Hmmm. Where do we start with this? Personally, I swore I'd never get into HP fandom but it kind of grabbed me - alas, the good gen just isn't anything like as commonplace. There's bad slash out there but the worst slash seems to be *way* better than the worst gen, which falls into all the cliches a 14-year old MarySue writer can imagine. Even the most popular gen tropes out there (Severitus, Harry rescued from the Dursleys) show a startling lack of imagination.
I think you have to look at what people read before you can consider what they write. HP is a self-sustaining fandom in a lot of ways, with a lot of people in HP alone (many of them apparently under the illusion that they invented fandom), so where's the exposure to well-written gen as a comparison?
And if the average age of the writers is as low as we suspect it is, then they're not going to be approaching writing gen with the same literary background (both fandom and otherwise) as people who've been around longer.
Maybe people just aren't seeing the same gaps in canon to fill? I find there's generally scorn towards AUs, so I'm not even going into that subject, but you'd think there'd be much more room for manoeuvre, wouldn't you?
Personally, I'd say your inherent criticism of the ease the slashers write all sorts of pairings in HP shows they have much more of an imagination than the gen fans, but I think you'd also find that many of the people producing the most weird (and often wonderful, oddly enough) slash are significantly older than the mean.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2005-04-22 10:33 pm (UTC)I think you have to look at what people read before you can consider what they write. HP is a self-sustaining fandom in a lot of ways, with a lot of people in HP alone (many of them apparently under the illusion that they invented fandom), so where's the exposure to well-written gen as a comparison?
And if the average age of the writers is as low as we suspect it is, then they're not going to be approaching writing gen with the same literary background (both fandom and otherwise) as people who've been around longer.
Maybe people just aren't seeing the same gaps in canon to fill? I find there's generally scorn towards AUs, so I'm not even going into that subject, but you'd think there'd be much more room for manoeuvre, wouldn't you?
Personally, I'd say your inherent criticism of the ease the slashers write all sorts of pairings in HP shows they have much more of an imagination than the gen fans, but I think you'd also find that many of the people producing the most weird (and often wonderful, oddly enough) slash are significantly older than the mean.