As some of you may know, I have been writing parodies for amIRight since 2007. I now have 108 parodies, and most have been favourably received, especially those written in the last few years. I chalk it up to suggestions from the user community--varying refrains even if the OS repeats them and avoiding making parodies of parodies, for example--that I have subsequently incorporated into my style. This topic, however, is about a parody that was NOT favourably received.

This summer, I was watching on my computer the ABC Nightline special about the evangelical Christian practice known as the purity ball. I was creeped out by the way fathers were feeding their daughters wedding cake and dancing with them as though they were at a wedding. Except that the "date" forced down the girls' throats outdated norms (to say the least) of how teen girls and young women should behave towards teen boys and young men. After all, adolescence should be a time of discernment concerning sexuality and other such matters.

Now, if a girls WANTS to be pure until marriage, that's okay with me. What's NOT okay is to straitjacket her into purity. In response, it took me a few months, even though I noticed that no-one had written a single parody about purity balls on amIRight. When I got down to writing the parody on the night of 9 October 2014, then, I was filling a void on the site. This was the end result:
http://www.amiright.com/parody/80s/jethrotull4.shtml

When I saw that parody the next morning, I felt vindicated at first. But then I noticed 1's across the board from a reviewer. I shrugged that one off as the Unobomber, but then another 111 appeared. By afternoon, two more had appeared and a certain user dismissed the parody in the comments section as "totally unlyrical and unpoetic." I mean, I had matched the pacing (pursuant to my high standards of parody composition) and it was the first purity-ball parody that I know of on the site, yet that brickbat attacked the parody nonetheless, even going so far to emphasize a lack of connection to the OS, "Down at the End of Your Road" by Jethro Tull. (For the record, the track originally appeared in commercial form on their excellent 1988 box set, 20 Years of Jethro Tull, and made the 2005 remastered version of their 1982 album The Broadsword and the Beast as a bonus track, in case you're looking for the OS.)

Though a later commenter did praise the effort to expose purity balls, it got me wondering about this question: What do you do when pacing and a unique topic for your parody are insufficient for a good grade, so to speak?

I Dont understand what your looking for here. I get unobombed relentlessly regardless of topic, humor quality or pacing skill. What can one do besides wonder what in the hell is wrong  with some people? :-\\

I wholeheartedly approve of the subject matter :)  (Not purity balls themselvers, of course, but the slating of them.. it does seem a bizarre sort of practice)

But..

You chose a bitch of a song to parody: one of those Tull songs where the original stresses the words "wrong", so that if you were to manage to parody the phrasing perfectly, it'd still feel stilted.  Reading the parody with the OS playing behind, it was hard to fit what you'd written to the song, even though I'm fairly sure the syllable counts must be pretty much the same.

No, it's not worth a sweep of 1-votes, but I think we've all suffered those in the last few years - there's only a tiny fraction of parodies on amiright which are actually worthy of a vote of 1s.  1-votes are to all intents and purposes never a judgment on how good/bad a parody is; instead, they are a protest, nine times out of ten a trolling one, trying to get a rise out of you.

In the comments you ask (hopefully not rhetorically, because I'm about to answer) which song you should have chosen - my gut feeling is anything where the OS is a "Something Ball", e.g. Dreamers' Ball by Queen (come to think of it, that one could be made wonderfully creepy sung from the perspective of the father at one of the purity balls) as that's sung slow enough for "purity" to fit; Wrecking Ball almost definitely wouldn't work, though from a "purity" perspective it would be a great way to send it up..

"After the fall" by Journey would provide the perfect title sub from a scansion perspective, but is another that'd be a pain to parody well.

Thanks for the advice, guys. So perhaps I should be aware of the intonation structure of the OS as well as the accentuation scheme. Come to think of it, I listened to this particular OS on my computer again and noted numerous alternate accentuation practices. Whereas we normally would pronounce "iniquitous" as "in-I-qui-tous," he pronounces it "in-i-QUI-tous," for example.

Ian Anderson does that quite a bit - it makes some Tull songs damn near impossible to parody as getting it right with the OS simply feels wrong.

Last few years, though, & mainly because I've been performing a lot more of the parodies I've written, I've found I've taken more liberties with syllable counts and pacing when compared to the original so that the result is singable on top of the original tune.  There's a 9 to 5 parody going up tomorrow which in its first draft matched the OS damn near perfectly, but I kept tripping over syllables in the verses so a lot got rephrased away from the OS & into a singable form.

You know.. I think whoever's been doling out the 1-votes read this thread

That 9 to 5 parody I mentioned got only one 1:1:1 vote, but two 1:2:2s and a 3:1:1
;D ;D

Y'see? the sonovabitch doles out the scores randomly, just so it doesn't look like one voter.

>:(

..but only after reading:

1-votes are to all intents and purposes never a judgment on how good/bad a parody is; instead, they are a protest, nine times out of ten a trolling one, trying to get a rise out of you.

..before I wrote the above, all my parodies had been hit by triple 1-s, either by Rob or by someone who likes him so much that they think arguing with him should be punished (not convinced though that there'll be anyone that likes him to quite that extent).  The next parody submitted after the above comment gets a load of nearly 1-votes.. Ok, so correlation ain't causation, n=1 & all that.  But there's logic there.

..and I wouldn't mind betting that over the next few days, my more recent parodies will mysteriously start receiving similar nearly-1 votes, when the above is read