anneapocalypse replied:

This is exactly it tbh. I see posts that disparage plot as something that doesn’t really matter, as something completely divorced from character and relationships development, which–if you believe that, I’m so sorry, you’ve been lied to by bad TV shows. People say “I just want the characters talk” when what they really mean is they want emotional continuity.

Let me put it to you this way: here, (hypothetically) I’ve written 100,000 words of two characters staring at each other. Sometimes they talk to each other. You don’t know them, you haven’t seen them do anything of consequence, you haven’t seen them in any conflicts or under any pressure. But they’re in love! Promise!

Will you pay me $30 to read it in hardcover? How about $8 for a trade paperback? $2.99 for an ebook? Anyone?

I am not saying fanfic doesn’t take effort. I am not saying it’s meaningless. I’m saying it builds on an established world and characters and the assumed familiarity of the reader with those characters. If you’re writing for a ship with any kind of a following, you often can assume an investment in the relationship itself without having to sell it. As such, you can skip a lot of the work of getting the reader invested. If you want to, you can write a novel-length fic of two characters mostly just talking and doing mundane stuff and make it interesting, because you are building off established characterization and experiences these characters have had.

Original fiction cannot skip the “making the reader give a shit” step. 

One is not better than the other. Both are good. But to disparage original fiction for doing exactly what it has to do to get you invested enough to write fic in the first place is a staggering level of missing the forest for the trees.

allofthefeelings commented:

This is SUCH A GOOD POST.

I just also want to note that doing the work of pulling the pieces together, even in fic where the audience shares canon to start from, can make that fic a lot stronger! I notice many of my favorite stories do that; we all share an understanding of the pieces of canon, but when the author explicitly draws out the parallels between disparate characters to show why they’re good together, or really uses the text as the baseline, I am so much more wiling to try ships and characters I hadn’t previously been interested in, and I also care more deeply about the original text.

It’s my favorite part of what fanworks can be, when we let them.