(no subject)

There’s this thing people do sometimes where they talk about the conventions of fanfiction as if they’re checkmarks of quality. This is used as a lead-in to argue that non-fanfic writers don’t know fanfic conventions, and fanfic writers don’t know non-fanfic conventions, so therefore both are equal and you can’t say non-fanfic writers are “better.”

I detest this argument, because by that logic, any writer who doesn’t check the conventional boxes for their genre is worse than one who does! Your checkmarking fanfic about half the cast hooking up isn’t automatically better than my fanfic about half the cast breaking up. (It’s probably better, but not because of the checkmarks.)