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thelittledoctor comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 13, chapter 81 - Less Wrong
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Comments (1099)
I think my favorite part of this update comes not from the chapter, but from the Author's Notes:
"If you write sufficiently good fanfiction, you can realize your romantic dreams!"
(Although "Make him go away" is either tied for the position or a close second.)
I have a suspicion that the average fanfic-created relationship is not caused by anything best described as "good".
I'm genuinely curious how you came to that suspicion.
Well, Sturgeon's Law for a start, combined with the fact that people who don't bother to create their own universes are statistically going to be less-motivated, less-experienced, and/or less-competent authors. There's a reason that the stereotype of fanfic authors is 13 year old girls. I'm glad for the exceptions, but they are exceptions.
Do you have this opinion of realistic fiction too?
I have always thought that but the story makes the point even better. Click on that link, everyone.
Uh, wow, I have linked this story on LW before, but your endorsement apparently makes a great big screaming difference to how much traffic a link gets.
Please endorse more of my things. I am addicted to web hits.
No, it mostly suffers from the problem that the people who write it are trying to create Art, and that never ends well.
Or, to answer the question you're actually asking, I'm arguing probabilities, not absolutes. Good fanfic exists - hell, we're on a thread to debate a fic sufficiently good that it caused me to read the original Potter books(seriously, the number of references in those first 30 chapters I missed the first time is kind of staggering). But it is not the majority.
Yeah I love that story.
Really? Seemed rather preachy to me. I got the point within a couple paragraphs, and got bored.
Could've been shortened with further editing (I think) but there was more than one point in it.
What did you think it was preaching?
"SF/Fantasy is as good as realistic fiction". It's a point I agree with, I just think it was overdone.
It is preachy (there's a warning for that in the stories index) but the preached idea was a little more complex than that. I gave earthfic the status and market wherewithal of real-world fanfiction (and promoted fanfiction to a respectable position), and was also making a point about fanfiction.
Do you feel the same way about published by known publishing houses fiction that based on other fiction? I'm thinking about The Once and Future King, Wicked, The Ayre Affair.....
Gatekeepers raise average quality levels.
Sorry, the reason for the stereotype is the fact that fanfiction is findable only on unmoderated internet archives where anyone can post. If you had to look on the internet for all your original fiction, you'd have the same problem. Also, it's in some ways harder to use someone else's voice and be bound by characters that maybe have traits you're scared to write about than to be able to write in your own voice and avoid certain kinds of characters.
But when you compare cherry-picked original fiction weeded through by editors until you get to read only a fraction of the total submitted for consideration and utterly unmoderated, undifferentiated fanfiction by good and bad authors alike side-by-side in the same archive, of course the original fic is going to be better.
<cough> Kindle Store </cough>
Or so I heard, at least.
I think that's probably true -- but not for the reasons you seem to be implying, and not with any particular implications for authors' romantic success. Fanfic seems to be a highly generational phenomenon; there have been shared universes and exchanges of what we now call fanfic going back arguably to the Twenties (the weird fiction genre was highly incestuous), but the form only really took off with the arrival of the Internet. So its authorship's going to be heavily skewed towards younger writers, who are almost by definition less competent and experienced.
However, literally every fanfic writer that I've ever met -- which is nowhere near an unbiased sample and skews somewhat older than the average, but still -- has work in at least one original universe as well. I suspect you'd be hard-pressed to find many genre fiction fans with writing skills that don't. So I doubt you can use that feature of the form to prove much about its authors.
Granted, most of the popular stuff is good(or occasionally legendarily bad). Popular opinion is a gatekeeper too. I suppose it depends on whether you sum over stories or over readers.