Braindump
Things I was tempted to spam you about in the last week or so, all in one handy post.
- I know it's deeply tedious to LJ about having trouble getting onto LJ, but the servers are significantly less robust since the move, y/y?
- I liked the remake of Terry Nation's One Other Good Idea Survivors, myself. ( minor spoilers for the opener, haven't seen #2 yet )
The real problem is the correlation between the quality of people's writing and their tendency to be all "ooh, shiny" about the new thing as soon as it comes along and therefore stop writing for whatever the previous ooh-shiny thing was.
I had to chuckle, because this is how I think about academic writing in my field--we follow fashion to be working on the latest/newest/hottest area because that's where the audience is. Which goes, I suppose, to your later point about writers being reluctant to write in a fandom that's developed a bad reputation.
And then this
And there's a lot worth talking about in the fact that most of the badfic writers don't ever really seem to improve very much, because of the Cult of Nice.is something I find intriguing (as a writing teacher) because this is how most of my students tend to deal with peer critique/review/response. One of my students introduced me to Sugar Quill, an HP fanfic archive/comm that is locked down tighter than Fort Knox, but supposedly "produces" amazing fic (I'm planning to ( ... )
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If you like strict adherence to canon, maybe. At least in ye olden days, they only allowed ships which they deemed to be CANON i.e. One Big Happy Weasley Family ships. And this was before JKR had actually MADE said ships actual canon, so it was especially obnoxious to people who had other ideas back in those days when we only had up to the fifth book.
Bah, HP fandom. I do not miss it one bit.
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I'm really not one to strictly adhere to canon in the ways that I think you mean it, but this is what makes this topic so interesting to me--how do groups define what is "good" writing in this particular context?
The impression I got from my student was that they were the arbiters of "good" writing for the fandom, but I didn't get a vibe from her that she thought "good" was being defined by adherence to canon--which interests as well, because her perception of how they were defining good may not have been accurate, therefore making her susceptible to misperceptions of the community's purpose and its relevance to her own writing goals/needs.
And now I'm turning ionlylurkhere's post into my own ( ... )
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Well, they also had pretty high standards for grammar and punctuation and suchlike for their submissions too, so that might be what she's thinking of. And for all that I know, they may have gotten rid of the shipping rules since I was last in the fandom. I hope so.
(I preferred Fiction Alley. Same high standards, no One Big Happy Weasley Family agenda. But I don't know if Fiction Alley is still around.)
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No, no, no, this is actually fascinating and useful, because I am interested in both How Do You Get Consistent Goodfic and knowing moar about HP fandom without having to go anywhere near the scary.
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