lunabee34

I feel honor-bound to say something!

Let's not forget that profic is more like fanfic than is often claimed. I mean, a gazillion literary novels are set on small college campuses where sensitive young writers are insufficiently appreciated, and a gazillion genre novels are set in windswept manor houses or spaceships or the Mean Streets of L.A. So not much chuffin' world-building there. OTOH maybe one reason that there are so many sci-fi fandoms is that the options for literal world-building are so broad.

(And my theory is that there are so many far-out AUs in popslash because, well, straightforward canon is "they have a concert" or "one of the guys gets interviewed on TV" so it's understandable that the filler between the sex scenes is something like "somebody turns into a sofa".)

Maybe one reason there are so damn many first-time stories is to give the POV character the chance to give an intensive tour d'horizon?

My personal cri de coeur about mediocre or bad fanfic comes from "The Simple Art of Murder": "it was second-rate fiction because it wasn't about the materials of first-rate fiction." There are so many damn fine fanwriters who know so much about how people behave and how language behaves and can convey it all that it makes me angry, or at least disappointed, to see readers and writers condescending to each other. On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed.