#is a result of the market encouraging that behaviour. not people collectively getting stupider

[communistkenobi]

I’m not a fanfiction rights warrior or anything but the discourse about how it’s actively making published literature worse is so stupid. if fanfiction is having a negative effect on the quality of published fiction, that impact is vastly outpaced by the economic reasons for why mass amounts of low quality garbage is being pumped into the fiction market. certain conventions of fanfiction (namely the use of trope and character tags) are being adopted by the industry not because fanfiction has some hegemonic influence on said industry but because those things are easily adaptable for search engine optimisation and marketing purposes. like what explanation sounds more plausible: fiction is being increasingly tailored to fit into various narrow category tags (“gay enemies to lovers slowburn coffee shop romance,” etc) because the consumer market has seen a rapid sea change in the past 5-10 years and now audiences all want to read what is essentially OC fanfiction that they also pay for, or because formulating books in that way makes keyword search optimisation on google and amazon way easier to market low-effort schlock to people? this is not a new phenomenon and blaming end-users for the state of the industry is basic cart-before-horse reasoning. you can dislike fanfiction and find the people obsessed with it annoying, but the relatively niche space those people occupy online is not structurally responsible for books being more shitty than usual lately

#marvel fans are not the reason the MCU is dogshit. etc #consumers can be stupid and the industry can be predatory and low effort. both those things can be true #this is even true for fic converted into published lit. like the fact that it’s low effort shit with the serial numbers filed off #is a result of the market encouraging that behaviour. not people collectively getting stupider #like come on man. this is bad analysis #if a single person is annoying on this post I’m turning off reblogs #note hell