The joys of fandom #298

[graculus]

Yes, it's the latest installment.

Let's talk about this obsession for self-promotion, shall we? Like the people who use mailing lists as the forum for their little mutual appreciation societies to pat one another on the back for their mediocre and unimaginative fic, because surely that's what they're for? Where the author posts interminable WIPs apparently solely for the purpose of their friends raving over every installment and their own vapid and cliqueish responses to that ego-stroking.

And then people wonder why there's no good fic in that fandom any more...

Comments

[gategrrl.livejournal.com]

Can I make this into a metadiscussion about fic? (laughs wickedly). I know the type of fic you're refering to - chock full of cliches and tropes, color-by-numbers plot points...but I like to think that some of that drivel is the drivel of a beginning writer, or a writer with little confidence in their own imagination. Hopefully, some of those writers will break out of the paint-by-numbers approach and become dissatisfied with the yes-man audience.

But the situation you speak of sounds more like performance art, written for externals than internal reasons. (not that all performance art is like that - more like a class clown desperate for attention, that sort of performance art)

[graculus.livejournal.com]

Meta? Nooooooo! ;)

Where's the encouragement to take risks, to write something a little less by-the-numbers, if what you're currently producing garners such adulation? Why take the risk and possibly lose the ego-strokes?