Run Away! Run Away!

[emgeetrek]

Area 52, the Stargate Slash Archive.

I've had the "Recent Stories" page bookmarked for eons, and I check it often.  It's just been redesigned, and I do not have the words to express my horror.  How many more unnecessary, irrelevant, unreadable, color-challenged and distracting elements can they put on that page?

And if that weren't bad enough . . . a few notable entries aside, the sheer awfulness of most of what's shown up there lately is serious cause for despair.  The latest outrage, as framed by the most recent iteration of the page:  two different authors, one of whom has definitely been around long enough to know better, who have failed to grasp the notion that British English and American English are not the same, and that Americans do not wear singlets, or speak of their arse, or use biros.  (And there's no such thing as a "postrate gland"--yes, spelled the same way twice--but that's a different rant.)

I would give up on the site were it not for the fact that occasionally I do find a decent story there that doesn't show up in any other venue.

Topic for discussion, should you so choose:  is the story quality at Area 52 declining, or is it just that I'm getting pickier?

Comments

[emgeetrek.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm not really a het fan either, although M/M/F threesomes often float my boat quite nicely. And I can enjoy a well written gen fic but, as my reading time is sometimes limited, I tend to skip the gen unless I have reason to believe it will be exceptional.

I s'pose if I looked really, really hard I might find some TOS on LJ. There are a few communities, I think, and I did poke around a little bit a month or so ago in a fruitless search for something I could latch on to . . . maybe I just wasn't diligent enough.

Your comment on Starsky & Hutch is very encouraging since this is a pairing that I love, and the few archives I know of don't seem to be very active anymore.

Beats me why some fandoms have made the jump to LJ while others haven't. I've yet to look for an X-Files presence on LJ, because I suspect I'll be depressed by what I find, or, rather, what I don't find. XF fandom seemed to crap out, with a few notable exceptions, almost immediately after the show was cancelled. Certainly both my preferred pairing (Mulder/Skinner), and my preferred threesome (Mulder/Scully/Skinner), have passed beyond endangered and can safely be said to have entered the realm of extinction. An online M/Sk fanzine, to which I contributed a story, was published a couple of years ago, and that was pretty much the last gasp for that pairing. As for the threesome, I think only two or three writers wrote for that particular combo--and I was one of them. (Who knows, maybe I will be again. I do have a WIP on my hard drive.)

Not sure what killed Blake's 7, as I never saw the show and never got involved in the fandom or the fic. It would be interesting if someone with an analytical bent and a whole lot of free time (or a pop culture doctoral dissertation to pursue ::grin::) would do a comparative study of the waxing and waning of fandoms, including their transition into and out of various media. I wonder, for instance, if the patterns for SF-based fandoms like Stargate and Trek are different than those for dramas like The West Wing or fantasies like Harry Potter.

Good grief, how I have gone on! And it's well past dinnertime, as my stomach is noisily reminding me . . .