TEXT: Fan Fic Review: Phantom Desires

Phantom Desires (zero stars)
(Written by MasterDragon21; starring Dani Phantom, Ember McLain and Danny Fenton; 2009)

Art by Levelord, posted with permission

Some optimists say that no matter how bad a fan fic may be, it can still be salvaged by the means of "MST'ing" it. For those who are not familiar what this means, it's basically writing a witty and sarcastic "commentary track" that makes fun of the original work, making it instantly entertaining and, in some cases, actually readable. Note that I call these people optimisists, as they apparently haven't read MasterDragon21's fics.

Phantom Desires is this person's yet another example of his numerous (and futile) attempts of becoming an official author for the WWOEC community. This time he tries to tell us a Danny Phantom-themed lemon of what I believe is about how Dani Phantom (the female clone of Danny Phantom) and Ember McLain (the one-hit-wonder pop star ghost) are in search for love. However, there isn't much of a search going on as the answer comes to them almost instantly after they start pondering over their problem out loud.

To save you the trouble of reading the fic I can reveal that they both realize they're in love with Danny but don't actually get to have sex with him as he's suddenly gone to Florida. Instead, we have a quick fight scene with Dani and Ember but without any punctuation marks whatsoever, which then turns into lesbian pity sex after Ember finds out about Danny's whereabouts and Dani decides to console her. The fic ends abruptly before we get to any read any action, which may actually be a good thing considering the overall quality of the writing.

I've read lousy fanfics a many during my lifetime and while the MST'ing rule applies to surprisingly many of them, MasterDragon21's fics are a notable exception to that. The writing is so chock-full of grammatical errors that it should easily inspire hundreds of Plus4chan's drawfags to illustrate gay rape pornography of an English dictionary getting it into every possible hole. The characters recite their boring lines without any emotion, and to be honest they don't even feel like the original characters but rather some cheap, Chinese-made bootleg version of them. You know, like those Dragonball Z figures that are badly painted and may sometimes lack body parts (do a Google search for "flying headless Goku" for a good example).

While you cannot deny the fact that a fan fic writer will, more or less consciously, put his or her fantasies in their stories, it requires skill and talent to pull off a vignette that is more than just a text dump depicting character A and character B having a sexual act of some type. A good, ambitious story both explains the reasons for them having sex and makes it seem believable to the readers – this means you can give a character a paper-thin or even illogical reason to act a certain way, but it won't matter if it makes sense for the character to make that kind of decision. As a writer, MasterDragon21 fails in every aspect: Dani and Ember just suddenly have a vision of Danny after whining a bit about how they want to fill that void in their empty lives, and then eagerly decide to go on a little trip to fuck him senseless. After all, isn't love synonymous with sex?

If you're still thinking about MST'ing this fic, just forget about it as it would be completely useless to do so. Unless, of course, you want to have Mike and the 'bots just staring in silent awe at the horrifying train wreck of Phantom Desires. This fic excels in inexplicably horrible grammar, non-compelling story and cardboard characters so well it defies all common logic. In that sick and twisted way, it is a masterpiece.

Oh, and in case you didn't notice, this is just part one of what I assume is a trilogy of these stories. "Knowesting" (yes, that's how he writes 'knowing') MasterDragon21, he will most likely be more than happy to finish the story, contributing yet another hapless accident to a community that just wishes he'd cease his attempts at writing comprehensible sentences in English language. Avoid this fic.


I didn't find a proper pic of Roger Ebert giving two thumbs down, so this'll have to do instead: