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10/22/2002: nostalgia, sort of
I miss having a "honeymoon period" with new fandoms. For those not familiar with the term, it is a state, mostly experienced by those new to a fandom or to fanfic in general, when you see fanfic through rose-colored glasses, and enjoy everything or almost everything you read (and you tend to read a lot then) just because it is about the objects of your (new) affection.
Delightful as it is, I don't really miss the part of reading crap without noticing or caring about it, however, the honed instincts of a couple of years of fanfic reading make it hard for me just to browse a random archive without cringing. I think a lot of bad fanfic is bad in the same way, and even a lot of mediocre fanfic is mediocre in the same way, and after some experience with these cross-fandom trends, there is just no way of ignoring that knowledge.
I only had a "true" honeymoon phase in The Sentinel, when I really read every story that at that point was in the archives (and in early 1998 that already were thousands, many of them truly bad), though my first venture into X-Files fanfic was also a lot less gun-shy than any approach I have to a new fandom today.
With some fandoms I don't miss the ability to read indiscriminately, either because there are a lot of rec pages, or because I know a lot of authors already, that was the case for me with The Phantom Menace , with dueSouth, it is that way for me with Smallville now. And in some fandoms I don't have the desire to read a lot, so I'm fine with the recs I come across now and then, like for Buffy/Angel (and anyway, if I ever had the desire to read more, there's no lack of recs for those anyway).
But sometimes I get into a new fandom, like now with Andromeda, and while there is no lack of enthusiasm for the source on my part, and I'd really like to read more fanfiction for it, I can -- in my mind's eye -- all too clearly envision the horrible things bad fanfic will do in this universe and I'm weary and cautious. There aren't that many Andromeda recs, at least I haven't come across many and my searches for some weren't very successful either, and not that many authors I already know write Andromeda.
So I find myself taking a look at archives. For example The Black Hole. I arrive at the site, and think "that collage isn't very good," (I should mention that I have this theory about awful, inept photomanipulations and impractical or bad site design being bad omen for the quality of fiction) though I still click on it -- and get to a 404 page, because obviously their domain avatarblackhole.com doesn't work. Okay, that's not really much of an obstacle, I just type in the index2.html URL manually, which works, so at least it still there on the geocities site. Unfortunately, though I am at the geocities location, the links are all leading to the non-existent domain, making navigation a pain. Which is the point where I lost the little enthusiasm I had for randomly browsing an unknown archive.
Am I too jaded? I mean, on the one hand I'd really like to read some more Andromeda fiction, but -- *sigh* It's not so much about that particular archive's problems with its internal links, I'm just a lot more impatient with fanfiction (and fanfiction sites, obviously) now than I was four years ago. That's why I feel nostalgia. Sort of. Not because of the bad fiction, but because I know I will miss some of the good fiction and even more of the solid fiction, that might not be great but still fun to read, because I don't feel up to random reading to the same extent I once did. I mean in TS I found my favorite authors through brutally reading everything, and I know I won't find my favorites in Andromeda fiction that way.
To close on a more positive note, I saw today that Maayan wrote one short Andromeda story, Dialectic, which I quite enjoyed.
