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A Review
11-22-2013, 02:12 PM
(to the tune of "Oh Holy Night")
oh holy crap
the heck is this I'm reading!?
I cannot believe
I read the whole thing
I want brain bleach
My eyes! The goggles do nothing!
it wasted time
I can never get back
a fic so bad
it's a human rights violation
UN envoys
will be sent to see it burned
Oh...
Oh my god...
I can't...
I can't describe it
this fic
this fic
this fic... is an eyesore
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
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Why am I thinking you've found the Gunslinger Girls/Transformers  rime fic currently up on ff.net. I only got through a paragraph of it and gave up due to 1.): script format; 2.  word usage. It's gone on for over eleven chapters and all that writer's work is in fracking script format, why hasn't anyone hit the fracker with a banhammer/cluebat!!
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I'm pretty sure it's the same phenomenon that made people think that the artist who dre Dilbert had to secretly work at their offices, because I haven't even heard of the fic you mention. And as far as that goes - LALALALA~ So, how about that scansion? It's a little shaky around the transition between verses, but pretty good over all, right?
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
For concrit, then. Lots of criticism - all intended to be constructive.
okay... original song is, in beats//syllables
4 + 7 A
4 + 6 B
4 + 7 A
4 + 6 B
4 + 7 C
4 + 6 D
4 + 7 C (+1 beat but not syllable)
4 + 6 D (+1 beat but not syllable)
repeat of final 4
repeat of final 4
now, for yours...
oh holy crap
the heck is this I'm reading!?
I cannot believe // this is 5 beats and should be 4. Quick fix - use "can't" instead of "cannot"
I read the whole thing // this is 5 beats and should be 6. Yes, it still comes to 10, but you're splitting "believe" in an unfortunate way
I want brain bleach
My eyes! The goggles do nothing! // this is 8 beats and should be 7. quick fix: "the goggles, they do nothing". Also, reading/nothing is a *much* weaker rhyme than shining/pining,
it wasted time
I can never get back // doesn't even try to rhyme with "bleach"
a fic so bad
it's a human rights violation // 9 beats, shoudl be 7.
UN envoys
will be sent to see it burned // 7 beats, should be 6
Oh...
Oh my god...
I can't...
I can't describe it // doesn't even try to rhyme with "violation"
this fic
this fic // two sets of two beats is not the same as one set of 4. perhaps something like "this fic - so bad" or even "this fic is bad".
// Even better would be "Oh fic, " as a reference back to the original song.
this fic... is an eyesore // doesn't even try to rhyme with "burned". Also, doesn't live up to the rest of the poem/song - "eyesore" is really pretty tame
// compared to some of what goes before. "Eyesore" might work towards the beginning, but I feel like it needs more evocative language.
// Perhaps something completely over-the-top and yet straightforward, as if jumping from hyperbole to simple statment. Somehting like
// "This fic so bad - so bad it killed my cat". I don't think that line itself quite works, but something like that.
Using the tune to "Oh Holy Night" for a "this fic is terrible" poem is a bit of an odd choice to begin with, unless you're trying to suggest that it's so awe-inspiringly bad that you have to use religious imagery in order to capture the sheer magnitude of it, in which case that may want to inform the wording a bit.
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If possible, I'd like to see more filkings of songs, using bad fanfiction as the theme.
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...
Sirrocco, you are awesome. As for choice of song, it literally grew out of one line in Homestar Runner a year back, I think the joke was the cast of characters doing an ad for a supposed album of christmas carols. "Oh holy crap" was Strong Bad of course, before cutting away to the next person.
This may just have been something I thought would be a funny thing for them to do, but I'm pretty sure is was an actual thing.
Having things turn kind of shaky and cut off suddenly at the end is mostly due to my lack of close knowledge of religious music (I energetically avoid most things involved in any "living" RL religion) and at the end a reference to the "This ____. This ____. This ____. This ____. (...) This ____ is an eyesore." meme, with the rest being running out of inspiration. No excuse, sir.
Edit: I did actually sing this while writing and slurred together the extra syallables, but wrote it normally for clarity's sake. Here's how tose long lines sound:
a fic so bad
tsa human rights vi'lation
UN envoys
ll'be sent to see it burn'd
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
Swallowing syllables is not without cost. It's a technique you can use if you have to, but you're better off tweaking the wording if and where you can - particularly for something that's primarily going to be experienced as text.
I ask for no excuses. I will note that I referenced the lyrics by doing a quick google search, rather than having it all in my head. The scraps in my head were enough to tell me that some of it was off, but past that, I needed help.
protip: Christianity, in particular, is an expansionist evangelical religion with a large number of english-speaking evangelical followers. If you want to reference some fact or other about christianity (hymn lyrics, bible quotes, creeds, etc) there are lots of websites out there that are designed to find people with vague curiosity about the faith and hook them up with more info than you could possibly need. Finding this stuff is easy with even moderate google-fu.
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