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Plotbunnies from Hell
Jan. 3rd, 2003 01:21 pmYou know plotbunnies. Annoying little things that appear in your mind, saying things like "Hey there, let's write a story where Tara shows Willow her dildo collection!". And you look at it in disgust, say "No, let's not", pick the little sod up and drop-kick it into next Tuesday.
They're kind of mildly annoying, but you can ignore them.
Not so with the Plotbunnies from Hell.
They're the ones that instead of going "Let's write..." go "WRITE ME, PUNY HUMAN!", and when you turn to throw them away you realise that rather than a pink-nosed little bunny you're dealing with a rhinoceros-sized thing with teeth the length of your arm and eyes that look remarkably like laser cannons from a sci-fi B-movie.
So you go "Well, I have this huge heap of WIPs I really should finish first, some of them have been gathering dust for years, and while your idea is nice and all it's not really my style you know, and I don't see any social relevance to it, so if you don't mind I'll just skip it for now, all right?"
At which point it puts a Godzilla-size paw on your shoulder and trains the laser-cannon eyes on you. "Dude," it says. "Nobody cares if you ever finish those WIPs. I know how you write, and trust me when I say that the world will be a better place if those stories never see the light of day. As for social relevance, you rip off other people's ideas and use them to write pornography that you self-publish in the sodding Internet. You may try to convince yourself that it's postmodernist re-mix of widely spread material, a sort of verbiage-collage and that you're doing to text what Marcel Duchamp did to that urinal, but that's all bullshit. You write porn, and if it has any redeeming value whatsoever it's that it's better wanking material than Finnegans Wake. Now write my idea before I tear your fucking leg off."
Which is why I find myself writing Willow/Anya when I don't even particularly like Anya. Sheesh.
They're kind of mildly annoying, but you can ignore them.
Not so with the Plotbunnies from Hell.
They're the ones that instead of going "Let's write..." go "WRITE ME, PUNY HUMAN!", and when you turn to throw them away you realise that rather than a pink-nosed little bunny you're dealing with a rhinoceros-sized thing with teeth the length of your arm and eyes that look remarkably like laser cannons from a sci-fi B-movie.
So you go "Well, I have this huge heap of WIPs I really should finish first, some of them have been gathering dust for years, and while your idea is nice and all it's not really my style you know, and I don't see any social relevance to it, so if you don't mind I'll just skip it for now, all right?"
At which point it puts a Godzilla-size paw on your shoulder and trains the laser-cannon eyes on you. "Dude," it says. "Nobody cares if you ever finish those WIPs. I know how you write, and trust me when I say that the world will be a better place if those stories never see the light of day. As for social relevance, you rip off other people's ideas and use them to write pornography that you self-publish in the sodding Internet. You may try to convince yourself that it's postmodernist re-mix of widely spread material, a sort of verbiage-collage and that you're doing to text what Marcel Duchamp did to that urinal, but that's all bullshit. You write porn, and if it has any redeeming value whatsoever it's that it's better wanking material than Finnegans Wake. Now write my idea before I tear your fucking leg off."
Which is why I find myself writing Willow/Anya when I don't even particularly like Anya. Sheesh.
