My Thoughts on Fanfiction

Really, I've been wanting to do this for some time. *sigh* These are my personal thoughts on fanfics, and how they seem to be going down the drain these days.

Well, first of all, back before FFNet existed, it was hard to find fanfics (or so I assume. I dun really know, as I've only gotten my 'hunger' for fanfics recently, if you count about two years recent). But anyways, they were probably harder to find before, because they were hosted on private sites that used HTML programming. As such, chapters were much longer, and the people writing them put a much better effort into it.

But, nowadays, with FFNet, MediaMiner, DevArt and other sources, writing and posting fanfics online has gotten considerably easier. And as such, the quality of fanfics has slightly dropped. Often, you can find stories filled with errors, grammar and punctuation mistakes, text that should be limited to IMs and text messages and general annoyances, such as Mary-Sues and the like.

All in all, it seems that because these new privileges have been given, people have become lazy in keeping up the quality. I mean, do fanfic writers these days have no dignity? If you write something that the whole world may very well see, don't you want it to be the best that you can do? I know that I do.

Case in point, because I don't wanna sound like a prissy know-it-all, I'll tell about myself and my own 'history' in fanfic writing. When I first got started, I had seen a lot of fanfic writers who did those cutesie script thingies at the beginning and end of their stories. I'd also seen some of them doing that "REVIEW OR I'LL DIE!!!!" thing. Naively thinking that that was all it took to be a good fanfic writer, I used those types of things in my fanfics while the story itself seemed to be less-than-qualitable. I finally realized when I was forcing myself to write a new chapter and after receiving some slightly unnerving, but sensible criticism; I really needed to change a lot of things around. So now, I am currently rewriting my still unfinished story, in hopes of making myself and the story not sound like blatant idiocy.

I was able to save myself from making too many mistakes to count. But, I feel like there may be hardly any hope for other fanfic writers who constantly write this literary garbage. I'm sorry if I sound cruel or mean, but it may very well be true. I love fanfiction, but if it continues on like this, I'm beginning to feel like it will be destroyed.