[ SECRET POST #4354 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4364 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 48 secrets from Secret Submission Post #625.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

There's definitely more good published fic in existence than good fanfic.

But when I'm looking for fanfic, I can look for it in a centralized repository where it's extensively tagged, and where I can trivially filter based on those tags, as well as things like word count and how many other people have read and enjoyed it. AFAIK, there's no way to do that for pub fic (and I would be *delighted* if there was something like it).

[type_wild]

Content tagging of books probably won't happen in the near future, but as for the rest of it: Thickness and page count is usually a good indication of length. If you want to know if other people liked it, it's probably a lot more relieable for ~real books~ than for fanfic. You'll find both professional and non-professional reviews all over the internet.

[(Anonymous)]

You'll find both professional and non-professional reviews all over the internet.

I know that book reviews *exist* but that still requires me to run through and find a million different book reviewers, and hope to get lucky and find one whose taste I agree with, and who isn't constantly spending half their posts on promo, giveaways, their own books they're writing, backscratching by promoting other writers and agents so that they can get promoted in return, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc. Which it seems like 80% of all book reviewers do.

With AO3, I can find a centralized list of fanfiction to read and know what's in it. I can look at how many hits, kudos, and bookmarks a given fic has. I can filter by tags and relationships and fandoms and topics. And if I want to find someone with similar taste to me, I can go and look at who bookmarked fics that I like.

[type_wild]

I use Goodreads if I want the user review aggregate, and I never read book bloggers, but reviewers for professional publications like newspapers, magazines, larger websites for genre fiction etc.

I also tend to find that hits and kudos only serve to part the mediocre fic from the bad ones, because there's so much more than quality determining what people like. Does it have the most popular fanon? Is the author a BNF? How many chapters is it? Is it smut?Is it whatever AU is the hot thing this season? The biggest fandom hits tend to be passable, while the true gems get way less attention than your run-of-the-mill hanahaki-disease dribble.

[(Anonymous)]

IA that kudos mostly serve to separate the bad fic from everything else, but that's still useful.

And IMO published fiction is also very, very vulnerable to popularity and trends and random flavor-of-the-month stuff and peer pressure. Both for writers and reviewers.

[(Anonymous)]

Unfortunately, I don't tend to especially like fanfic with more kudos and comments any more than ones with fewer. I do better with specific recommendations, but it's just as easy to find specific recommendations for published fiction. Even free, online published fiction. Like say Clarkesworld or Strange Horizons or Lightspeed or even Tor.com - all have a bunch of free online stories, admittedly not tagged and categorized, but I find tags of limited use because there's not much in the way of tags for "well written" and "good story flow" and "has an actual ending" which you can find reliably in professionally edited fiction.

I do find fanfictions I really like, that are as good as the really enjoyable published fiction I mostly read, but it takes a lot of random not so great reads to get to them.

If I had difficulty getting invested in characters, I might be like others and prefer fanfiction about characters I already know, but I don't. I get invested enough in any character I'm reading about just from a usual level of authorial characterization skill, and I very rarely get so invested in a character that they come live in my head (and if they do, sometimes fanfiction about them is hard to take because it's not my headcanon, so that's a mixed blessing).

Anyway what I do get invested in and want to read fanfiction for is worlds - some of the settings from stories I've loved are what make me enjoy fanfiction set in those worlds. That's what I like about AUs, I like to read where people put either original characters, or characters from some fandom I'm not familiar with, into worlds I really like. Put them in a Golden Compass or a Wizarding or an Amber setting, a Star Wars setting, whatever it is that I know and already like the parameters of, and I'm pretty sold (if it's well written etc).

In some ways a lot of older science fiction and fantasy did this, what with using Tolkienesque settings and space opera settings, so maybe it's the same reason I'm more tolerant of not quite as well written science fiction and fantasy that follows those tropes.

Urban fantasy has achieved something similar in many cases, with the vampires and werewolves and witches (oh my) setting pioneered by Anne Rice and White Wolf and (no really) Laurell Hamilton, the latter of whom was the first to popularly world-build a setting where society had adjusted to learning that vampires were real.

(Prior to that, urban fantasy was a lovely but niche subgenre with contemporary rather than historical elves and fae, and there's still that branch - modern versions of Charles de Lint, Emma Bull, Mercedes Lackey etc - but it's been voluminously overshadowed by the witch/vampire/werewolf type.)