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"Bait and Switch" Fics
"Bait and Switch" Fics
#1
Since the Disappearing Fic? topic has drifted into a topic about change (or lack of change) in
Ranma, I'm starting another topic about something Bob mentioned. Bob couldn't find a fic he'd been reading. When he was pointed in the right
direction, he discovered that, after 10 chapters, the fic (named Photocopy) took a major change in direction and wasn't what he thought it was
after all ('jumped the shark' was the phrase used). As I recall, Bob said he isn't so enthusiastic about the fic now.

Who has had this happen to them? What fics drew you in, and then lost you later because of plot changes?

For me, there have been stories I started and dropped because I just didn't care for them from the outset (I was trying to give them a chance, but
couldn't deal with it), but I can't recall dropping a fic mid-stream because of an plot change (now watch someone correct me). What about you?

[Image: 6bf36ddc1d2c96930d75576c361a9b3f8152885f.gif]Jeanne Hedge
www.jhedge.com

"Believe me, if I have to go the rest of my life without companionship, knowing myself won't be a problem."
-- Gabrielle of Potadeia
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#2
Almost the entirety of Skysaber's work, though Eva Revolution stands out in particular. Apparently once Skysaber reaches a critical mass of eyeballs, away goes the story and out comes the soapbox. When you derail a story to deliver a monologue on your... *unique* views of Hebrew history... well.

Armageddon?!, a story that's been lauded here, TVTropes and other places, drives me up the damn wall because the author can't decide if he's writing a strawman political parody or a serious story. The tonal shift is like getting thrown around by a malfunctioning merry-go-round, and by 3/4 through I'd had enough.

Another story with proponents here, the ST/B5 cross A Thin Veneer, lost me when the author decided to drag in his (not at all well-written) kitchen sink crossover universe. The story held up fine on its own, dammit!
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"
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#3
Chunin Exam Day. Character- and author-bashing aside, it had such a promising start.

Pronounced "shy guy."
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#4
The most recent one for me was "The Interrogator."

--The Twisted One
"If you
wish to converse with me, define your
terms."

--Voltaire
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#5
I was in the middle of a rather pleasing ForeverKnight/DueSouth/Highlander/Buffy crossover, at one point, when out of the blue it took a hard left turn into
the yaoi zone.
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.
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#6
This happens to me whenever there is character bashing. Even earned character bashing.

Bash Akane. Drop. Bash Sasuke. Drop. Bash Gendo. Drop.

I don't care who you are or why you are writing the story, if you can't like every character you like then don't
write about that character. And it may be cathartic for you to torture and misrepresent and otherwise vent your feelings about fictional characters but
that doesn't mean I'm going to sit down and read your tripe. Come back when you have a story to tell, not an agenda to push.

--------------------

Epsilon
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#7
I've completely forgotten what it was called by now but, there was this Buffy/Stargate fic... Buffy ended up very screwed up and I think it involved her
getting mind warped... it was good for a while and then suddenly Buffy went vague extreme hypocrite on us. She got tortured and was suddenly a rabid
antitorture spokeswoman... even though she regularly did it to nonhumans herself, on a regular basis in Sunnydale. To make it worse she went so far as to
badger the Hammond into giving her paperwork saying SGC doesn't torture... and never got to the point the where they actually defined anything on what this
'torture' she was obsessing over in the first place meant. There was a chance it was a debate echo that was mocking the then current, and equally
vague, word torture in the news... but it just forged blindly on ahead after that point and the quality dropped off sharply in a chapter or two.

I had a thread about 'Almost good fanfics' going on that one... it was just that bad of a course change.
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#8
Would that be jAkL's http://www.tthfanfic.org/story.php?no=8322]Far Beyond Normal and its sequels, Necratoid?
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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#9
Yeah, that would be the one... as I gave up on it I didn't know it even had sequels.

For another one is Overlord by ChibiReaper. Which was an enteraining Disgaea/Nartuo cross
involving a Bored Laharl taking Naruto as an heir fic... and it was good. Then around chapter 10 Naruto abruptly decides that as he is going to the local
NetherWorld to take over that he is going to abruptly remove the entire civilian population from Kohona, to make the village STRONGER, much Stronger... you
know by removing all sources of agriculture, trade, day to day stores, the blacksmiths, etc... and then import all supplies. The hell? Make the village
stronger by eliminating its self sufficiency entirely and make it dependant on constant importing of goods and services. This was something ChibiReaper tried
to cover by stating he meant the civilian government aspect as the screwed everything up in the first place, but only after get half a zozen WTF?!?! reviews on
the subject.

