Every time the topic of fanfiction comes to mind, I think “I ought to read more of that.”
But when I actually try to find some fanfiction to read, I find I have to sift through a veritable mountain of erotic fanfiction to get to anything else. (Nothing wrong with erotic fanfiction, mind you, but it’s not really what I have in mind when I think “I ought to read more fanfiction.”) Maybe I’m not looking in the right places.
I do think it’s on balance a good thing, that more of it ought to exist, and that it should be legal. (It pretty unambiguously isn’t legal at least in the U.S., but it should be IMO.)
So: I used to read gen fic. When I talked about fanfic with my fan friends, I always said I liked the characters and the relationships. They continually tried to get me to try slash fic, and I would, I really tried: I’d find stories in the fandoms I was in featuring ‘my’ pairing and I’d try them … and honestly, they were crap. I could not believe my fan friends were reading such poor quality stories!!
Then a friend sent me a gen zine for my birthday. It had three big stories in it, two of which were my big fandoms, the third some show I’d never heard of before, but I read the story anyway. And if was fantastic. I immediately wrote everyone I knew asking if they knew of any other stories, and another friend loaned me a different gen zine. Another long story, really really good I immediately decided that I was a fan of this show, the fic was great!
So I wrote my friends again and it was at this point that I found out that, somehow or other, I had managed to read the only two gen stories in the entire fandom - absolutely everything else was slash.
But I loved my new fandom so I decided to “tolerate” the slash - but it was good too!
It was much later, after going through more fandoms than I care to think about, that I realized that for most fandoms (though not all!), but that the really good stories in many fandoms are either mostly slash or mostly gen. So the gen fandoms I loved the fic on - I loved the fic because the good writers in those fandoms were writing gen. And the slash fandoms I got into - I lived the fic there because the good writers were writing slash.
Nowadays I wander freely back and forth, depending on what shows attract my interest. And sometimes I’ll be reading gen and sometimes slash, but I end up reading one or the other because that’s where the good writers in that fandom are.
Which is a really long-winded way of saying that, maybe it’s the fandoms you’re in that you’re ending up with stories that don’t interest you. It does happen!
Every time the topic of fanfiction comes to mind, I think “I ought to read more of that.”
But when I actually try to find some fanfiction to read, I find I have to sift through a veritable mountain of erotic fanfiction to get to anything else. (Nothing wrong with erotic fanfiction, mind you, but it’s not really what I have in mind when I think “I ought to read more fanfiction.”) Maybe I’m not looking in the right places.
I do think it’s on balance a good thing, that more of it ought to exist, and that it should be legal. (It pretty unambiguously isn’t legal at least in the U.S., but it should be IMO.)
So: I used to read gen fic. When I talked about fanfic with my fan friends, I always said I liked the characters and the relationships. They continually tried to get me to try slash fic, and I would, I really tried: I’d find stories in the fandoms I was in featuring ‘my’ pairing and I’d try them … and honestly, they were crap. I could not believe my fan friends were reading such poor quality stories!!
Then a friend sent me a gen zine for my birthday. It had three big stories in it, two of which were my big fandoms, the third some show I’d never heard of before, but I read the story anyway. And if was fantastic. I immediately wrote everyone I knew asking if they knew of any other stories, and another friend loaned me a different gen zine. Another long story, really really good I immediately decided that I was a fan of this show, the fic was great!
So I wrote my friends again and it was at this point that I found out that, somehow or other, I had managed to read the only two gen stories in the entire fandom - absolutely everything else was slash.
But I loved my new fandom so I decided to “tolerate” the slash - but it was good too!
It was much later, after going through more fandoms than I care to think about, that I realized that for most fandoms (though not all!), but that the really good stories in many fandoms are either mostly slash or mostly gen. So the gen fandoms I loved the fic on - I loved the fic because the good writers in those fandoms were writing gen. And the slash fandoms I got into - I lived the fic there because the good writers were writing slash.
Nowadays I wander freely back and forth, depending on what shows attract my interest. And sometimes I’ll be reading gen and sometimes slash, but I end up reading one or the other because that’s where the good writers in that fandom are.
Which is a really long-winded way of saying that, maybe it’s the fandoms you’re in that you’re ending up with stories that don’t interest you. It does happen!