Alicorn comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 13, chapter 81 - Less Wrong
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Comments (1099)
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.
True, it was more generally a "Don't be snooty about genre perceptions" piece. Good literature is good, bad literature is bad, and genre be damned. I'm not arguing with you, I just wasn't a fan of the style.
There were also non-genre-related criticisms of fanfiction being addressed. Basically, a lot of criticisms of fanfiction can be plausibly applied to earthfic. For example, "If you're too lazy to create your own characters / world, then you're not a real writer" is bandied about by anti-fanfic folks, and yet they do not consistently apply it to biographies, or historical fiction, or older 'fanfic' writers like James Joyce and T.H.White, or sequels/series.