some unexpected plot twists are not good

[ratcreature]

Sometimes fanfic is really weird. See, I've been reading an X-Files story, which started normal enough. It was a Profiler!Mulder story with an X-Files twist in that Mulder forms some sort of psychic connection with the killers and victims, and so on, cue to Mulderangst. Which was the kind of story I wanted to read. Only then suddenly out of nowhere some green, winged horse shows up and brings Mulder to a blue anthropomorphic cat shapeshifter alien who starts talking about fighting interdimensional demons. What? Just, what? I have no idea how this continued, because the story rather lost me at that point.

What irks me most is was that I read over half of this long novel, which I thought was one thing, and then without warning it turned into something completely different. It had a summary and warnings for all kinds of things which indicated that this was a serial killer story with child molestation, but nothing mentioned mystical furry aliens fighting evil on psychic planes. Gah. What a waste of time.

Comments

[mecurtin.livejournal.com]

LOL. Was this originally posted serially, as a WiP? Because sometimes long WiPs go off the rails like that, in response to comments or just because the writer got sick of what she was originally doing and thought "what I'd really like to see now is a green flying horse".

[ratcreature]

I don't know, but I don't think so. I've been reading it in the novel archive, but at least it is formatted without any additional headers for parts like there sometimes are in longer XF fiction. It's Mind Games by Spider.

[droolfangrrl.livejournal.com]

I startled my piggie when I laughed at what you said. heheh

ANGST, WOE, SERIOUS ISSUES

with a nice cherry topping of my pretty pony

[ratcreature]

Yeah. I think I wouldn't have minded as much if the alien involvement had been limited to some oozing black oil, but even then. I mean, considering that this is the X-Files even complete weirdness can be made a case for in fanfic. I just felt cheated, because it presented itself as a serial killer story with some XF stuff, and then over 300K into the file went off the rails completely.

[brownbetty]

What!?!

Are you sure it wasn't like, "And then Mulder realizes he is hallucinating"?

[ratcreature]

Mulder considers at first that he's hallucinating, but that is more or less dismissed by the narration. I mean, he is actually transported to places by this thing and healed and stuff, if I understood correctly. I admit I haven't read further, but I skimmed a bit, and I think that alien was real. Which isn't a problem in XF per se, but well. You are free to check it out, I linked the story above. If you want to skip right to the alien part, start with the section labelled "Book 3: The Meta".
ETA: He first see the green flying horse in an altered mental state shortly before that part, and then I thought it was just a hallucination, but it turns out it wasn't.

[astridv.livejournal.com]

I once read a Stephen King novel that was like that. It started out as a story about domestic abuse and a wife managing to escape from her husband, and in the middle all of a sudden it switched to some kind of weird fantasy story with people stepping into paintings... plot threads dropped, others appearing out of thin air. Later I read his meta book "On Writing" in which he mentions that he never plots and just goes where the story takes him. No kidding, I thought. And he seemed to be quite adamant that plotting is a creativity-killing thing of evil that should be avoided at all cost. But as that story shows, it can't hurt sometimes.

[ratcreature]

Wow, you'd think editors would prevent that kind of thing. Then again, if King wrote that one when he was already famous, I guess bestselling cash cows have certain liberties. And plotting is evil? Sometimes writers have really odd notions. *shakes head*

[astridv.livejournal.com]

Then again, if King wrote that one when he was already famous, I guess bestselling cash cows have certain liberties.

Yeah, it was one of his later ones. I understand once a writer has reached that kind of bestseller status the editor won't get a word in edgewise. Or doesn't even want to. King's early work was much better overall (well, imho) and lack of editing may be a part of it.

I read a post on this by an editor: he said that no editor wants to become known as the person who breaks the bestselling streak. So they rather don't interfere, this way if the book tanks they won't be blamed for changing a winning formula. That's why Rowling's last three books are quite a bit too long and have problems wrt structure and pacing that the first didn't have.

(edited for typos)