MSTing (Fanfic Riffing)

Does anyone remember this tradition from back in the day on Usenet? Riffing bad fan fiction. There were some really good ones like the riff of “The Eye of Aragon” and we even had the Ed Wood of Star Trek fan fiction, Stephen Ratliff, writing stories about Marrissa Picard, the adopted daughter of Jean-Luc Picard. What were your favorites? Did you ever write one?

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Yeah! If you haven’t already, you should really check out 372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back. It’s a podcast by Mike Nelson and Conor Lastowska. It’s great!

It’s sort of a book club for bad books, including some fanfiction, with riffers we know and love.

In fact, they did Eye of Aragon: Episode 19 – The Eye of Argon – 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back

It’s usually multiple episodes, they really analyze the whole thing.

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The main fanfic MSTing sites are sadly long gone, but their ghosts persist on the Wayback Machine: Index of /mistings

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There was one website that strictly tore apart bad Star Trek fanfic, especially K/S. OMG, I spent many a Saturday night laughing my rearside off reading those.

I recall another site called “Bad Fanfic, No Biscuit!!” But I don’t recall much else about it except its eye-straining red background.

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Yeah, none of those sites would fly in today’s fanfiction culture. I’ve been writing adventure stories (not sm*t) for more than 25 years (currently it’s Stargate Atlantis). There was a time when people just dealt with sites like Bad Fanfic, No Biscuit. These days if you even point out a few typos, there are writers who will scream your head off for not praising them. Kinda sad really.

I’m sure they would lose their bloody minds if someone tried to riff fic today.

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And of the 17(?) books covered, Eye of Argon is the best.

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“Damnit boy”, what about Truckin Through Time?

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Dammit, boy! You’re right!

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Oh yes, I was in on a couple of those. Always a lot of fun, figuring out who’s best to deliver a riff and trying to make sure everything’s in character in the host segments.

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Yeah, I used to do fanfic MSTing all the time. I even did one of Ratliff’s ‘The Only Constant’ at one point. There used to be an archive I sent to, Shinji’s Vault of MSTings, although that’s probably gone now.

For a while people posted them on fanfiction.net, but that quickly got banned after a few months.

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I posted a link to a video of some friends and I doing a riff/read-a-long of the infamous Eye of Argon.

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Yeah, I had a couple on SVAM too. Alas, the site appears to be gone – svamcentral.org doesn’t resolve. Several I remember from there (and Website #9) are archived at MSTing Canon, including my two forays into mid-90s Batman movie scripts. The MSTing Mine is an even more complete collection, linking to the original posts through Google Groups. Saw a lot of names in there I haven’t seen in a long time. :slight_smile:

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A few places (posted in another thread) where fanfic riffings still exist:

  1. The MSTing Canon
  2. http://jubei.ceyah.org:8081/~jandrese/marrissa/index.html
  3. The Eye of Argon
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By the way, if you’ve never read The Eye Of Argon MSTing, you need to. I’ve read it so many times and it never fails to make me burst out hysterically laughing. An example of what you’ll find (and the part that makes me laugh the hardest most of the time:

The paunchy noble’s sagging round face flushed suddenly pale,

Crow : It flushed pale? Did it blanch red after that?

then pastily lit up to a lustrous cherry red radiance.

Crow : Hold me.

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We had a game of reading the (unMSTed) Eye of Argon at conventions – as soon as you laughed, you passed it to the next person. I don’t think anyone ever made it more than one page, and I’ve seen people bust out laughing on just being handed the text and seeing what they had to read next. The “many fauceted ruby emerald” was a killer every time. XD

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By the way, I have the dubious distinction of having attended the same college as Stephen Ratliff of the Marrissa stories. We might’ve even overlapped by a year or two; I don’t know when he graduated. Never met the guy, but MAN was he a bad writer… good thing he’s such a good sport about the MSTing of his fics. LOL

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Lol, I was reading a few, these are lovely.

SERVO: My nurse’s-- I mean, my surgical gown!

:joy:

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Would this be the place to discuss the MST “Space Oddity” fic that went into the time right after Joel was sent back down to earth, built another robot, and had to stop Dr. F & TV’s Frank from taking over the world with a device that brought all the worst things from the films they’d riffed to life. What I mainly remember is TV’s Frank singing Ace of Base at one point…
Edit: Oh wow! looks like I downloaded a copy and kept it buried in hard drives all this time. It was written by “Chirpy the Mutant Hellbeast” aka Mark Barklage.

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What’s he up to these days? I’ve often hesitated to ask because his somewhat conservative Catholic leanings back in the day make me worry he’s fallen into the Tr*mposphere. But who knows, maybe he (say for example) came out of the closet or transitioned or something.

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No clue; I may have gone to the same university, but I never met the guy. Pretty sure he graduated before me anyway, so we definitely wouldn’t have had any classes together.

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