Heh. This makes me think about the sheer practical difficulty of sorting through fic. I guess in fandom as in RL, to some extent the author is the brand. I think I've always tended to read by mining "everything else" written by the author of a story I really liked, but I've always found it very difficult and frustrating -- and, eventually, too much effort -- to try to wade through what's out there to find a new favorite author. Even reclists are hit-or-miss, especially if they try to be comprehensive.
One possible response in the community is to treat fics as commodities -- here's another PWP, here's another rapefic, here's another fic where H does A, but not B, to D. So that the choice of what to read is as standardized as consuming one particular brand of soup and not another. I think that's pretty dreary, and it's maybe at the back of my hesitation about "warnings" as reductionist.
So I daydream, sometimes, about a fandom where there might develop a tradition of "advertisements" (in the sense that very old books used to be prefaced by an "advertisement" that discussed what the book was about) -- something more substantive than fandom "synopses," which tend toward a teaser style, where you could get a sense of what the author proposed to do (in as spoilery or non-spoilery a way as they chose) as well as a taste of their writing style. Not a practical suggestion, I know, but maybe a mental exercise to describe what's missing!
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-06-24 04:40 pm (UTC)Heh. This makes me think about the sheer practical difficulty of sorting through fic. I guess in fandom as in RL, to some extent the author is the brand. I think I've always tended to read by mining "everything else" written by the author of a story I really liked, but I've always found it very difficult and frustrating -- and, eventually, too much effort -- to try to wade through what's out there to find a new favorite author. Even reclists are hit-or-miss, especially if they try to be comprehensive.
One possible response in the community is to treat fics as commodities -- here's another PWP, here's another rapefic, here's another fic where H does A, but not B, to D. So that the choice of what to read is as standardized as consuming one particular brand of soup and not another. I think that's pretty dreary, and it's maybe at the back of my hesitation about "warnings" as reductionist.
So I daydream, sometimes, about a fandom where there might develop a tradition of "advertisements" (in the sense that very old books used to be prefaced by an "advertisement" that discussed what the book was about) -- something more substantive than fandom "synopses," which tend toward a teaser style, where you could get a sense of what the author proposed to do (in as spoilery or non-spoilery a way as they chose) as well as a taste of their writing style. Not a practical suggestion, I know, but maybe a mental exercise to describe what's missing!