(back to essays) | (cross-indexed under ao3-ing)

originally written 24 october 2021.

as many xv and f/f shippers are aware, chatfics can be quite the fucking plague upon an ao3 tag! and on god do i hate seeing them around (plug -(title:(chatfic || "chat fic" || groupchat || "group chat") || summary:(chatfic || "chat fic" || groupchat || "group chat") || filter_ids:106225) into the "search within results" box ok i love u), but unfortunately, i have read good chatfics and therefore must go to bat for them… sort of.

you'll see what i mean.

it's not that i think chatfics are an inherently bad trope or genre or whatever in fanfiction. it's really not. it's just that i think the way most people don't utilize the chatlog medium to its fullest potential as a storytelling device— by which i mean i highly doubt that most chatfic writers are trying to tell a story at all and are just using the medium as a vehicle to flanderize characters via fanon quote memes and pop culture references for cheap laughs— that sucks shit and balls.

like, something i notice is very common i chatfics is that all the characters type in the same style, usually the author's. which i think is kind of a shame bc i think that typing quirks can be a really fun way to differentiate and characterize characters.

(yes, i know, "every so often someone accidentally reinvents homestuck" well i've never read homestuck i only know vague snippets via osmosis leave me alone moving on)

plus, the thing i personally find the most interesting abt the epistolary style of writing (bc chatfics are technically just modern epistolary writings!) is the fact that you're only reading the paper trail.

very rarely do i see chatfics consider the fact that sometimes, conversations pick up and drop off online bc people are switching to irl business or a voice chat. i think there's a lot of potential to be had in, say, a mystery story told in the form of a chatlog (or similar), where huge chunks of the plot are left out at the start bc the characters are aware of the sensitive nature of their discussions n purposely don't leave a paper trail, and then everything comes together at the end after everything has finished transpiring and some uninvolved persons end up talking about it or smth.

chatfics are, from what i've seen, mostly just mockups of group chats w/a large cast of characters, but the character dynamics feel very much like how you'd expect a group of online friends, who had either never met irl or met irl long after their internet friendship had hit it off, to act. the characters all usually have the same level and type of internet literacy (which is, again, usually the same as the author, who is also usually deeply internet poisoned in a twt/tik tok fashion these days), which can feel very jarring if you're not in the same internet circles as the author.

and what i think they're trying to do is bank on a mutual understanding of pop culture btwn author and reading in an attempt to make the audience laugh.

and there is nothing wrong w/trying to make your audience laugh! but at the same time, it's also led to this sort of common, implicit understanding that "chatfics are meant to be humorous" or w/e when "humor" is not a necessary part of "chatfic" in the same way that "unmarried" is a necessary part of "bachelor". basically, what i think this means is that people who want to write chatfics feel the need to be funny, because "that's what people expect out of a chatfic".

but aside from the obvious fact that humor is, in fact, extricable from chatfics, there remains the problem that comedy is a skill, and a creative skill at that!!

but unlike with writing, no one really teaches comedy outside of specialized classes, so people writing chatfics and trying to be funny for the first time are more likely to just reference things they personally find funny and not encounter anyone w/meaningful feedback on their humor when posting bc you just don't usually find people who are good at articulating what makes something funny— or even more critically, people who can identify how to make something funnier without being cruel.

and just like… idk. it's not that i think that chatfics are a bad concept; it's really not. i'm just frustrated at the lack of genuinely excellent examples out there for the genre, thus making the vast majority of chatfics i see in ao3 tags feel like a xerox of a xerox of a xerox of something whose potential died in its throat.

now, as some closing thoughts, for reference, i actually have had some proper comedic training! several years of it, in fact!! i did competitions for this stuff!!! so i think i can say that i at least kind of know what i'm talking about here in regards to comedy being a skill that can be trained.

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