Go ahead, laugh :P

[penguin2]

Guess what? I've had another epiphany. This one came a couple of days ago:

I accept fanfiction as a concept.

As a concept, mind you. There is still no excuse - nor will there ever be - for the clumsy, feculent, inappropriate, character-disrespecting, childish fic-maunderings of the average fangirl (of any sex). But then, there's sod-all excuse

Comments

[quatranoctal]

I am of very much the same opinion, and was going to take a shot at mangling Sturgeon's Law before iampunha beat me to it. There is good fanfiction out there, but it's obscured by an insane amount of crap, so you have to look for the warning signs of bad fanfic when you're reading it. And, sadly, the fact that it's fanfic is one of the warning signs.

Some series fare worse than others - by definition, fanfiction is written by fans, so the quality of fans influences the quality of fanfiction. Hence I daresay Deadwood and Firefly fanfic is, on average, a bit better than Harry Potter or Naruto. And, of course, you need to be prepared to run as far and as fast as you can when the sentence begins "Though [male character] had always thought of himself as straight, the strange feelings coursing through him ..."

[penguin2]

Urgle! I have no intention of actually reading fanfic. It's just that I've accepted its right to exist!

Seriously. Apart from Real Life(TM), work, all my usual researches-for-fun, and additional work in the form of genrelism and paid editing, I'm in the middle of writing an unslashable Book...

[quatranoctal]

Can't be done. Unless it has fewer than two male characters. And even then ...

(I'm not even going to bring Rule 34 into this, because I've already thought up some ghastly counter-examples to my above statement, and that rule pretty much states that the unimaginable has already been imagined.)

[penguin2]

Well, the primary characters in the first half of the story are male and in love. As it happens.

I have no idea what Rule 34 is. But then, that's probably not surprising. You and I inhabit different parts of the sphere of reality :-)

[quatranoctal]

Rule 34 of the Internet has a few different forms, but the one I think most accurately captures the truth is "if it exists, then there is porn of it". There's also a Rule 35, which goes something like "if there isn't porn of it, bringing this to people's attention guarantees that there soon will be". Sadly, there's nothing in the rules to guarantee that there's good porn of it, and most of it is, to my knowledge, at least as bad as you suspect.

[penguin2]

Thank you for the clarification. And now that you have told me this...well, I think Sherlock Holmes said it best...