🔗 To Read or Not to Read Romantasy - by John Warner:

Many of my students had been passionate participants in online fan fiction forums, a genre I’d held in low esteem until reading a student’s paper years earlier (circa 2009) which provided background and critical context that allowed me to see the sophistication and dynamism of the culture churning away in the form of literally millions of words. The fact that fan fiction derived from very specific subcultures and was expected to adhere to particular precepts didn’t make it any different from any other genre, really. Also, the fact that a lot of fan fiction wasn’t very good didn’t make it different from any other apprentice writing either.

And in the end, wasn’t my undergraduate writing a kind of Ray Carver fan fiction?

(It was.)

I have been trying to cultivate more of an “It’s not for me” attitude when it comes to books, movies, TV shows, and music that I might formerly have just said were bad. I find the tendency of the terminally online to form immediate opinions and judgements about everything to be toxic and tedious; I don’t understand what joy there is in getting angry about things that other people like, even if I have gotten caught up in that sort of thing myself.

Every genre has its own internal set of rules and norms. Maybe the best we can say is whether that genre and its rules are for us, and then whether or not any particular work is internally consistent.