J in which they discover that she apparently has had sex and is pregnant for reasons that are (near as I can tell) never adequately explained; and a bit in which Pokemon characters (who may or may not exist in canon) travel to Edinburgh, Scotland, to take on a case with the cast of "CSI: New York." It also contains lines like this:

"I think you guys are panicking," I sighed. "I'm breathing just fine, but I do feel a little sick..." the Charizard roared slightly.

"We should pretend that she's a dragon and take her to a vet," Mac blinked.

"Or pretend she's a mutated orange lizard with wings," Stella shrugged.

Needless to say, the story contradicts canon in far too many ways for anyone to name; but at the end of the day, who cares? I mean, what can you really say to a line like that? "Ha ha, this fic's so bad that it has a Charizard interacting with Mac and Stella from "CSI: New York," in which pokemon don't exist?

Awkward Fanfic Theatre is an idea I’ve been kicking around for a little while now, but which I was only recently inspired to actually make a reality.

The basic idea behind Awkward Fanfic Theatre is to give me a venue to discuss those fanfics I found which I thought were awkward or uncomfortable or strange or silly, in some way which I thought was notable but not extreme enough to bear a full-on sporking. I won’t be going through these fics line-by-line—instead you’ll find a lot of commentary interspersed with quotes to help me make my point. Sort-of like the format for my Twisted! sporking but with less summarizing and more commentary.

Additionally, chances are I won’t have as much vitriol for these stories as I do for the sort I normally spork. After all, if they made me that angry on that many levels, chances are I’d just spork them.

Master List

I’ll be running Awkward Fanfic Theatre on and off indefinitely now, and I have a few fics already lined up to put here. If you want to see an entry in particular, you can find it here.

What Pretty Girls Get

Girly Boy