azdak

Reading through some of the entries (and comments to those entries)on metafandom, I can't avoid the impression that the reason why *so* many people are *so* pissed off with cousinjean is because at some deep level they feel she's claiming she's better than they are - because she thinks her fanfic is so good that people will actually pay her lots of money to write it. I guess most people who spend a lot of time writing fanfic have a little fantasy about being able to do it full time, and when someone comes along and thinks they're good enough to put that into practice it triggers a furious response. I can't otherwise explain why so many people accuse her of feeling "entitled" (which is stupid psychobabble word that as far as I can tell from my exposure to it on TWoP means "thinks she's better than anyone else") or why they state over and over again, in various different formulations, that "We'd all like to be paid for writing fanfic, but the real world isn't like that".

My own reaction, when I first read cousinjean's proposal, was that she was making a mistake in thinking that adoring feedback can be translated into cold hard cash. It's easy to send off a squeeing comment saying "You are the best author in the world", but it doesn't mean the sender would actually *pay* to read that story. Nor, come to that, does loads of positive feedback mean that the story is actually, artistically speaking*, very good - just that it very effectively presses a lot of people's shipper buttons. You only have to look at what happens when a popular author decides to try her hand at an unpopular or rare pairing to see how true this is - the quantity and squee-factor of the feedback always drops dramatically. So I was certain that cousinjean had fallen into the trap of overrating the value of her "product" because of the lj culture of positive feedback. And I'm not sure it wasn't the fact that her Modest Proposal revealed that she rated her own work so highly that pissed other authors off so very mightily.

*I'm not using the word "artistically" in a cavalier fashion - I've been giving a lot of thought to what makes something good art - as opposed to merely being the product of artistic endeavour - and how fanfic fits in.