The problem was that Naruto's plan, which he'd planned to set off then leave for the Netherworld as it went off, basically started a full on war
against the civilians after the ninja, minus a skeleton crew, were off hnting down remanents of the failed invasion during the Chunin exams... this plan would,
by default, kill off his stil beloved older brother character, Iruka, in the first 10 minutes or so. That Naruto proceeded tolaugh about this plan as funny.

The logical problems with this was that Flonne and Etna were there and knew about this. These two have standing orders that if Laharl ever turns into a
teamkilling madman they are to execute him by his own orders. Naruto is Laharl's heir in training. Naruto just killed off thousands of people on his own
side, including beloved family, literally gleefully... and no one blinks. In the Nippon Ichi verses, this is the same thing as killing off the that many of
your own party members... which would mean earning a Bad end dozens of times over... and instead of killing off the corrupted Naruto its treated as a good idea
and as a normal chapter end.

I don't know what then happens, but unless Naruto gets offed and the story goes into New Game+ mode, with the player trying for a different ending, I could
not see the story recovering from that point. So I don't know what happens then after. I found this abrupt genre changing into a dark revenge fic
borderline traumatic.
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#10
I forgot the name of the fic, but it was one of those SW/ST crossovers, complete with the stupidly over-powered Warsies-to-Trekkies thing. It involved a
pairing of Luke Skywalker and 7 of 9.

The ridiculously powered up Warsies I could live with. But what killed it for me was when the author drops us into the Evangelion Zone by steadily killing off
virtually every one of the characters I do so love, starting off with Deanna Troi (at least that's the one that sticks out the most as the first). I
finally stopped reading it after this guy blew away the Delta Flier with Tom Paris on board (and a few others I don't really recall right off) and blows up
Coruscant. Like, have a steaming plate of angst, yo!
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#11
Quote: Epsilon wrote:

This happens to me whenever there is character bashing. Even earned character bashing.




Bash Akane. Drop. Bash Sasuke. Drop. Bash Gendo. Drop.




I don't care who you are or why you are writing the story, if you can't like every character you like then don't
write about that character. And it may be cathartic for you to torture and misrepresent and otherwise vent your feelings about fictional characters
but that doesn't mean I'm going to sit down and read your tripe. Come back when you have a story to tell, not an agenda to push.




--------------------


Epsilon




I qualify my dislike of character bashing for some characters. I call it the Umbridge Exception.

Pronounced "shy guy."
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#12
Another one that I did a long disgusted review on was one where Ranma ended up with a cabbit as a cursed form... got involved with the shrine dwellers Ranma
was adapting and learning about his new form and abilities... then in a truely disturbing genre shift. The group was for some reason taking a group bath,
Ranma was a cabbit at that point, and RyoOkhi droped a toxicly odorific pheormone bomb that resulted in a pregnat cabbit, due to chemically driven, mind
controled, breeding frenzy... and suddenly Ranma is angsting about having been the one in the wrong and tormenting the poor cabbit. And now the cabbit who
raped him, the then not sensient animal was his honor bound tre fiance... and this made sense. Largely because the writer effectively declared sensience a
STD. Then Cabbits took over the universe with Washu helping and solved all the major issues in the universe with their humaniod forms and super powers.
*Shudder*

Shay Guy... that isn't what Epsilon meant. First off, bashing Umbridge is more or less impossible... without making her into something from Sesami Street.
Writing Umbridge as a hateful, foul, ugly, humanesqe thing that loves to torture kids for political reasons and sicks soul eating hoards of demons on
children. That would be staying in character for her. Unless a writer is taking ranks in antiwriting its near impossible to bash Umbridge with any skill as a
writer. Making Umbridge act as vile as Umbridge does in the books is not bashing.

Epsilon's thing against bashing is a matter of bashing being a giant ball of violation of the 'Show, Don't Tell' Rule of writing. It is NOT
bashing to spend 5-50 chapters documenting how events changed a character into what most people assume Sasuke Uchiha is like based on their fanfics. It IS
bashing to have the character end up a berely recognizable thing that bears their name. Having Sasuke end up as a near drooling retard that goes 'Durrr...
teach me that move that is mine as I've heard of it at all'.

