oceana

So here I am, innocently checking out Area52 for the xth time today, knowing that they can't possibly have updated again because it was updated 4 days ago, only to find that there are new stories. Which always gets me a little excited, even if I should know better by now.
Now, I can't read every story that gets published on Area 52. Not only do I not have that kind of time, but I would also like my tender brain to stay intact a little longer.
So I have this strange system about the stories that I read:

There are authors I never read because I deeply hate what they do to the characters, and I get very angry when I stumble across one of their stories.

There are authors that I read when I'm very desperate, and then only for the smut. (I wasn't that desperate today)

There are authors that I have never read and will probably never read, because they have already published a number of stories, but no one ever recced them to me, and their names are boring, and I just can't be bothered. (Sometimes, when I'm starving for SG-1 fic, I look up these authors and read their stories. They often end up under category 1 or 2)

There are, of course, authors that I worship and whose shopping lists would give me greater pleasure than most fics these days, but I usually read their fics on the mailing list, so I already know them when they are up on Area52.

And then there are the new authors: Authors who have published only one or two stories at Area52. I give them a chance, every time. I made some nice discoveries that way (like The Grrrl), and they gave me some good laughs, and they made me bang my head against the wall and cry.

This time there were only three stories by "new" authors.
One is harmless (to put it nicely), one is deeply disturbing and makes me want to scream "Pro Censorship!No more badfic on public slash archives!" and one was... I don't know, I guess boring is the best word. The fic wasn't bad itself, the writing was okay (at least what I noticed, but I didn't read it till the end), I counted only two "Dannys" (though those two were Dannys of the worst kind). But the whole fic was kind of pointless. No one needs another of these fics. It's the kind of fic that exists in every fandom, and that everyone has read a thousand times, and it isn't even a good example of that kind of fic. It felt like a fic that was written without love, for the fic or for the characters, written just to write something. Mass production, and it shows in lovely details like
I sit down beside him and he jumps up like a zat gun just shot him in the ass.
Excuse me, but being zatted usually isn't known to make people jump.

This is, at least for me, the difference between porn and slash: one is about two men having sex, the other is about two characters that you know and love having sex.

I always feel bad ranting about fic, because I have the highest respect for everyone who goes out there and publishes something and takes the risk to have it taken apart. But I feel cheated by stories like that. I don't want people who don't really care about them touching "my" characters.

Good news is that ELG has published "Into the labyrinth" on Area52. The story is quite old, and was published as gen, but now I have hope for a slash sequel.
I can't categorize ELG as an author. I'm inclined to say that I would happily read her shopping list, but I'm afraid that a 500kb+ shopping list will fail to hold my interest, no matter how well written it is.