The one thing that never ceases to annoy me about the StarCraft gaming community is not the lack of quality fan fiction, per se, but the overwhelming stupidity of most of it. I work as a Content Manager Person for a StarCraft oriented website, which is basically a polite synonym for That Idiot We Let Handle the Great Morass of Stupidity That We Call Our Fan Fiction Database and At Whom We Are Now Laughing Mightily Violently Right Now. Most of the submissions I review seem to have been written by people with brains smaller than purely theoretical subatomic particles, to be generous; if I wanted to be mean, I'd have to say they operate on the same intellectual plane as shrubbery. Retarded shrubbery.

In a nutshell, the basic problem with fan fiction writers that frequent the site I work for is that they do not possess the skill to write, but they do possess the skill to think they can write. This leads to screens of roughly twenty fan fiction submissions, many of which seem to have been written by antelopes on banned substances, to which I must devote the time required to read and rate them all. Needless to say, these writers to be are very, very lucky that they are not in the phone book under "~~|V|@st@ Pyyn@g3~~" or whatever massively infantile handle they have devised for themselves. Had they tortured Bell Atlantic so throughly, I might feel the necessity to take vigilante justice upon them a la DareDevil, except without the slightly freaky, fetishistic red leather outfit that makes me vaguely nervous. In fact, my vigilante justice would probably less resemble a blind guy in leather and more resemble Rambo, if Rambo was a sixteen-year-old white kid with an asthma problem and massive pent-up rage.

One of the major reasons that doing this seemingly effortless task is more than minorly annoying is that there are a few things many of these prospective writers need to learn before they attempt to write, many of them little things, such as the English language. Many of these poor young souls are also under the impression that their sixth grade English teacher was joking when she reminded them that every sentence must be started with a capital letter and ended with a punctuation mark. As the site I work at does not currently have a way for me to talk with these authors, I cannot correct their misconceptions. So I just delete the work and pray that there is a God and he does have control over lightning bolts.

Another facet of writing that the people who submit to this site seem to have glossed over in their English classes is that mysterious thing called plot. Of course, the only thing even vaguely mysterious about it is how a person can think up ones as bad as those I deal with on a daily basis at this site, but that is immaterial. Combined with the never-present grammar, this makes for a very interesting reading experience. I would like to say that I have never, ever read stories as bad as those I was forced to review on that site. I would also like to ask the user currently going by the name of tassatul that I want those forty-five minutes of my life back.

Some examples of the "fan fiction" I have received from the fine writers who frequent my site:

"I love star craft."
"."
"doe anybody now were I can get a cd key fr starcraft?!"
"you guys suck you wont except any of my stuff you shold all dye."

Bear in mind that these are not made up...I have a special file in which I cut and paste anything short and stupid enough to qualify as representative of the worst material I have received in the time I have worked at this site. It is, sadly, two pages long.

Having only worked at the site for three weeks now, that's pretty sad.