Quote:
Originally Posted by ardeegee
Yes. I found the same in the past when I tried to read some official, published Star Wars-related novels I had bought in a batch from Ebay. In the few I attempted to read, the writing and the stories are so awful I gave up on them and eventually years later tossed the whole box.
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I'm not surprised. From what I've seen, most of the officially commissioned novels based on
[insert your movie or TV series of choice here] are at best mediocre, at worst utter crap. The best fanfic writers, on the other hand, can not only write circles around these, but often write works that surpass the originals on which their fanfic is based. If the franchises who publish these novels would only seek out those most talented fanfic authors (who are not only subtle and gifted writers, but care passionately about the characters)... well, it would be a whole different ball game.
People shouldn't judge "fanfic" as a whole based on generic fanfic sites such as fanfiction.net (which does have a few buried gems, but you'll often have to do a lot of mining to find them). In my experience the best fanfic is found in monofandom communities on sites like LiveJournal. And of course, much depends on the fandom itself, how popular it is (this can influence its noise-to-signal ratio hugely), and its demographic (the original
Star Trek series will have a much different demographic/fan base from something like
Twilight).