Gotta love how Sarah Z threads always seem to end up with her presenting a plainly rhetorical question and people rushing in to focus on said question instead of the actual points of discussion within her videos. Every time, without fail. It's like clockwork lol.
And I actually don't think this title is necessarily a bad one cuz it's clearly being used as the springboard behind her ideas, but in the day and age of clickbait and knee jerk reactions it sure does her a disservice when it comes to discussion.
Anyway, this was a great essay! I really like her argument of how fanfiction should be considered its own medium and not just some lesser form of written literature. And following that, pointing out how the majority of works in any medium are bad; most photography is bad, most paintings are bad, most videos are bad, etc etc -- it's just that the really good ones are what rise to the top and get featured in galleries, lists, and shared around. I'd never really thought about it like this before, but 100000% the same is true for fanfiction. I have seen so many people (on this forum especially) who obviously don't read fanfics dismiss it as all shitty, awful writing full of boring clichés (the phrase, 'it's like fanfiction' comes to mind), and, yeah, the vast majority of fanfics are like that. But it's the same for any medium, and it's a bit unfair that they're always wholesale judged like this when no other mediums are, especially because there are fanfics out there that are genuinely amazing works of art.
youtu.be
