Alelou wrote:Well, I don't, and I certainly include myself in that. As fanfic writers we write what we feel like, focusing on our favorite characters to our heart's content, without regard to the rigors of the commercial teleplay format, the need to keep a general audience as well as a maniacal fan base relatively happy, and budget and time constraints we can't even imagine.
It's essentially comparing apples and oranges to compare writing fanfic to scripting Enterprise. Even Foundations would have to be considered a failure by TV standards, because it obviously can't handle regular production deadlines.
Fanfic is fun. Sometimes it's even beautiful, sometimes it crosses over into creating new characters and truly original stories. But when you come right down to it, it's still just fanfic -- a highly-derivative, highly addictive pastime that exists solely to give pleasure (or relief) to fans.
After sampling other fandoms, I don't think I agree. I don't think I'm just partial to this fandom because I wasn't always a part of it, and I remember reading XF and Enterprise fanfic back in the HoT day, and thinking HoT was way better. Since then I've read some House, Lost, Firefly, TNG, Voyager, BSG, even Enterprise fanfic on other sites (not including the sites of people also here, I'm talking non-HoT/non-TriS authors) and there is actually a very distinct literary talent gap.
I agree with CX for not just that reason, but also because if you walk candid interviews with television screenwriters and scriptwriters, they'll admit that they can't always gun for real quality because of the nature of the television medium. I saw a special on G4 just yesterday about Lost, and Damon Lindelof, one of the showrunners, was talking about how television is not in the business of writing one story that has a definite start and stopping point, it's in the business of keeping a show on television as long as possible, which means a compromise in writing and storytelling quailty, because you can't aim for an endgame with a definite path from start to finish since you don't know when the finish is.
Fanfic, like Trek novels, are totally different. It goes where we want it to. There are a handful of writers here and from HoT that didn't just write these one-track fluff stories that ARE, yes, for fun. There are a handful of authors that write full-fledged, full-range stories that span drama, action, romance, comedy, and tragedy. Those are people who can write "better" than we saw on TV, I think.
Besides, marketing always poisons creative enterprise. Just watch The TV Set
...or the series of Kevin Smith's movies in chronological order. You'll see a steady decline.
Other than the Vulcan arc I'm afraid I find those fourth season multi-parters pretty dreary, at least when it comes to deciding what ep I feel like rewatching. I enjoyed the little "ah hah" moments the first time I watched them, but they often seemed to be much more about Romulans and Andorians and Klingons and Soong and TOS than about our guys. I do a lot of fast forwarding. The most egregious case of this was that horrible MU two-parter. Gah!!! I guess you could argue *the_abomination* was an example of that too. You could almost begin to wonder if the writers were detaching themselves emotionally from the characters because they knew it was over -- so we got their separation anxiety playing out in the scripts.
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