Oh, sure, that whole dynamic is why I would never in a million years maintain a recs page. The social and the personal and the artisitic worthiness of a story are all too tied up with each other, and it's not worth it to me. It's not a dynamic that happens to bother me, but I know I tend toward the conflict-avoidant, so.

I'm just wondering if there's a truly wonderful story lying at the bottom of all this, with flames and sockpuppets and insulting of people's mothers, or cats, or something.

I mean, does that happen?

It can. It usually depends on the sanity, or lack thereof, of the author. I've known fandom authors who get pissy at criticsm to the point of taking their story down and putting cryptic remarks in LJ. Then everyone emails them to find out what's going on. And they sob. And their friends are outraged! And leap to their defense!

12 hours later, the story is back up and someone has been beaten to a bloody pulp in the corner.

Yeah, I'd say it depends more on the author's friends. Or how many she has. Minions can get very outraged. I was stunned at the number of people who leapt to Cassie Claire's defense when she got booted of ff.net for plagiarism.

I personally have never taken crap for something being up on PolyRecs or not up on PolyRecs, but I'm not the more visible half of the pairing.

Shrift is your human shield?

Apparently. She says she's heard some general kind of whining.

I'd be happy for people to whine at me, just so I could explain how much I don't give a crap. We rec what we like. There are probably close to 2000 stories up there by this point. It's a pretty broad selection. Deal with it. If something's not up there, it doesn't mean we have a vendetta against it. If something is up there, it doesn't mean we're best friends with the author. It is what it is.

Oh, the ds_undercover stories are up on Livejournal!

Oh, yeah. Someone I know got very pissy when her fandom wasn't represented in one of the BSO updates a few months ago.

You just can't take those sorts of things seriously, or you go crazy(er).

I left a Smallville mailing list after I saw someone get torn to shreds for saying they liked Lana. It was horrifying.

I'm not sure if this was the same mailing list where someone thought writing a story where Lex cut off his head and put it on a woman's body would be really cool! But I left both of them in disgust.

In the glorious tradition of coming late to the party, I finished "Lust Over Pendle" last night, and it was pretty freaking excellent. Except I sort of wish I'd stopped before the epilogue, since I didn't like that so much. But thank you folks who mentioned it every so often, so that it was in my mind when I finally came to a place to read it.

My only problem with A.J. Hall is her idea of what makes a dramatic scene worth writing about is not my idea. This is a bigger deal in later stories, where she describes major dramatic incidents instead of giving them a scene. Her thematic choice, of course, and I always feel weird for thinking "Wouldn't that have worked better if you'd shown us that scene before we knew how it was resolved?"

I also thinks she makes some assumptions about what her reader is picking up as the plot progresses. Things get brought up that I sometimes go "Where did that come from? Oh, is that was X meant three pages ago? OK." I'm not sure if it's that she's a British writer writing for a British audience or what. I often feel myself playing catch up.