My fifteen minutes · 9:13pm Jan 3rd, 2014
So, my little vignette just got it's hundredth like. Which is nice, of course. Just made me wonder if someone has calculated the number of views or rate of getting them needed for the popularity effect to snowball. When do people start looking at something just because it's popular?
I know I usually pick top-rated stories to read.
Funny thing, though. I expected that 'Twilight makes first contact' would get some views, but it soared enormously, leaving its big sister in the dust. It's funny because for me, the criteria for picking up a story is almost diametrically opposite: I tend to pick fics at over 100,000 words to read.
Which, I guess, actually shows I'm not getting the point of fan fiction at all.
The existence of established characters and universe makes short stories eminently easy to both write and read. There's no need to establish characters and settings at length, because everybody already knows them from the original. I, on the other hand, love to both read and write long stories that tend to almost perforce change the characters and the setting into something more personally the writer's own. So... it doesn't actually need to be set in the established universe per say, does it?
Well, that's something I've been planning for my thesis: comparing the establishment literature with that of fanfiction. I have a hypothesis: there is actually no difference, but that forced by the copyright law. I assume that before strong copyrighting the world of literature was more or less the Wild West: authors were stealing and using each other's stuff willy nilly and acknowledging the original author was more of a courtesy or a sign of great respect.
Which is kind of cool. Don't get me wrong, published authors really need their pay to live and work. It's just that, from artistic perspective there's no point for the copyright to exist at all. And there seems to be a legion of people ready to produce 'content' free of charge.
So, I guess I'm advocating for some kind of citizenship wage model. XD
Don't worry, I tend to pick up 100k+ word stories most of the time... I follow a few 500k word monsters, including one that isn't all that good.
For me it's all about the world building and it's just hard to find good world building in shorter fics.
One-shots just don't do it for me either.
Like a young man coming in for a quickie, I feel so unsatisfied.