Fanlore:Featured Article Archives/2021: Week 52

The SlashFic Hall of Shame was a website mocking bad slash fanfiction. Its owner was Sandy Herrold.

The website was started up in the late 90s in the midst of many fandom arguments about feedback, and about fandom's overwhelming tendency to push back against any hint of negative critique. The site was thus set up as a comment on this tendency, as a site that explicitly pilloried bad fic. An early tagline was, "Bad Fanfic Must Be Punished."

There were some rules around which stories could be submitted, namely that they had to be Professionals, X Files, Highlander, Due South, or Sentinel slash fanfic, and must be public. (Refer to "The "Rules" for more on this). The site also did not name authors and did not link to the stories themselves.

The site was often subjected to legal threats and reports by authors in an attempt to get it taken down, but many fans left approving comments on the site itself. Themes of discussion about the site (for a sampling of comments, refer to Reactions) ranged from whether an atmosphere that only allowed positive commentary on fic was stifling, to whether fans take themselves "too seriously", to whether it was unfair to make negative critique public and whether outright ridiculing stories was petty and uncalled-for.

A similar site was Citizens Against Bad Slash.