For Epsilon the fact you openly HTAES a character is all the more reason to put great efforts into making them be fulling recognizable if they were named
'X'. If you hate a character it is your duty to spend as much time and effort as necessary to write that character and not a bad attempt at a
distorted parody of them. Don't hate characters, love to hate them. Bashing is stupid to him. Its a waste of effort. Its bad writing.

As a person who, a decade ago, first learned of Ranma 1/2 through fanfiction, read literally hundreds of fics, and then bought the first two seasons on
absurdly expensive video tapes. As a person who watched and enjoyed those tapes... but was utterly confused by who those fanfics were actually about half the
time. As a person who spent hours on end downloading enormous zips of image files of the Fanscan of the manga and got more confused. I have to agree with
him. Bashing is stupid. However, having characters that are vile or stupid or annoying act that way is not.
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#13
Yeah, basically what Necratoid said, though some calrification of my position:

Bashing doens't involve making a villain an villain, or a foul character a foul character.

You could bash Umbridge in your fanfic. For example, you could have a otherwise serious fanfic where, after every second paragraph you included the line
"Oh, and by the way, Delores Umbridge was being raped to death by demontors in the vbackground, Nobody cared." Nothing to do with the plot, nothing
to do with the story... just constantly mentioning Delores Umbridge getting raped to death by dementors.

Bashing is as much "I will inflict terrible things on this character for no plot-acceptable reaosn other than I hate them and am the author" as much
as "I will Flanderize this character as much as possible to unsell them to the audience" in my mind. Its when the author clearly hates a character,
has an Agenda of hating the character and then exploits his authorial control to basically destroy the character for no reason other than his own hate.
It's not really sloppy writing, its obnoxious writing. I'm not here to read you hate screeds. I get enough of that off the evening news, thank you very
much.

No, if you have a plot which just happens to involve Delores Umbridge being raped to death by dementors or Sasuke getting a massive brian injury that turns him
into a vegetable that's okay... as long as you aren't kludging this into your plot or at least make it not obvious the entire goal of the fanfic is to
engage in torture porn.

-------------------

Epsilon
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#14
Necratoid Wrote:The problem was that Naruto's plan, which he'd planned to set off then leave for the Netherworld as it went off, basically started a full on war against the civilians after the ninja, minus a skeleton crew, were off hnting down remanents of the failed invasion during the Chunin exams... this plan would, by default, kill off his stil  beloved older brother character, Iruka, in the first 10 minutes or so.

Uh, Iruka was already dead when Naruto set things off. According to one of the author's notes, there was an error in an earlier version of one chapter where he accidentally wrote Iruka when it was supposed to be Ibiki, but by that point Iruka was most certainly already dead. At that point, all the people who were in danger were ones I think he no longer considered even marginally on his side. (The only people who I'd say were both at risk and who he'd count as friends were the Ichirakus.

New Game+ though... So, maybe this story would be part of Naruto: The Videogame?

On character bashing, I can generally ignore this as long as a couple conditions are met. There must be something else going on that I find interesting, and the author doesn't turn any characters I'm fond of into rapists. So I'm still keeping up with Chunin Exam Day, because PL hasn't run out of problems for the characters to solve, and some of his ideas on how the Naruto universe would work are interesting.

-Morgan.
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#15
Wouldn't work as part of the 'Naruto: The Videogame' universe. Not only is the style wrong, but the Naruto though paterns aren't actually
similar. Okay, so I mixed up the loved ones after now reading it for months, nothing else changes there. Flonne is light years out of character for allowing
that and wouldn't let Naruto BE the kind of character as his heir, period. Subjigate them and force them to be less stupid, at massive energy attack point
sure. But this was slaughting vassals-to-be wholesale for EVIL LULZ... Only the Laharl from the extreme bad end, who would be too busy wandering around
sulking with his girlfriend the flower to care, would think that was a good idea.

The only other choice is that a major glitch in reality made Naruto possessed by Seedle... so yeah.
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#16
The Make a Wish series. It was pretty fun, even with some of the OCs... then 'Harry' realized how he'd been leading the world along and it turned into a God-mode Harry fic. Mind you, it was already a pretty wallbanger at the start, but I made an exception because the misunderstandings were fun. And then it got bad. And then worse...
--------------------------------------
I am the LORD OF THE CRACK!
Check out said crack:
Takamachi Nanoha of 2814- Green Lantern Nanoha. To START! Now with a TvTropes page!
FATE/Holy Grail War of 2814- The Fifth Holy Grail War with Magical Girl Prisma Illya, in the DCAU, from the above story.
Magical Girl Magistra Erebea Molly- the world's first Dresden Files/TvTropes Crossover.
VENGEANCE! The Musical! The Story of Uchiha Sasuke
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#17
The "Harry Johnson" series. It started out as a fun if not necessarily straightforward "oh my God, look at how overpowered everything is, especially Harry" work, and then lost me a couple of stories down the line after somewhere between the third and sixth consecutive time Harry argued in support of slavery and won - not only because "I'm incredibly powerful and I don't care", but because the person he was arguing with (who was effectively becoming a slave, in a context where "voluntary" is decidedly ambiguous) apparently couldn't come up with any arguments to refute him.

Frankly, that turned me off of almost everything by the same author, largely because most of it is technically a single gigantic megacrossover and the likelihood of needing to have read "Harry Johnson" to understand some events or references in other stories seems quite high.
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#18
Don't take this wrong, SCM, but the Nanoha of 2814 fic did this for me.

HOWEVER, I should caveat that with the fact that I came at the story as a DCAU fan with limited (aka almost zero) exposure to Nanoha or FATE/whatever.

But I *loved* the first couple chapters.
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#19
Thanks. Maybe you'll come back when I get to the Justice League stuff?
--------------------------------------
I am the LORD OF THE CRACK!
Check out said crack:
Takamachi Nanoha of 2814- Green Lantern Nanoha. To START! Now with a TvTropes page!
FATE/Holy Grail War of 2814- The Fifth Holy Grail War with Magical Girl Prisma Illya, in the DCAU, from the above story.
Magical Girl Magistra Erebea Molly- the world's first Dresden Files/TvTropes Crossover.
VENGEANCE! The Musical! The Story of Uchiha Sasuke
Reply
 
#20
The less I need to know about Nanoha, FATE, and other magical girl shows, the more keen I'll be.
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#21
Nanoha isn't a magical girl series. It's a Gundam series, with the robots disguised as little girls.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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#22
It's stilla MGS, and one I haven't bothered to see. I'm mostly out of Anime, guys. The only reason I know Naruto is because my wife manages at a bookstore, and whilst I waiting for her I ended up reading the entire series.
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#23
Bob Schroeck Wrote:Nanoha isn't a magical girl series. It's a Gundam series, with the robots disguised as little girls.
Having watched the first two season I can say... no, its not. If it were a Gundam series than half the supporting cast would have exploded into little bits by the end of season one. No, its pretty much a magical girl series. But like when Sailor Moon stole tropes from tokusatsu shows to expand its genre, Nanoha stole tropes from Dragonball Z.
---------------
Epsilon
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#24
Epsilon Wrote:
Bob Schroeck Wrote:Nanoha isn't a magical girl series. It's a Gundam series, with the robots disguised as little girls.
Having watched the first two season I can say... no, its not. If it were a Gundam series than half the supporting cast would have exploded into little bits by the end of season one. No, its pretty much a magical girl series. But like when Sailor Moon stole tropes from tokusatsu shows to expand its genre, Nanoha stole tropes from Dragonball Z.
---------------
Epsilon
But only the good ones. No pushing a ball of energy back and forth for 5 episodes that are punctuated by the occasional incredulous 'Impossible!'. The fight choreography is also many, many times better. But yeah, there is a lot of beam spam.  And it follows Magical girl formulae only to a certain extent. And the third season discards almost all of the ones that were left over from the first two and turns into gundam with Magical girls minus the gratuitous character deaths.
As to anime in general though, I'm  more and more going towards the direction that Jpub is. The 5% just seems to be harder and harder to find.
For bait and switch fics... enh. I think in most of those you can see it coming. It's just that it had a promising start so you want to stick with it just a bit longer. I definitely agree with the character bashing bit though. That _really_ annoys me. (An just once I'd like to see a _competent_ manipulative Dumbledore).
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#25
To be fair to the Dumbledore-haters, he makes a LOT of mistakes in the series. (Especially during Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire -as Adam-Troy Castro pointed out in one of his books, he should have taken better precautions. The only reason Harry was selected for the Triwizard Tournament was because Barty Crouch Jr. put his name into the goblet-surely there exists a spell in the Hogwartsverse that stops anybody who puts a false name into a magical artifact? )"There's only one kind of monster that uses bullets"-Colonel VanHeusen , from "It! The Terror From Beyond Space"
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