Degrees of dissonance

[graculus]

In the six or seven years I've been in fandom, I've read widely in a number of fandoms. I'm wondering if my tolerance levels are the same as they were, or whether it changes as new fandoms gain my interest, or is dependent on the fandom itself.

I've been reading a lot of Harry Potter fic recently. Some of it is excellent and some of it can only be described as god-awful. In essence, no better and no worse than any other fandom, as far as I can see. But where it differs in one respect is the couple of fics I've given up on early on because they just don't work - there's some fundamental flaw to the story premise that is only evident to me because I have a knowledge of the law and mores of the culture the stories are based in (not the wizarding world, of course, but mid-90's England).

So, I was wondering about this - I know there are people reading this entry that read in an equally wide variety of fandoms, or focus intently on one to the exclusion of all others, people with a wide variety of life experiences and areas of expertise. Can you get past a glaring error in something you have knowledge of and move on to read the rest of the story? Are you someone who, once they've started reading something, have to finish it? Or is it dependent on the quality of the tale, that if it's good enough then you can ignore something you know to be incorrect?

Inquiring minds and all that...

Comments

[emony.livejournal.com]

If a story is good enough, I'd overlook some flaws, like maybe one or two glaring lapses in logic (ie. characters flying from Bulgaria to Scotland on broomsticks in half an hour) or even slightly dodgy characterisation, but it would bug me the entire rest of the way through the story. Like there's one HP story I've been reading which happened to include emails, and consequently email addresses, for the characters, who were, in this fic, an MP and a peer. The email addresses were obviously just made up, but it bugged me all the way through the fic that they weren't in the actual format that MPs and peers email addresses are in. It's incredibly petty and totally irrelevant to the story as a whole, but it was there at the back of my mind for the entire rest of the fic. For all I know, it was a deliberate choice by the author not to use the real format for parliamentary emails, but it sort of felt more like a casse of slacking a bit on the research, and if she slacked there how do I know she didn't slack elsewhere. It puts doubt into your mind, and then the fic just loses something, because if the author doesn't care enough to do her research, why should I care when I'm reading it? If that makes sense.

Bad characterisation and impossible scenarios will throw me out of a fic immediately too. I'm very fussy these days, actually. I barely read anything. It's sad.

[graculus.livejournal.com]

It's incredibly petty and totally irrelevant to the story as a whole, but it was there at the back of my mind for the entire rest of the fic.

I think for me, my ability to immerse myself into a story is inverse proportion to how much it looks like the writer has at least tried to get all their ducks in a row. In the case of your example, why on earth would anyone not at least make an effort? Out of curiosity I went looking for the right email address format for MPs and it took me less than 5 minutes on Google to figure it out.

It puts doubt into your mind, and then the fic just loses something, because if the author doesn't care enough to do her research, why should I care when I'm reading it?

Makes perfect sense to me. So much so that if there are glaring spelling or grammar errors in the first couple of lines of a fic, then it shows that the writer can't be bothered to do their best by their story, so why should I give their fic the time when they obviously didn't? ;)