Warning. Not for the light of heart.

Badfic.

There's a tremendous amount of it out there. A scary amount of it. For every Penny or Kelly there is someone who is... not Penny or Kelly.

What baffles me is how badfic gets so much FB, thus perpetuating it for eternity. Victoria, eternally wise woman that she is, tackles that subject so I'll leave it alone. But back to badfic. As readers, we all have different ideas of what quality fic entails. For instance, at bare minimum, this is what I require:

• Good spelling, grammar and punctuation (it matters and don't even try to say it doesn't "because it's only a hobby!").
  
• I have to be able to recognize the people in the story. I'm afraid I don't recognize Janeway or Chakotay in 95 percent of the J/C fic out there. Most of the time, I wonder if I'm watching the same show as the rest of fandom. Thank goodness for people like Rocky or monkee whose fic assures me that we at least are watching the same show.
  

If the above two criteria are met, I continue reading. This time I'm looking at plot and plausibility. Plot, at least in my eyes, has to include something more than the crew of the Enterprise giving up all of their duties to get Spock and Chapel together. It's got to be more than Kim, Torres and Paris sitting around figuring out how to get Janeway and Chakotay to 'fess their love for each other. It's got to be more than Kira moping around waiting for Odo to come back from the Great Link and for God's sake, Crusher and Picard are adults, not teenagers - they so don't listen to the Backstreet Boys. Nor do Mulder and Scully, for that matter, but it's especially reprehensible for adults in the 24th century to listen to NSYNC.

So that leads into the first thing that makes me bail. Songfic. Yup. That's not to say all songfic is immediately badfic but I can probably count on two fingers how many songfics are actually good. Now, that's not the same as filking a song - which Jemima is the hands-down queen of. I'm talking about fics where people sing their love to each other. I'm sorry, but I really can't see Scully getting up at a Cher concert, grabbing the mike and singing "I Will Always Love You" to Mulder. That goes for the multitude of "Talent Night" fics in the Voyager universe. Aie, aie, aie, since when did Janeway become a closet Reba McEntyre fan? Hmmm?

Okay, so we've gotten past the plot issues, now it's time for plausibility. So many stories have such good ideas behind them but it's plausibility that kills them. Is Chakotay really going to sprinkle rose petals all over Voyager to confess his undying devotion to Janeway?
Are Paris and Torres going to forget all of their duties aboard Voyager in order to get J and C together? B'Elanna said it best in "Muse": "When you think that you are surrounded by enemies--when you're up against the Borg, or, or Species 8472--the last thing on your mind is romance!"

Then there's the eternal A and B have an unexpected encounter and nine months later, they are given a Little Bundle of Joy, but A and B are fighting eternally and no one wants the Little Bundle of Joy. Then said Little Bundle of Joy croaks and A and B are distraught and pledge undying love. You can also rearrange the characters so that either A or B dies and then the surviving parent then spends the rest of forever blaming Little Bundle of Joy.

Sorry, folks, in no universe is death romantic. Shakespeare did it once and now I'm going to have to blame him for the many fics I've read where A cries hirself silly over B's grave. Points are deducted if A decides ze can no longer go on living and kills hirself on B's grave. Even more points if the Spawn of A and B come by, discover newly deceased parents and erect a monolithic memorial commerating the love A and B had for each other. This isn't angst, it's just really bad fiction - manipulation is not the way to get to the reader and deathfics are the easiest form of manipulating the reader's emotions. Example of good deathfic: Letting Go by Kat Hughes. But seriously, deathfic is not easy to do well and should be avoided at all costs. I mean, seriously, you gotta have a really good reason to kill off a character other than making someone else angst over said death.

The majority of badfic, spelling and grammar aside, is all about implausibility and the inability to recognize characters, even up close and with a magnifying glass. It's about adults who suddenly start acting like high schoolers (no, Mulder and Scully do not hang out in a mall, so stop putting them there) or you have a middle school scenario where A passes a note to C, asking C to find out if B likes A. Adults don't act like that. Adults don't dwell on whether there's romance in their future; sure they wonder about it, sure they are aware when they have deep feelings for someone else, but for the most part, normal, well-balanced adults do not let their love lives run their non-love lives. But in so many fics, the love lives take a backseat to the rest of What's Going On. In TOS, for instance, Kirk is more interested in what's going on in Spock's love life than in running the ship. Picard and Crusher suddenly spawn like crazy, despite the obvious fact that they are not young people (pet peeve #6839846 - Janeway and Crusher are in their 40s. They will not have three or more children without much help. Scully is barren - unless you're Chris Carter, you'd better have a darn good reason as to how she got pregnant in the first place).

My only conclusion here is that people are so interested in seeing their favorite characters kiss, they simply don't care how it happens. Chakotay and Paris skipping hand in hand down the corridors of Voyager, is about as plausible as Janeway suddenly losing her backbone and getting all rubbery on Chakotay. In these instances, it might be best (and perhaps more satisfying) to just do a "find and replace" on the names in one's favorite Harlequin romance and the results will be exactly the same.