Amazing Het Whinge
You know what I find amazing? If, say, I were to read ten randomly-chosen Stargate: Atlantis slash stories, the likelihood of at least three of them being good enough to rec would, in my experience, be very, very high.
Clearly, this trend has spoiled me for other fandoms and pairings.
I have just been on one of my occasional het kicks, and the pairing I was craving happened to be Trip/T'Pol of Star Trek: Enterprise. (OMG, DON'T JUDGE ME!)
So, anyway, I went and trawled an archive (no, it was not ff.net) and found a whole bunch of stories with that pairing and downloaded 30 or so of them.
The result? Not one of them was good enough to rec, and most of them were so bad they made my eyes cross!
(*looks shifty* Um. I'd just like to add: I do not blame the person who recced the archive to me, as I have found the bad!het trend to be true of other het pairings in the past and was expecting it. I'm sure the other stuff in the archive is of high quality. If you are reading this post, dear reccer, thank you for the link. I mean it. I needed that dose of bad!het to set me back on the path of slashy virtue ;)
But, seriously, why is it so? Why is het so often terrible? Still? I just don't get it.
Also, I'm still craving good Trip/T'Pol fic, and by "good" I mean anything with a half-way decent plot and/or sex that doesn't make me want to push the screen away; so high melodrama and/or traditional romance would be just fine. (OMG, DON'T JUDGE ME!)
Clearly, this trend has spoiled me for other fandoms and pairings.
I have just been on one of my occasional het kicks, and the pairing I was craving happened to be Trip/T'Pol of Star Trek: Enterprise. (OMG, DON'T JUDGE ME!)
So, anyway, I went and trawled an archive (no, it was not ff.net) and found a whole bunch of stories with that pairing and downloaded 30 or so of them.
The result? Not one of them was good enough to rec, and most of them were so bad they made my eyes cross!
(*looks shifty* Um. I'd just like to add: I do not blame the person who recced the archive to me, as I have found the bad!het trend to be true of other het pairings in the past and was expecting it. I'm sure the other stuff in the archive is of high quality. If you are reading this post, dear reccer, thank you for the link. I mean it. I needed that dose of bad!het to set me back on the path of slashy virtue ;)
But, seriously, why is it so? Why is het so often terrible? Still? I just don't get it.
Also, I'm still craving good Trip/T'Pol fic, and by "good" I mean anything with a half-way decent plot and/or sex that doesn't make me want to push the screen away; so high melodrama and/or traditional romance would be just fine. (OMG, DON'T JUDGE ME!)