>>Every time I apply standard techniques of literary criticism to
>>fanfic, somebody says this. Why?
>
>Probably because the standard techniques of literary criticism come
>off as extremely irritating and pretentious when applied to something
>you were neither forced, charged, nor paid to read.

Okay, I'm going to have to agree with thorne/Phil here. This is vaguely slippery-slope-ish, but hand-waving any degree of sloppiness in online fic -- be it original or fan -- is yet another reinforcement of the acceptance of inferior quality. I don't know how much fanfic the EPU staff reads, if any at all, but the signal-to-noise ratio in pretty much any fandom is stupidly, ridiculously low. I got started in Highlander fanfic, which seems to be largely unique in that the vast majority of the people writing it -- or, at least, this was the rule when I was still involved in the fandom -- can use things like a spellchecker and a grammar checker, and their writing is readable and coherent. In terms of actual story quality... well, the average story was definitely better than the average, say, X-Files fanfic, but there was still a fair amount of drek you had to wade through to find something worth reading.

Then, when I started getting into other fandoms -- Gargoyles was actually the next fandom I started reading -- I discovered something. The greater part of net.authors SUCK. They suck HARD. But even the utterly, mind-numbingly, my-brain-is-leaking-out-my-ears-because-I-tried-to-read-this bad stuff seemed to generate fanmail from lemmings who would read literally ANYTHING related to Their Favorite Show. Now, six years after my original start in fanfic, I've found that most people who post online seem to think that little things like style, spelling, and grammar don't really matter, since it's not like they're getting paid to do it or anything. There are a lot of authors who DO care about those things, and I'm always thrilled when I find something I can actually judge on the merits of the story without having to decode a fundamental incoherency, but it becomes hit-or-miss (at best) in even getting THAT out of it.

So what I'm saying is that I judge things I read online, even fanfic, by the same yardstick I use to judge professional writing. I spend more cash on comic books than I do on regular books, generally speaking, and comic book writers, especially those writing for Marvel and DC, write on a schedule. They must have that story ready, and some, like Brian Michael Bendis, churn out several very, very good stories every month. I don't hold net.authors to that particular kind of standard, since they do have day jobs, but since nobody's paying them, and they operate on their own schedule, that means that they can take the time to do it right. And if, in reading a story, I get the sense that the author didn't care enough about the story to take the time to Do It Right (and I have good friends who are unfortunately abysmal writers because of this habit), then I fail to see why I should take that writer seriously, even if they only write fanfic.

I don't differentiate between fanfic and original fic for these purposes; I expect quality, and when I don't get it, I'm going to say something about it. Maybe I do let a little more slide than I would in a professional publication, but not all that much, and I'm not going to let ANYTHING glaring slip by me. Especially since, this being the 'net, it's FAR easier to correct stupid mistakes than it is when you run off 15,000 copies and have to wait for the new edition to come out in order to fix them.

-- Sean --

http://www.thebrokenlink.org The Broken Link 4.0 is live!
"Imagination is more important than knowledge." -- Albert Einstein
"It's not easy being green." -- Kermit the Frog