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| Living in Denial | |
| Posted By: Narcogen <narcogen@rampancy.net> | Date: 5/20/04 12:28 a.m. |
In Response To: Re: (Mis)informed opinion, a letter to Anton. (Count Zero) : Not only ignore it or not find it, but acknowledge that it was present and
Exactly how the heck were the author's wishes expressed by simply having the word "fanfic" in the meta tags? When the terms first appeared and I also thought they might be genuine, it seemed likely to me that there was some kind of puzzle here, and that perhaps another clue was to be found in HBO's fanfic section. After looking and finding nothing, I eventually abandoned that theory. For a bit I thought it was related to Wideload, but they disabused me of that theory. Eventually I contacted Bungie directly. The individuals I contacted said they had no specific knowledge of Bungie involvement. However, that still seemed to leave some wriggle room, and the whole thing might have been Bungie-sanctioned if not Bungie-generated. So at their request I didn't publish their denial. But I don't think there's any way someone can say that the use of the term 'fanfic' in a meta term is an unambiguous expression of the author's intent. It's not. In fact, nothing in this whole thing was unambiguous, which was more or less the point. What I tend to wonder is why this wasn't introduced as a special fan fiction, with the HTML presentation? Because nobody would have been interested in it. Moreover, some fanfic authors might have wondered why Steve deserved special treatment. In order to get attention, the source and nature of the Enkidu story had to be obscured, so that readers might think it was Bungie. I come to the same point Miguel did-- once you stop looking at this as a puzzle, what do you have left? Miguel found an enjoyable story. What I saw was a piece of fan fiction that, while admittedly light years ahead of most (if not all) of the existing Halo fan fiction out there, still fell far short of the standards set by Bungie, and that's why I eventually came to believe it was not from them and was a fan creation. Technically it was well executed in terms of style, presentation, spelling and grammar. However, it doesn't add much of value to the Halo universe, it confuses parts of the Halo and Marathon universes in a way even Bungie never intended, and contains parts that at times conflict with what is known in the Halo universe or at the very least is so unoriginal that Bungie would never do it. The story started out very well, but once it began to simply repeat the Halo story it became uninteresting. Wow, that sounds harsher than I wanted it to. Basically, once it became clear that the Flood were at a structure that wasn't a Halo before the Fall of Reach, I knew it wasn't Bungie, because in their storyline, that makes no darn sense. I think the crux of it all is, it is difficult for anyone to judge the quality of the fiction objectively because of the controversy over the story's origin. The problem is, we'll never be able to know now whether this was really a genuinely good bit of fan fiction that everyone would have enjoyed even had they known what it was from the start, or just a sophomoric attempt at intellectual narcissism, fueled by cribbing from mythology and previous Bungie games, designed specifically to attract attention to something that would never have gotten any attention otherwise; essentially, a triumph of style over substance. | |
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