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(03-19-2015, 06:05 PM)Warren Castille Wrote: The same reason "The Room" is considered an awful movie: The trope was defined by writers submitting material for fanzines and fan-publication, and they were only interesting or fun to read if you happened to be the author. While I'm sure they could be marveled upon and enjoyed like all bad media, there's still a line between "So bad it's good" and "so bad it's horrible."
Power fantasies are potent things we can lose ourselves in. The key is being able to have a wide-spread audience do that. When it becomes self-obsessed writing it's not accessible, which means it isn't good as a consumer product, which was the original intent.
"My Immortal" is not good.
Self-obsessed writing can and has been quite commercially successful; Twilight and 50 Shades are very self-obsessed. The usual distinction between commercial success and aesthetic quality applies.
But, to be clear, self-obsessed power fantasies can also be aesthetically successful, critically successful, and commercially successful (although for pre-commercial texts like medieval romances and the epics I suppose "culturally successful" might be the better term). While I don't agree with the politics of the movie, American Sniper is a good recent example. Poets did quite well talking about themselves before the modernist movement made poetry inaccessible to the reading public. There's a fair bit of precedent in the commercial sphere for self-obsession and power fantasy to intersect and make a good bit of money in the process to both popular and critical acclaim.
But you mention "My Immortal," a text that will never go anywhere near a publisher, not simply because of its aesthetic failings but because it's fanfiction. It's not a commercial text. It is, in someway, unable to be legitimized through the usual channels. I wonder if the author-function has something to do with this.
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