Thread:DJ MC CJ/@comment-5897814-20121222043350

I just finished reading your fanon and while I like to nice to people I do have to be honest and I'm afraid to say found your stories to be rather wanting. I must confess that I possess a tendency to take a dim view of fanfiction and generally avoid it but I have on occasion have been surprised by some pieces I've stumbled upon, this was not one of them.

My problems with your work are as follows:

1. You have far, far too many original characters.

I am not against original characters in fan fiction, but I won't pretend that I find them welcome. My main problem with OCs (aside from authorial inserts, Mary Sues etc.) is that they often detract or outright steal the spotlight from the canon characters and one sometimes wonders why the author didn't bother writing their own original story and setting instead of using the canon setting and characters as crutches. However I shall discuss that further in the next point.

The really big issue I found with your work was that you threw in a ridiculous bevy of OCs into your stories; continue to do so throughout the chapters. It's bad enough that you decided to throw sixteen OCs at the start but the fact that you continued to add new characters throughout and were even producing OCs in chapter 45 borders on being a parody of ''Sonic The Hedgehog. The problem with this is that it is very'' difficult to remember all the various details of each character such as their names, appearances, and affiliations. It also means that many characters are lacking for reasons I shall explain in my next point. In short one or two characters would have been much easier to follow and would have also been much more developed and better written.

2. A large number of your characters are badly written.

One of the biggest flaws of your OCs is that a large number of them are poorly developed, mostly due to the reasons mentioned previously. All of them are given a quick laundry list of details ascribing to their appearance, which with the first 16 was a rather tedious process, made worse by the fact that you cram it into a single chapter, and I was getting tempted to make a drinking game out of it by the 10th chapter. I will say I find your apparent love for people of British descent (or at least British accents) somewhat touching. However I would also mention that saying a person has a 'British accent' is extremely vague and could mean a large number of dialects; also not everyone comes from London. It should also be noted that accents are not hereditary which seeing as a lot of these kids are orphans makes it odd that they would not be speaking in the accents of the places that they grew up in.

The other problem with your characters especially the heroes is that they are borderline Mary Sues, or as people in video game circles would say 'overpowered'. They are big, know martial arts, are intelligent, are artistic, and generally are very popular and well liked and possess very few or superficial flaws. This makes them rather dull characters. Furthermore they are nearly always made out to be right, this is most egregious in chapter 22 where Chris rails into Francine and Muffy for being snobs (which isn't really true in Francine's case seeing as she is poor) and everyone agrees with him. Frankly the fact that the Sisters Of Destruction dumped them into a trash can because they teased them strikes me as disproportionate retribution. In fact Chris often comes across like an Anglo-American Fonzie if he were a holier-than-thou smug git (the part in chapter 45 where he says "Well we did it again Bradley. We saved our friends from another disaster. Man we are tired from all of this mess" really irked me). Also the three little sister characters (why three?) knowing 'how to fight' and being able to deal with the Tibble twins? Really?

Furthermore many characters being to become interchangeable as the story goes on, their only difference being their appearance rather than having developed defining traits. You could have easily condensed the number of central OCs to less than ten and would have not lost a great deal; on the contrary, you would have gained quite a lot. As mentioned in my last point by having too many characters you diluted their development and personalities and ultimately reduced their capacity to be memorable characters (see Red Letter Medias review of the Phantom Menace starting at 6:50).

3. The cast of Arthur is often side-lined in favour of these characters.

This one is fairly self-explanatory, not only do your OCs frequently one-up or put down the regular cast of the show but a lot of the time Arthur and his friends barley feature at all. Now not including canon characters can be acceptable in some cases, mostly in fan fiction set in well-developed universes such as the Star Wars or Warhammer (both fantasy and 40k) settings. Arthur on the other hand, considering that it is effectively set in the 'real world' barring only Elwood City and talking animals is not really conducive to this format. As such I often wondered why you bothered making this a fan fic when you could have had a lot more freedom by making your own setting.

4. You repeatedly make grammatical errors.

This is also a self-explanatory point, you frequently use 'your' instead of 'you're' and you also make a number of repetitions and incorrect sentence structure. You also constantly start a new paragraph in the middle of character's speech, which is really disorienting.

5. You fail to capture the spirit of the show itself.

Your stories in this work were alright, they're not brilliant and are weakened by the cast and the fact that they sometimes go off onto tangents which are not picked up on again but at least they have some interesting concepts and are not silly/gross slash or romance stories. Many times it felt like you were padding and as mentioned before the huge OC cast made it difficult to follow. However the problem is they don't really grasp the spirit of Arthur (largely due to the lack of the regular cast in the stories) It is also distinctly lacking in humour, something which makes even the most strange crack fics I've read enjoyable (I was frequently sickened and appalled it's true, but at least I was laughing). With your story however I frequently skim read to get through it all and it just felt dry and dull. It's not that I don't like the idea of children dealing with gangsters or find it unrealistic; Just William and The Secret Seven did it all the time but in those cases there was humour and a good cast as well as witty writing (at least in the former example).

Conclusion:

On a positive note I would like to say I do admire your dedication and work you put into the story and character bios. However in future I think I would be wise to heed to my advice and cut down on the number of characters involved. If you so wish I would be more than happy for you to send in your future work so I can proofread it and give constructive critiscm because I do see a good writer in you.

Thank you for your time and happy writing. 