The unfahomable appeal of crappy writing

[wiseheart]

For a while, it was the songfics that flodded the internet. They were shitty, but at least they had some vague resemblance of *stories*. They had some semblance of plot.

Now it's the IM fics. Basically imaginary IM conversations, transcribed. No plot, no description, no characterization, no nothing. Call me a snob, but what exactly makes them stories to begin with?

Either today's authors are incredibly lazy and completely lacking any kind of imagination, or today's readers are too lazy (or too demented) to read an actual, honest-to-earth story. Or it's an unholy convergence of the two above factors.

I think I ought to keep away from every single contemporary and/or sci-fi fandom until this new trend dies down. Not that I'd be killing my eyes by reading this kind of crap, but trying to find something worth reading, in any fandom possibly including the existence of computers, is just too frustrating.

So, back to reading Tolkienfic for a while. Or Cadfael. Or history novels. Anything that's safe even from the possibility of running into an IM fic.