yuletide_coal | Coalclaw Adventures

Because there's a lot of those this year.

http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2015/works/5466008

The beta really failed at their job. Ouch.

Author clearly not a native English speaker. Hard to beta those fics because there comes a point where the only thing you could do would be re-write the whole thing into more correct English.

Unless YT is about to start instituting a TOEFL requirement for participants, this seems like a tough one.

ESL teacher about to comment and you beat me to the snarky comment. A+++, anon.

DA

I've done rewrite betas. Sometimes, it makes sense. One time an esl author I was betaing for was trying for a very distinctive ye olde style in English, and she was including rhyming couplets and the whole thing was a translation of another version of the fic. I betaed the prose parts, but the poetry I just rewrote. It was the only practical solution.

But that's impractical for most YT fic. I figure the worst esl issues fall into that same abyss of badfic caused by talentless native speakers and people who are totally phoning it in this year. YT has never had quality controls after all.

Or the author ignored (or ran out of time to make) all the beta's corrections. Or the author refused to believe that dialogue sentences followed by a dialogue tag should end in a comma and not a period in English. Or the beta was able to fix some glaring ESL errors but not the deeper problem of the author's writing just not flowing well.

"Or the author refused to believe that dialogue sentences followed by a dialogue tag should end in a comma and not a period in English."

^^This. I betaed an otherwise-good fic full of that. I haven't checked, but I hope the author took those changes to heart.

It looks like they had a beta (named in author notes), but the beta is also ESL.

Re: Bad fics

(Anonymous) - 2015-12-28 07:03 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Bad fics

(Anonymous) - 2015-12-28 10:27 (UTC) - Expand

http://archiveofourown.org/works/5482106

It always bodes well when there's a spelling mistake in the summary.

Awww. That's not the best fic out there, certainly, but it's not the worst. It has formatting and SPAG issues, yes, but if I'd requested fic about Robinton as a kid, and had received this fic, I wouldn't be at all unhappy with it.

--Pern-loving nonny who likes Harper Hall stories

+1
I can forgive a lot if I can see the passion behind it. I thought it was cute!

http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2015/works/5377967

Shockingly loaded with typos for something that is barely 1k. Also, nothing happens. I admire the recip for being kind enough to leave a nice comment despite how little effort obviously went into this fic. Zero kudos and only one comment from the recip.

http://archiveofourown.org/works/5468285

None of the Emily fics were great, but this was especially disappointing.

http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2015/works/5468906

That's ... horrible. I'm particularly fond of "10 years before hand", but even the sentences without glaring errors are painful to read.

why does this have more comments than my fic :(

+1

It's just not fair. My fic was actually good. :(((

Ugh, that gave me second-hand embarrassment. Nothing worse than a failed attempt to grasp what made the original canon funny.

On the other hand, it's definitely not the worst fic I've seen this year. I think some effort went into it, for one.

Not the worst - the dialogues are very IC - but there's definitely a failure somewhere in understanding what makes the canon enjoyable.

Most BB fic this year is not very good, unfortunately.

Eh, errors and a truly overwrought story, but the character voices were good. I'll take that over generic characters with a better plot any day. They tried, and that deserves something.

http://archiveofourown.org/works/5456438

Barely over a thousand words of "character study" that fails to explore or reveal anything about the character in question.

http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2015/works/5461136

The author deserves points for trying, I guess. There are a few nice turns of phrase in there now and again, like the description of how the drug in his tea affects Csevet. The "back from the dead" aspect is creative, as is the alliance with the Steppes witches. But... there's just so much in there that's extremely silly, and neither the writing nor the sex scenes are good enough overall to get me past it. I lost my will to keep going when it turned out that sparring with wooden swords had made Maia ready to go into battle, and he was able to magically transport to Eshoravee.

is that the one the beta got on like the 20th, or am i mixing up people from chat?

anyway, i liked parts but overall it was both too fluffy and too gory for me

Re: Bad fics

(Anonymous) - 2015-12-30 04:29 (UTC) - Expand

http://archiveofourown.org/works/5520227
TMFU
Fairytale of New York

Nothing happens. It feels like two random ficlets slapped together to make the wordcount. A main character's name is repeatedly misspelled. And I could swear I read a version of this somewhere before Yuletide. It's kind of cute and mostly IC, but...

And what's with that title?!