E. Darwin Hartshorn ⳩

The number one problem with fanfic in the modern age is the following.... Years ago, people would start writing their juvenilia, and everyone knew it was bad. The writer knew that it need work. The readers knew that it need work. The writer would be encouraged to do better and, with time, usually did. But with fanfic, bad writing gets rewarded. If the person's writing is bad, but it also happens to scratch some wish fulfillment itch of the fandom, they can get millions of downloads for really bad writing. This means they never learn to improve. The result is a whole bunch of TV shows and comics that are horrible, because the writers have learned everything they know from being rewarded from writing fanfic--while still being immature writers. They've never had to learn to be a good writer, to tell a good story. As soon as they move outside of the audience of people who have wish fulfillment desires about a particular story, they can't write a story that holds a larger audience. So the problem is not that fanfic is good or fanfic is bad--the problem is that people are being rewarded for writing bad stories and any attempt to say "This storytelling is immature: this writer needs to improve" gets attacked over and over and over again. In other words, it's not writing in someone else's background or writing in your own background that is the problem, it's the audience giving the writer false positives.