The Problems with Pastiche

[jane_elliot]

A couple of years ago, Jeeves & Wooster was one of my favorite fandoms.  The quality to crap ratio was astonishingly high, the writers were wonderfully consistent, and the fics were fun, if short.  Given ten J&W fics, I'd often rec six or seven, with another one or two that were good enough to rec but too short for my rec community.

Today I realized

Comments

[torra]

Oh good, it's not just me! I was trying to explain this to someone at a con a few weeks back and just could not put it so eloquiently as you just did. That is EXACTLY the problem I've been running into and trying to put into words. I think I've read maybe one good J&W fic in the last year and mostly that's because I gave up reading new J&W fics sometime around Yuletide. ::sighs:: (Not because of any fics that may have come out of Yuletide, mind you, it was just around that timespan that I gave up entirely.)

[jane_elliot]

Sorry this reply is so late -- I was moving.

Honestly, at this point I think there is exactly one J&W writer that I consider worth reading and I think she's only written one story in the last two years. It's really unfortunate, too, because another author is consistently writing J&W epics but because she uses so many literary flourishes, I find her stories harder to read than college level textbooks (the difference being, the college level textbooks are *supposed* to be hard to read). Hopefully J&W writers will go back to basics in the future, but I fear by that point I will have given up on the fandom entirely.

[sibiriens]

THANK YOU! This is just how I've felt the last few years since I started falling out of fandom with J&W.

[jane_elliot]

It's been frustrating, hasn't it? Especially since it used to be my absolute favorite smallish fandom. *sigh*

[ext_6232681]

You ranting like that reminds me of a female on her period 🙄