cesare
2003-04-10 09:20 pm UTC (link)

There's nothing huge to point and laugh at, so I'm going to be weird and actually, like, engage with this. I don't know from Smallville fic, but I've seen a lot of fanfic trends come and go.

liviapenn wrote: "I'm sorry, but if you really care about your ideas, if you're really inspired, if you really love writing about the characters or the pairing that you love-- then you *will write them* no matter what happens to be "popular" at the moment."

She probably has a point, but there's an echo effect in fandom. When you're a fan, you're usually reading as much of the fic as you can get your hands on, and you can't help but be influenced to some degree by what's being written in mass quantities.

I've seen this happen a zillion times-- someone establishes a trend. Then many other writers of varying quality follow that trend. Now sure, a great writer might disregard everything that came before and do her own thing, but in the meantime, many very good writers pick up on the trend because they're reading it everywhere and being influenced by it. So you end up with a glut of the same kind of thing.

In that environment, I can see why you might want to reassure people that there's still an audience for a diversity of fic. And hell, if my fandom(s) were overtaken by baby stories, I'd probably gripe too.

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telesilla
2003-04-10 09:54 pm UTC (link)

This was one of the reasons I didn't agree with someone at Escapade who was saying that everyone should read most of the archive before trying their hand at TPM fic. Ignoring the sheer folly of the statement (3000+ fics, some of them unbeleivably wretched? I think not), what bothered me most about it was that you end up with several problems if you do that.

One, in spite of the fact that some of the fic is wrteched, a lot of it is increidbly good so you get very new writers looking at the "giants" and saying, "well fuck, why bother?"

Two (or maybe a corollary of one), people have an idea nad then read the archive and say, "well fuck it, it's been done."

Three, they get so convinced by fanon that they don't try to put their own spin on things.

And yes, two and three contradict each other, but fandom is vast; it contains multitudes.

*realizes she's been serious in a f_w post*

SQUIDWARTS 4 EVA!!!!!!1111!!!!

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rhi_silverflame
2003-04-11 12:33 am UTC (link)

Gah, it's a serious conversation here and that scares me.

Anyway.

Good points all, and a concurrence from me based on my experience in Xena-verse fanfic. When I first got into the genre (having actually been hooked on the smutty fanfic before the series itself) the "alt" fic, that is to say the X/G pairing, was just beginning to really hit its stride, and only a handful of uber fics were out there. (Uber fic, in case anyone is wondering, used to be the concept of taking X/G archetypes, sometimes their reincarnations, and putting them in a different context.)

Now "classic" X/G fic is practically a thing of the past (as that term suggests) and uber fic dominates Xena fandom to far beyond the point of glutting the market, which is a fact that I blame largely on the small vanity publishers that started cropping up -- and some of them crashing quite spectacularly -- in that market. Turns out people think uber fic has some kind of mainstream marketability. So of course lawsuit-bait references to the actual show get edited out or modified, the manuscript gets doctored in one way or another, and it gets published in a clunky trade-paperback size.

Then some of the published authors ("bards") decide to put long, ingratiating blurbs in their sig files about being the author of so-and-so book, published by such-and-such small press that is likely doomed anyway because it's run by fans who don't have a clue what they're doing. That meme spreads. Bunch of other fans see the sig files and think, "Ooooh, I could do that too!"

And hey-presto, an explosion of uber-fic, most of which is the most cookie cutter shit imaginable because it's a cascade of derivative work coming down from the first generation of uber. Most of the story summaries sound like the TV Guide blurb for a Lifetime original movie. I gave up reading Xenaverse fanfic about two years ago because of the fact that it's practically impossible to find anything decent any more, and I know it's getting even worse because my partner still reads it and gripes to me about all the horrors she finds. Actually, she sort of corners me and makes me listen as she reads out loud. The trauma is never-ending.

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	Uhhuh kannaophelia 2003-04-11 05:33 am UTC (link)
	And that, my friends, is why I left the fandom. ~g~ Although at least uberXena wasn't a real problem for Xena/Callisto fans like me. ~has read one of these it's-not-Xena-honest books and heartily regretted it~ (Reply to this)(Parent)

	kimera 2003-04-11 01:12 pm UTC (link)
	The "echo effect" thing is evil. Evil! I read a fic I like, with a neat concept, and then suddenly there's all these crap fics with the same theme that just make me sick of the whole idea coughreincarnated!buffycough. On the other hand, I do like kidfic. But not mpreg or schmoopy OOC stuff. Yeah, I'm picky, I know =P (Reply to this)(Parent)

	bonibaru 2003-04-11 05:19 pm UTC (link)
	Just to clarify: the Challenge had already been in existence for some time. We just used the AIM conversation to pimp it from my LJ. Which led to a snowballing of people coming forward to admit they didn't read "domestic" fic. All in all it was pretty civilized. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	deeablo 2003-04-11 06:23 pm UTC (link)
	It was civilized, yes, but I still think there was plenty of self-important wank there. It just wasn't flamey. Oh well. I can't believe this means that the SV fandom is finally going to play nice. They'll be flamey stuff soon enough at which to point and laugh. ::readies Evil Hand for future pointing and laughing::: (Reply to this)(Parent)

	elke_tanzer 2003-04-12 02:27 am UTC (link)
	I've seen the periphery of this topic on my friends list lately without paying too much attention to it, and I just have to say here, as I did in my own LJ, that I was kind of disappointed that the big and yet civil hoohah was about domesticity fics, and not domestic discipline ones. Those would be much more interesting... imho. :-9 (Reply to this)