Well, This Is A Bust

I feel like there's a lot to say, and since the point of this post is to say goodbye, it sounds like the smart-ass thing to do would be to start at the beginning

Fanfiction sucks farts. FimFiction sucks slightly less. Throw a bunch of obsessed nerds in a room full of typewriters and they'll have less success than the monkeys at writing anything good. But that's not the point. That was never the point. Fanfiction is about expressing ideas. By skipping setup and character development, writers can dive right into their stories, and we can fill in the gaps wherever they appear. Throwing away those barriers to entry lets loose the raw creative sludge in which there are the occasional gems. I started reading FanFiction with one such gem.

More importantly than "not judging a book by its lack of a physical copy", I learned why bad writing is important. Every school wants to teach kids "The great classics" or depicts literature as some great climb from rough beginnings at the dawn of culture to finicky masterpieces too cool for normal people to "get", but it fails to take into account the bodies that make up those hills. Fan Fiction teaches us how to fail, how things change when we are not the author: that oh-so-edgy alicorn OC suddenly becomes a lot less cool when someone writes about a similar hero, dominating all the monsters and wooing all the women. It was the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th stories I read on FimFiction that confirmed, yes, the majority of FanFics really are that bad.

But there are talented people on this site. I've tried to point them out on this blog, analyzed what made them good and bad and presented long-winded, overly analytical comments on their work. I hope that they move on from this incubator: they're talented enough to survive in whatever the next step of writing is. It won't be as warm and cozy as a circle of friends who all know what you're talking about, but it'll give them a place to write about something significant, that everyone can read and enjoy.

There's so much I want to write about. I want to write about writing, and everything I've read and how that taught me the dos and don'ts of writing. I want to be challenged on those beliefs, though, and FimFiction is not the place for that. FimFiction is about support, and so many writers have become so much better because of it. Bad fanfics are part of the process: FanFiction is a laboratory, where most of the experiments fail, but no one ever leaves stupider than when they went in. I've learned so much, and I am so grateful for that.

MLP will not become our generation's Star Trek, and I doubt any show will ever as fun and exciting as this series was, so all I can do is collect my mementos, the skills that I was encouraged to develop (drawing and writing), and work on something that will last longer than a kid's show. I still read the Fanfics, and I still watch the first seasons when I'm feeling down. Nothing has made me smile like those old episodes.

So I guess the only advice I really have for the half-dozen people kind enough to follow me is this: Keep your eyes open. Look closely at everything, and try to see the quality in everything.