the “lets compare fanfic to lit vs dont compare fanfiction to lit bc its not” discourse on this website is the dumbest shit i’ve ever seen. who cares. who cares. truly i have never before logged on and seen people so mad in a stupid way about a more inconsequential topic. it seems like a lot of people focus on uselessly litigating what it’s acceptable to “value” the subjects in question which misses what i feel like is a lot of interesting meat that would actually contribute something to or ask something meaningful about how we conceptualize our understanding of stories
i would say that my issue with how people talk about this is that i’ve seen some some great points/perspectives but they are often undermined and limited by the need defend an assertion of value, whatever that may be, rather than really like… exploring stories as serving different experiences and needs through a lens where things don’t need to go back to considering value, which opens up a lot of possibilities i think, esp concerning what it says about the people involved. i’m less asking for people to actually go about life that way and more to consider it as a lens to think about things through
a big part of this is definitely a reaction to this thing where people in fandom feel the need give legitimacy to fanfic as a medium, because it has often been looked down on, by comparing it to works that are seen as having legitimacy (in ways that may or may not be applicable, which is a whole subject of discussion that is pretty interesting) which i do find pretty corny… but i’m, again, struggling to articulate my problem with the conclusion a lot of people have come to that amounts to “fanfic isn’t exactly high art and that’s fine” which is at least ostensibly pretty reasonable!
i guess i’m coming at this as a person who is interested in looking at genres/types of media that are seen as trashy/pulpy/indulgent not because i think the average individual work is very profound or life-changing or says very much – and it’s not meant to – but because i feel like they firstly tell us about people and secondly they’re interesting to evaluate on their own terms. like, the average isekai anime or whatever is not “good” by the terms of storytelling as a whole, but when we evaluate at it under the idea that it might be serving a different purpose/need than the kind of story we might normally think of as good and look at it from that perspective, suddenly we see a lot of mechanisms at play – perhaps it serves that different purpose well, even if it’s not one i care about or think is worth serving. thinking about stuff this way won’t necessarily make me like something i didn’t enjoy or think was good but there is something to like, think about and even respect there.
basically i like, really enjoy looking at things that are not seen as or meant to be profound with the kind of consideration reserved for things that are because their inconsequentiality doesn’t exist in vacuum in the way that like, if we look closely at the air we breathe it in fact tells us a lot about the environment – or even what does it say that people breathe air? is there a difference between good air and bad air or is it all just air? etc.
so this is maybe tangential to the greater discussion but that’s not one i can imagine having a very like, fruitful outcome anyway. i guess i find the conclusion on fanfic to be limiting partially because it stops at “it’s ok for fanfic to be low art and liking low art is fine” and does not really make an effort to think further with that, because ultimately the conversation has always been about defending a hierarchy of value and any interesting (imo) points made are more of a byproduct… it’s disappointing?
