Many months ago, I had a sort of revelation: There were many fanfictions that I, as a person, found morally rephrensible.

Indeed, so I set out to create a sort of parody of fics I found terrible. I created a sociopathic bitch of a protaganist whos interests consisted of nothing more then sex, drugs, and murder. Oh, and I also claimed she was a Female Harry Potter.

Although I rather liked early chapters, the lack of any sort of response rather annoyed me. Everyone kept saying the same thing over and over again, about how I suck. Most of them didn't even really get the joke.

I woke up today to find an email stating that my story was deleted for 'language above current rating' which pissed me off.

I had 'ended' the story months ago, as I decided to reboot the entire thing and pretend most of it had never happened. Why would the mods get me now? I haven't even been responding directly to reviews anymore, because I felt it to be pointless.

What I want to know before I publish the reboot is... how do you make it clear that what you are writing is satire, and the readers are not supposed to sympathize with the protaganist in any way?

 

I suspect that you failed because your piece wasn't any good. Having written some in my time, I can tell you that satire is very hard to do well and from what you describe, I'm not sure there was much of a joke to be gotten. Fanfiction readers aren't the most careful readers in the world (with a million stories to choose from, why do more than skim until you can tell the author is worth spending time on?) You have to be a little over the top if you want them to get it.

Assuming you're serious and not just coming for a sympathy circle-jerk (which DLP is, no doubt, famous for), let me give some advice:

1) Recognize that fanfiction satire is particularly challenging if you're not already a well established writer with a vast following (Jeconais or nonjon, e.g., who could publish grocery lists and get 500+ reviews)--unless you're skewering tired tropes, such as mustache-twirling evil Dumbledore, Soul Bond of Amuchness®, Hermione-Sue, or moRon, you're likely to go over the heads of 99% of your audience with your piece, no matter how clever. Nobody else is in your head. There are a million Harry Potter fanfiction stories, only a dozen or so that have been read by most readers in the fandom, so unless you plan to restrict yourself solely to those small few, then you will have to hold hands or advertise what you're doing somehow. One way I've seen it done decently is Lens of Sanity's The Dark Lord's Equal, which excerpted quotes from the authors he was lampooning/borrowing from. This provided a guidebook and gave props to those from whom he borrowed.

2) Understand that satire is only as powerful as the subject (at best). You're trying to lampoon fanfiction, man. It ain't like riffing Papa Hemingway or the Republican Party. Don't go into it with overblown expectations. Ladies aren't going to be tossing their panties at you just because you dismantled Hermione.

3) An Author's Note saying, "This is a piece of satire lampooning some of the most morally objectionable things I've encountered in fanfiction," would remove all subtlety, but would at least get the point across that you aren't serious with what you're doing. (It's the difference between "You suck!" and "You suck at humor!") And give stuff an M rating if it's anywhere close to the line--no sense giving the administrators a reason to go after your story.

4) Don't be a douchenozzle. Consider contributing something positive to the fandom. Once you have, people maybe, just maybe will be more inclined to laugh with you at the negative. Otherwise, you're just another prick with a keyboard.

Just a few thoughts, probably worth what you paid for 'em.

 

Hm. Alright.

I don't have any problems here. Moving on.

I'd like to improve, thanks. I'd like to learn from you guys.

I purposefully went out of my way to avoid tropes like that. It was one of the few things I could say I was pleased with by the time I was finished, anyway.

Yes, I think I did go into this with far too high expectations. I must be more vigilant.

... I didn't do any of this. I avoided the M rating due to the fact that I, personally often have never even seen M rated stories because fanfiction . net doesn't bring them up by default when you use the search engine. I imagined that as long as I did not make any of the sex or violence extremely explicit, I would be able to get away with it. I suppose I did. I got busted for swearing, remember.

I also decided not to point out that it was a joke because I figured that the smarter readers could figure it out. I had recently read an article online that stated that people were more likely to share the story with their peers if they thought the story was amusingly awful.

Of course, I intend not to make these mistakes again.

I've been thinking about it, but I'd rather not. I'm not really interested in writing more serious stories for the fandom, because I prefer original works. It's a personal preference, really.

Thanks for the help. I appreciate it.

 

If you have any sort of objectionable content in your fic, just mark it as Mature. FF.net does not care if you overrate your story.

 

Satire really requires a delicate touch, particularly if you're doing it with respect to fanfiction. Despite how many fanfics are out there with common tropes and elements, the fanfic-reading audience, how should I put this, not particularly perceptive of satire on the best of days. It would be better to take a slightly satirical look at canon as a whole, because with few exceptions, everyone's read that.

But even still, there's a fine line between satirizing canon and fanfic and taking low-brow cheap shots at it, and that line can sometimes become extremely subjective. Hell, when I wrote Point Game, I thought I was close, but even looking back on the story it became less of a satire and more of a metaphysical examination of certain tropes (not to mention a psychological conundrum I was thinking heavily about at the time, a fact I didn't realize until months later). And even with all of the jokes and penis references and Community-esque tone that I tried to take, it still was an acquired taste at best.

I guess the lesson to come out of this is that if you're going to write satire, keep it simple and accessible. The narrower your audience becomes, the less appealing your story will be as a whole. And if that fails, at least keep it funny enough so nobody notices.

 

Hey, I remember reading your story.

Like the others guessed, your story was simply too similar to the fanfiction it was mocking.

And unfortunately, while I thought it was clever in that sense, it was rather boring. The joke got old after the first or second chapter, if I remember right, and I couldn't bring myself to keep reading.

It was simply more of the same "fem!Harry does drugs and swears and everything is wrong", with no variation. There was no increasing tension, or suspense, or even any sign that things would get more over the top until everything fell apart and the thing was revealed to the poor souls who hadn't caught onto the joke yet but had kept reading.

It was rather frustrating to see that so many people in the reviews didn't get the joke, I'll give you that.

 

Well I don't presume to know much about writing parody. However I found several of http://www.fanfiction.net/u/674180/ writings to be amusing.

I know that author has a bit of mixed reaction at DLP but I for one found them to be funny.

 

I think I tried to be far, far, too subtle with the way I envisioned how twisted I saw my universe. I focused far too much attention on FemHarry's 'problems' and I never even got to anything I really wanted to write. At one point, I wanted to 'prove' that mudbloods were indeed inferior to purebloods, but I hadn't written in any hints in early chapters, and I kind of forgot about it until I tried to reflect on what I did wrong.

I disagree with the 'it never got more over the top' however. I lost enthusiasm post chapter eight, but by chapter ten I tried my best to crank out a worthwhile chapter. I rather enjoyed it, especially the build up. After that, I tried to focus on building the OOC and original characters. (Ron is cool, FemHarry has a famous twin, Dean, Seamus, Crabbe, Goyle, Rolf Scamander, and Draco all fought alongside the heroes) I also tried to go out of my way to show that yes, FemHarry is a sociopath. I think I did rather poorly, though.