Fanfiction . . . Inherently Bad?

[kimberly]

I'm not exceptionally well-read in the manga genre, so unfortunately the anime and manga fanfics are usually lost on me. I do see a great many horror and sci-fi movies, though!

I've noticed fanfiction is almost invariably terribly written. There's even a term for the type of vapid, one-dimensional perfect female protagonist who so commonly populates fanfiction, the "Mary Sue."

Much of the reason why I wrote the Labyrinth sequel fanfic The Continuation of Sarah Williams was because I wanted there to be a decent Labyrinth fanfic out there. I know it is for and by amateurs, but are there any diamonds in the rough out there that anyone knows about?

[Robert]

This is a rather late reply, but there's a site, that you likely know about, that has quite a lot of fanfiction so I think it should be possible to find at least a few good works.

Myself I'm only starting to look through it, so I won't recommend any titles, but from what I've noticed, generally you have a higher chance of finding something good with longer works, like at least 10k or 20k words. Not to say that there are no short works that are good, but there's a lot of them and most are, indeed, poorly written.

Anyway, here you go:

http://www.fanfiction.net/

There's also adult content oriented site, but it seems to be, generally, poor so feel free to look through it, but it may be exceptionally hard to find something worthwhile:

http://www.adultfanfiction.net/html-index.php

Not quite on topic, but there's also a rather big original fiction site:

http://www.fictionpress.com/

Ok, so I had an inkling and checked where you posted your Labyrinth fanfic. Then, it's basically about searching long and hard on fanfiction.net for something good. It's really the biggest site like that out there and you're not likely to find anything better.

[kimberly]

The Laby fanfic I wrote is on Fanfiction. You're right, Robert, I think they are the best by far. I'm getting to the point in life (i.e. I'm getting old) where I'm quickly finding there are writers out there just not worth my time, both traditionally published and unpublished. I'll read anything you're adamant about, because I trust you, but I won't read any new Anne Rice. She hasn't been great for a long time. There's a thousand writers on self-publishing that are so god-awful, they're what I'd call "Narcissist Hacks" that are unreadable. They make Stephanie Meyer look like a grammarian. Yet there are also the stars of self-publishing who are better than anything you can get in the bookstore, so go figure.

[Robert]

I don't think you have to get "old" to care about what you're reading . Regarding fanfic, what kind of frustrates me is that there are always some works that had potential, but it was wasted. My personal "favorite" is when I just can't read it anymore, because it has such poor language that it's killing it with a chainsaw. I've learned to generally avoid uncomplete fics, too. Nothing worse than a writer dropping something that you actually enjoyed.

Anyway, if you're really desperate there's lesbian fan fiction, too . One of the things I've learned on my "quest" to read as many different things as I can. I think I'm actually getting to the point of trying out some gay fiction... as long as it's not explicit . Back to the "topic", there's actually a whole lot of mostly Xena fan / uber stories out there. I'd say that the quality is surprisingly good and there are tens of novel sized works. So, if you're desperate ( I'll only add that from what I've seen there are both explicit stories and ones that have maybe a kiss at most ), here you go. Both sites share most of their content:

http://www.xenafiction.net/

http://www.academyofbards.org/

So, it's not necessarily all bad, maybe it's just straight ( fan ) fiction that's bad?
Though for real now, it kind of surprises me that there is, to my knowledge, not one similiar site that'd offer heterosexual fiction / fanfiction of such quality. I mean, how come? Is it because there's far more published hetero books out there? So they have more of a drive to write good fanfiction?